Public Works Productions

Archived News

recently : 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 : 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11| 2002 : 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11|12| 2001 : 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11|12| 2000 : 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11|12| 1999 : 01|02|03|04|05|06|07|08|09|10|11|12| 1998 : 12| … & even older… |

2005

side track  o-blog: an i.p. blog

2005

06-30 The opening “vernisáž” for my show “Jūtōpia” was last night at the Prague gallery Školská28 Komuikační Prostor. Around twenty people showed up to admire the images and drink a very nice Czech red wine. The prints were hung on 1-meter wide gray cards, sewn through with monofilament in such a way as to simultaneously hold the four corners of each print in place, with the weight of the board holding the monofilament tight — my idea of “tensegrity” put to practical use.

06-28 We’re back now from Köln, having done our retrospective show “G.N.P.” at Gebäude 9, in a former industrial area on the east side of the Rhine. Pablo, the organizer, was very helpful, repeatedly ascending a stepladder to adjust the hang of the screen so that a fabric seam would be placed outside the image area. All for naught, as the duct-tape adjustment refused to stick in the summer’s heat. In the end, the visible seam didn’t seem to hurt the show; applause at the end was long and enthusiastic.

06-02 Sadly, a key web resource has announced, after 10 years, that it is coming to an end as a live site. UbuWeb will shortly be donated to a university, where it apparently will no longer be updated. Presumably, this means it will still be available, at least. UbuWeb hosts the complete audio works of the Tape-beatles, Public Works and the PhonoStatic Cassettes, among a terabyte of works by other artists.

05-27 Panel discussion on copyright and intellectual property issues. No comprehensive translation was provided (everyone except us spoke in Italian) so we answered the few questions directed as us as best we could, though unable to directly respond to any of the points made by any of the other participants.

05-25 Bolzano, nestled in the south Tyrolean Alps, is the site of our next show. With our Florence set, this one forms a perfect matched set of extremes: where Elettro Più was practically an anarchist squat, the button-down organizers of the City of Bolzano were our hosts for this show. Another extreme was also in evidence: Elettro Più was much better organized. Nonetheless, the show went off (aside from some audio glitches) and the audience responded enthusiastically, buying many CDs and T-shirts afterwards.

05-20 Arrived in Florence last night and met Serena at the Porta Romana. Stayed at her place over night. Interviewed this afternoon by Luka at NovaRadio FM 105.5, and after that, we were treated to lunch in a private basement room of a busy trattoria not far from the Duomo. After that, we drove to Elettro Più, site of the evening’s performance. The evening had a full agenda, with several things going on at once, and we did not begin our show until midnight. A bus driver’s strike may have conspired to keep some people away; however, it seemed like there were close to a hundred people there and they responded well to the show, even breaking into spontaneous applause at the end of “Persuasion,” which, I’ll admit, looked and sounded quite beautiful.

04-29 Marcus Bergner invited me to screen an early film I made, entitled ‘Buz’ (1985) for his class at FAMU, the Czech state film school. Not many students showed up, but I enjoyed screening it anyway. One guy had lots of questions, which is always nice.

03-25 The big show was tonight at the Collage Conference, organized by Kembrew McLeod and Ruedi Kuenzli. That afternoon, we sat for a filmed interview with Kembrew for a film he's working on called Copyright Criminals.

The performance space was organized really well. We were ecstatic over the sound system. It gave real presence and clarity to our soundtrack. Sadly, the film broke twice during the performance. Given that we had a related problem at CSPS two nights earlier, we swapped out projectors and continued the show as best we could. We were fortunate to have a supportive audience and the energy in the room felt great until the very end.

03-23 Tape-beatles performed at CSPS in Cedar Rapids. The show went pretty smoothly, though at one point the film jumped the gate and we had to stop the show and rethread. An augur of what was to come. We had a fantastic stay there, in the apartment under the stage and it was great to see Mel and John again (however briefly).

03-16 The web site I designed for Školska28: komunikační prostor went live today. I’ve been working on it steadily for a couple months now. Have a look. (English version coming soon.)

03-05 John Hopkins paid a visit to Prague, and we met up for coffee and a stroll, followed up by some good Czech cuisine. Hopkins is an art-networker from way back, we corresponded during the 80s around PhotoStatic and got in touch again in 2002.

01-28 I am just now finishing up a temporary teaching gig at the Bauhaus Uni in Weimar, Germany, in the department of Experimental Radio. It has been a four-month-long stint as a substitute for Ralf Homann, on sabbatical in the US. For the final project, the students are doing a 48-hour broadcast consisting mainly of their class projects. See also http://radiostudio.org.

01-16 I ran a laptop computer, assembling audio streams from around the world during the annual world-wide “Art’s Birthday” celebration. Convening in a recording studio of Radio Vltava in Prague, six Czech artists (and me) made an hour-long sound improvisation that included the streams from other cities piped through the internet. The Czech artists provided voice, electronic and acoustic sounds to the atmospheric mix. See also http://artsbirthday.net/. In Czech, see http://www.rozhlas.cz/.

 

Spring Conference to Host Tape-beatles

Collage as Cultural Practice

Tape-beatles visit home town to tout collage
2005-02-01

The Tape-beatles are pleased to announce their participation in a conference to be held at their old stomping ground Iowa City. Entitled “Collage as Cultural Practice”, the conference will take place at the University of Iowa from March 24-26, 2005. With confirmed speakers including Patricia R. Zimmermann, Rosemary Coombe, Carrie McLaren, Mark Hosler, Lloyd Dunn, Philo Farnsworth, Douglas Kahn, Craig Baldwing, Xmena Cuevas, Steev Hise, Stephen Perkins, and many others; the get-together promises to be a real barn-burner:

Collage as Cultural Practice seeks to examine interventionist collage practices in all media, with an emphasis on the social, political, and legal implications of this method of appropriation. The conference … will interrogate the political and social dimensions of collage as a practice that enables oppositional commentary across the cultural spectrum: from the leftist collages of the Dadaists and the Situationists to the unauthorized use of corporate trademarks, interventions by queer activists, and the more recent flurry of Internet-distributed antiwar video collage pieces that appropriate from the mainstream media in satirical ways. We seek to bring together scholars of, and practitioners in, the media of film and video, music, literature, visual arts and beyond—putting together a series of panels, performances and screenings, and an exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art on Interventionist Collage: From Dada to Negativland.

The Tape-beatles will perform an updated version of “Good Times” at Shambaugh Auditorium on Saturday night, March 26.

The “Practicing Collage Artists” panel will include Bradley Adita, Miekal And, Lloyd Dunn, and Kurt Heintz.

Conference registration is free. Watch these sites for details on scheduling, etc., as it becomes available.

Collage as Cultural Practice site.
Interventionist Collage: From Dada to Negativland site.

The conference organizers are:
Rudolf Kuenzli - rudolf-kuenzli(at)uiowa.edu
Kembrew McLeod - kembrew-mcleod(at)uiowa.edu


Summer brings Tape-beatle Shows to Italy, Germany

16mm film strip

As told in a recent IM chat between Heck and Dunn
2005-05-06, 12:49 PM

12:50 PM

DUNN: i’m here

DUNN: my icon is japanese, for no good reason

HECK: looks like an app icon

DUNN: a bit,

DUNN: well,

HECK: I’m comfortable

HECK: I have my coffee

DUNN: i am hungry

HECK: Do you want to eat something first?

DUNN: i would need to go shopping

HECK: or we could just pace it, and answer and pose questions over the next hours

HECK: I’m still trying to send Jan a proposal

HECK: the dvd looks good by the way, thanks

DUNN: good.

DUNN: okay, i’ll ask a question and then go get some food.

HECK: good

12:55 PM

DUNN: So, John, tell me what’s in store for the Tape-beatles this summer.

HECK: ok, I can field that one:

1:40 PM

HECK: Picking up a lead from last years’ Kinodesechos festival in Madrid, The Tape-beatles have been invited to present their new (retrospective) show, entitled G.N.P., at a film festival in Bolzano, Italy, the last week of May. As if that weren’t enough, a week before that they’ll do the show at a film club in Florence. Show information will be posted as it comes in by none other than you, the trusty webmaster yourself, Lloyd.

DUNN: I wish the info were here now.

HECK: At this moment we are tuning up G.N.P. since its premier at last months’ shows in Iowa. There will be an additional element to the show that I am not at liberty to discuss at this time. Next, June 24 will find us in Cologne, Germany appearing at Gebaeude 9. It would be nice to find additional venues for shows in that area, and that’s what I’m working on. The last thing on my personal Tape-beatle summer agenda is to clear time to start editing for the much talked about (between you and I) dvd releases.

DUNN: Good, good.

1:50 PM

HECK: We often talk about getting on to new work. How important is it to get old work out of the way (by releasing/publishing), before starting on new work? What effect does a desktop cluttered with piles of old ideas, half-finished sketches, crumbs from old daydreams have on getting on with new work?

2:00 PM

DUNN: i’m still eating

2:35 PM

DUNN: Often, it is best to have a clear desktop before beginning new work. Difficult choices must be made. Sometimes this means leaving something unfinished for the time being, especially if it has left you stymied. But, to be frank, I don’t have a set philosophy about such things that doesn’t change every time I sit down to work.

3:00 PM

HECK: The impetus for making G.N.P., our new retrospective performances that includes segments from Matter, The Grand Delusion, and Good Times, seems to me to have arisen out of a desire to make our work speak in new ways, or at least give some of the older work a new currency. There are, for example, many parts of The Grand Delusion that seemed to take on new relevance after another gulf war, and as a live cinema presentation the energy level of work itself seems more continuous. It is the release of a published work that seems to bring closure to a project that allows me to move on. I guess I see a distinction between live-film presentation, which is ongoing, and the more finite, project-based and contained ‘works’ that spawn the expanded screen spectacle. In that sense, G.N.P. is a cinematic ideal for The Tape-beatles according to my way of seeing -- that it utilizes works that were finished ‘in the mind’s eye’. I’m just making this up now; but really we are limited by what we imagine, and so to give GNP it’s inheritance or power, if you will, it follows that it must never be finished.

3:30 PM

DUNN: Well, yeah, G.N.P. partly an attempt to freshen old content, but honestly, it’s much more than that. The meaning of images changes over time, as your Grand Delusion example suggests. In addition, by sequencing the constituent parts in new ways, it becomes like looking at the overall body of work through a content filter. Certain themes (and sub-themes) become emphasized and the discourse is broadened. Because we work with film loops flanking the central reel, we can re-arrange those easily, even adding new ones, replacing old ones, so that the performed instance of the piece even becomes a new version.

3:35 PM

HECK: Very good. I’d like to go off the topic here. This from the mailbag: “I’m wondering whether ‘numbers’ will ever be released on CD, too? I looooooove the sample on your site.” Numbers is indeed a gem and would make for an unsurpassed mini-cd. I turn this over to you, Lloyd

4:50 PM

DUNN: I would have to say that it isn’t likely at this point that Numbers will be put out on CD. It can, however, be downloaded in its entirety as mp3 from ubuweb. Is that all?

HECK: I think so.

DUNN: Over and out.

HECK: Bye.

GO > news | works | faq | shop | contact :: archive | reviews | interviews | presskit

/news/2005/index.html : N© 20140307 2005-12-21 v 4.6.4 top