Conversations That Never Happened

June 28, 2008 6:00 pm to July 19, 2008

Tamala Poljak and Anna Oxygen have organized an exhibition that incorporates photography, performance, installation, food, and video within various forms of collective consumption - two nights of dinner theater, a temporary cafe, simultaneous TV dinners.

The point of departure for “Conversations That Never Happened” is a series of 200 photographic portraits that Poljak made in her kitchen while dining individually with her friends and neighbors. As a group, the photographs might remind us of “friend lists” on MySpace and Facebook, where sociality is expressed in serial form (as a grid of pictures or a list of comments and testimonials). Do these grids and lists refer to communities? And if so, how do communities relate to their own representations? Over the next few weeks, many of the people depicted in the portraits will be animated through the exhibition: they will eat dinner at TELIC; they will perform as dancers, writers, actors, magicians, comedians…; they will prepare and serve food.

At the opening reception on Saturday, the artists will be serving custom-made pancakes (with shapes made to order!) and fancy drinks; David Scott Stone will do a 3 hour ambient set.

Over the next three weeks:

July 9 - TV Dinner Night
July 12 - Dinner Theater Night #1
July 13 - Dinner Theater Night #2
July 19 - Mystery Picnic Cafe & Closing Performances

Participating artists and performers include: The All Girl Comb Choir, Mecca Vazie Andrews, Jackson Baugh, Lindsay Beamish, Big Swell (Sam Cooper), Christina Billotte, Katie Byron, Cathy de la Cruz, David P Earle, Steve Gregoropoulos, John Hogan, Horse Thieves (Alex Maslansky & Brie Turner O’Banion), Laura Lazarus, Eric Lindley, Claire Mckeown, Sarah Paul Ocampo, Anna Oxygen, Paloma Parfrey, Tamala Poljak, Katie Shook, Becky Stark, David Scott Stone, Tara Tavi, Christopher Wonder.
[ about the artists ]

For the most up to date details, see http://www.conversationsthatneverhappened.com/

To purchase photographs by Tamala Poljak, [ click here ].

domestic, events, food, group identity, interaction, performance, television | Comments Off

Subprime mortage mess primer

Google docs link

documentary, domestic, internet, news | No Comments »

Create your own personal geomancy

July 15, 2007 at 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Amar Ravva will give on-the-spot Vastu consultations.

Bring floor plans, sketches, or your impeccable memory of your current or future residence- each consultation will cost only $10.

The Fundraising Show, domestic, events, performance, remake | Comments Off

GRANDMA NIGHT!

June 21, 2007 at 8:00 pm to 10:00 pm

You are invited to GRANDMA NIGHT! An auction celebrating everything Grandma this Thursday at Telic Arts Exchange. Bring a family dish or dessert AND a 5 minute story about your grandmother. We will auction off the desserts after each story is told and all proceeds will go to Telic Arts Exchange. Any story is fine: impressive accomplishments, interesting migrations, heroic deeds, funny grandmas, bitter grandmas, etc.

We will then call a Real Live Grandma (inspired by the ladies of the typing explosion) and audience members can ask her for some real life advice. If you want to take it to the next level you can even come dressed as a grandma!

Doors: 8:00 pm
Dessert Grandma Auction Part One: 8:30pm
Real live Grandma advice session: 8:45pm
Dessert Grandma Auction Part Two: 9:00pm
Performances and live Grandma themed songs: 9:30 onward

Looking forward to seeing you there!!
x Anna Oxygen

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Mario’s Furniture 2 : A Mushkin-Barnet Game

October 28, 2006 6:00 pm to December 2, 2006

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Mario’s Furniture 2, an installation and interactive game, will be exhibited at TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown from October 28th to December 3rd. Created by artists Hillary Mushkin and S.E. Barnet, Mario’s Furniture integrates wireless technology with artistic production and performance. In most video games you just sit on the couch, but when you play Mario’s Furniture you MOVE the couch, in fact you move the whole living room!

Mario’s Furniture began in 2002 as a video installation, including a single night of performance. Four years later, Mario’s Furniture 2 - created with programmer Clay Chaplin and electronic specialist Lorin Parker - is now a wireless environment where viewers become players, physically moving objects before a relentlessly panning camera, all the while watching themselves and their scores in real time on a large-screen projection.

In Mario’s Furniture 2 the body is actualized in real and virtual space simultaneously. Players can’t merely manipulate an avatar with a joystick. Playing Mario’s Furniture involves strenuous physicality, parodying conventional video games in which avatars are put in peril while players sit on a couch. Players must physically move the couch to play the
game. Mario’s emphasizes how camera and screen effect the construction of social relationships. Players see themselves (and not a stand in) under the camera’s scrutiny, humorously mirroring the absurdity of living within the frame.

Mushkin and Barnet look at technological and narrative ways in which video and digital media unfold and complicate meaning. The game critically remarks on aesthetics and narrative boy-logic of computer games while reflecting on theories of the digitally decentered subject. The artists’ racing antics against the camera alludes to Chaplin and Keaton, Mario Brothers, Tomb Raider and the deadline pressed “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.” Continue reading…

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OSMAN KHAN - Sur la Table

August 16, 2003 at 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Sur la table revisits the domestic situation of the table. Events that normally occur on/over a table (the placing of objects, hand gestures, etc…) are amplified through projection and become the basis for interactivity, ultimately changing the visitor’s relation to the table. Using a camera as input, events occurring on/over the table are projected back onto the table so that a historic timeline of events is visualized as a continuous flow of images down the table. [see video]

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