NewWorLdLog: costumes

Sunday, 24 October 2010

Performance Art Saloon #1 Barcelona<->NewWest

HEY UN FESTIVAL DE PERFORMANCE!!!

On the 24th of October, Octopus Inc. is gonna have a wonderful night called the PERFORMANCE ART SALON #1.

We are seven young and very contemporary emerging, alternative, and fresh artists from ALL OVER THE WORLD!!

You are gonna be our favorite guests and we will have plenty of surprises for you- including delicious drinks that will make you feel SO HAPPY to be with us!

Also, don’t forget that in every salon there’s always free stuff that you can get and bring back home! Maybe its not that useful... but it will make you happy (and that's what its about, no?!)

This is gonna be a RIVETING ART EXPERIENCE that will shake all your senses. You will never forget the PERFORMANCE ART SALON #1.

ARTISTS:
- Anne Lise Le Gac (FR)
- Christina Schelhas (GER)
- Adina Bier (USA)
- Alex Goodman (UK)
- Scarlett Lassof (UK)
- Sebastian Hau-Walker (NW)
- Ariadna Rodriguez Cima (SP)

So don’t be lazy : JUST COME !

There will be more information on the spanish Newspaper "El Periodico" tomorrow Sunday (the day of the performance). You can write to ariadnaunderwater@gmail.com if you want to confirm you are coming or have questions. WHAT: PERFORMANCE ART SALON #1. WHEN: Sunday October 24th. 8pm to 11pm WHERE: La Fundicio. Carrer Pallars 178, Barcelona. metro Llacuna. HOW MUCH: Free entrance! If you are in Barcelona, we hope to see you there.
[email from Adina Bier, sent to my UCF mail box]

We even managed to get into the National Newspaper, El Periódico!
http://www.elperiodico.com/es/noticias/agenda/20101024/una-performance-obra-arte-espacio-tiempo-real/553903.shtml

Well, unfortunately my CEP budget doesn't cover the expenses of flying over to Barcelona and performing there, so I in order to perform 'live' I had to use the up-coming medium of Skype [webcam]. This way I was able to beam myself up into the space. However, I decided to give the whole webcam medium a taste of its own face-toface medicine and project the
'other side' and 'other half' onto the back wall, thereby giving me the opportunity to use their live stream as a material backdrop from which I could approach and recoil from.

And now for some some photographic documentation of my side of the performance.

Thursday, 21 October 2010

Bed Bugs love NYC

A recent survey of pest control companies found bedbugs are now prominently invading commercial businesses -- such as offices, clothing stores and hotels -- rather than private residences.

PIX 11 News first reported in May that New York City was quickly climbing to the top of the list of having the biggest bed bug problem in the country.

Extracted from: http://www.wpix.com/news/local/wpix-bed-bugs-on-the-rise,0,2726280.story

Signs everywhere I walk claiming to be a 100% effective guratantee bug extermination. Whole blocks and high-risers fumigated over night.

Are these creatures the New, New York immigrants?
Compare the linguistic hostility toards them with those mexicans crossing the border every minute.
Mass migration = mass movement = mass infestation = No Control, No Order.

New Rule: Every item of clothing I buy- the minute I'm home, thrown in the washer then the dryer. Twice over. Taking no chances with these blood-thirsty critters.

And now they could be my next inspiration for a performative Halloween costume.
Some of you blogstalkers may recall my performative outfits to the Freshers Ball Alice-InWonderland theme - when I was the Knave of Tarts, with a box-heart which you could open for candy and sweet? And a plate to play Tart Roulette- which one's filled with salt? Or maybe you remember the Glitter Ball, when I came as a cough sweet? All wrapped up in bubble wrap and white iridescent glitter; pop a bubble and recieve a sweet?
These costumes harken back to my younger adolescence when I'd go to clubs with friends dressed up to the 9s, they too, and we'd end up meeting everyone in the club and have our picture taken. Oh the club kid lifestyle, how I miss sometimes.
I've even been to a Bjork concert in Wolverhampton dressed as a present you could open (back when purple and yellow was just coming back as a clash-fash.)

Having missed my opportunity to perform guerilla at the Columbus Day Parade, this is my next chance before thanksgiving. And, perhaps, once more commenting on the current domestic American border and immigration policy with México and Mexicanos, I'm considering going as a Quasi-Mexican Bed Bug (or at least, a mattress, complete with sheets, pillow and blanket... perhaps, and this is the next level, use an actual old mattress, most probably infested with our fateful neighborhood friends ... but maybe I'll just stick to cardboard replicas again...).
The performance out of the costume would be to give away useful and not so useful advise on the control and extermination of bedbugs, but also highlighting the parable of the 'unwelcomed foreign alien' in our spaces of familiarity and control.
As per usual, (bed) bug sweets will be thrown around and handed out to all and sundry as a way of enticing and making [temporary] friends for the evening.
What more can I do..?
Post your ideas to PO Box 722 SUCKY SUCKY

[OutOfContext] "Heat-Smoke 'em out"

"What we're about to show you is brand new... her up-scale Northen Kentucky apartment hasn't been taken over by aliens [note: possible E.T. cultural reference? or perhaps more general cinematic infiltration of the 'site' of new alien technology/futuristic/biohazard apparatus- once again, a rmeinder of the implicated point sof reference hyperreal Hollywood has had on the American journalistic writing and average American psyche).
...she's been invaded by something far worse."
"Hoping to catch them, before they caught her... so humiliating, you don't want to tell anybody...

With the video above, note not only the moment when he announces that he and his family managed to get rid of the bed bugs, right before scratching his arm, hear that nice rasp, but that it appears that advertising companies now are giving some nice fat wads to customers willing to promote their products online via the 'home-baked' and 'neighbourly' medium of the self-uploaded Youtube video. Clever, very clever. McLuhan was right all along- only now the Corporations have cottoned on.

Is it me, or is there a fine line in the irony of the very heat they thrive to, is the very heat that kills them?

CEP Proposal

Deleuze & Guattari once wrote that “New York is virtually a city without a language...” [from Postulates of Linguistics in A Thousand Plateaus, 1923, pp. 103]. How provocative a statement to make about a city brimming with so many languages, dialects, slang etc. I thought. New York for me has always been, as for so many before me, a city of such artistic prestige and accomplishment, vitality and possibility. It has drawn young artists to its bright lights and wide streets for decades now, and it will continue to. Surely New York is a city without any ‘without’: a city of infinite possibility and opportunity, offering itself to all whom arrive, making them never want to leave, offering everything they need.

But I was too hasty; my argumentative cry against with their provocations would have been quickly silenced, had I read a little further on: “There is no language that does not have intralinguistic, endogenous, internal minorities...” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1923, pp103). But my silence was brought with a smile, with a sense of relief, of assurance. Just as I believe[d], and have argued, New York is a city without a language- without a set, solid and all-conforming ‘language’, but rather a multiplicity of tongue, of variations of the tongue, the lingua franca, of English. New York for me is a prime example of how all languages, exchanged by so many different people from such different places is continually being shaped, changed and modified, mutating every day through common shared discourse and people trying to make sense to each other.

Having been born in one country but then being raised between two countries has brought difficulty when pledging allegiance to either. I have felt neither here nor there, not this nor that. What happens to those who don't feel a part, or feel apart, from their surroundings? They start something new; they seek out new places to live and to start again, afresh. The historical implication of New York City having been built ex nihilo by such a wide group of people(s) having travelled from their Old World in search of the New, ready to build themselves a New life in new contexts has always inspired me to travel and work there, to also become a part of the engagement with the 'new' moving away from the old, the traditional, the conventional, the usual, the obvious. I can see a direct link between this state of mind, towards progression through experimentation, in my journey to art and performance College and my future journey to New York and the USA, to frame my questions around the 'New' within city whose very name and ethos is just that.