June 22, 2020

I used to be smart.

Maybe smart is the wrong word for it. Pretentious might be better – which I know is a shock to hear from your friendly neighborhood art reviewer. But it’s true. In my youth I obsessed over philosophy and snubbed most popular music and film franchises (Except for the mediocre, three-part Atlas Shrugged adaptation, which I went out of my way to see in theaters). I wanted so desperately to be seen as highbrow – so what changed?

Mental health probably had a lot to do with it. I either got worse or got better, but either way I changed significantly. I don’t read as much as I used to. I’ve developed a love for the music of Jimmy Buffett that was maybe once ironic but is now entirely genuine. And, in what is perhaps the most jarring development, I’ve now spent hours – seriously, hours – watching compilations of TikTok on Youtube. It was the type of impulse that seemed to defy explanation, a compulsion that was a mixture of nature documentary and thumb-sucking comfort. I’ve been thinking these past few months about what draws me to the platform, and recently I’ve developed a working theory. And, in the name of steadily pushing the limits of what ArtsEarth lets me post without problem, I’m going to talk about it.

So welcome to TikTok, and the rebirth of Vaudeville.

TikTok, for those not plugged into the zeitgeist, is a Chinese video-sharing app that gained massive popularity in the United States after merging with Musical.ly in August of 2018. In the vein of Vine and musical.ly, TikTok specializes in looped, five to sixty-second videos. In only a few short years it’s gathered over 800 million active users, far surpassing the growth of other sites like Instagram and even Facebook. It’s undeniable to see that what started as a musical lip-syncing app quickly blossomed into something incredible.

Compare this to the growth of vaudeville. It’s the late 1880s, and immigrants travelled en mass to the United States with dreams of a better life. What they got, however, were ghettos to live in and a country that refused to give them honest work. So they found their livelihood in vaudeville, performing in every – really, nearly every aspect. There were singers and dancers, sure, but there were also escape artists and impersonators, sketch artists and ventriloquists. Truly if there was something strange or unique about you that’s able to be harnessed, it could be done on the vaudeville stage.

Now this concept could apply to most video platforms, even to the internet as a whole, where you can find fame in everything from selling nudes to running a twitter for your cat. But the landscape of the internet has changed. Take Youtube, for instance, which hasn’t seen an independently produced video top the view charts since “Charlie Bit My Finger” in 2007. As the platform developed, the algorithm started to favor longer videos, causing many creators to spend less time creating content and more time padding to get at least ten minutes and allow for monetization. This is a sharp contrast to vaudeville philosophy, where going over ten minutes could cause a performer to lose their job. And this is taken even further on TikTok, where you have less then a minute to make yourself seen.

And what is there to see? There are carefully choreographed dances to popular songs, like in the work of Charli D’Amelio, the most followed creator on the app. Then there’s Zach King and his magic tricks and digital illusions. But don’t stop there! Scroll a little further and you’ll find original songs, strange animals, pranks and challenges, and rapid-fire comedy routines spanning across all cultures.

While vaudeville became a way for disillusioned minorities to survive in a new world, TikTok has become a place of refuge for the 16-24 year olds that make up just under half of their user base. This is Generation Z, where – like the early immigrants to the United States – we were promised an impossible future and given a world that is rapidly falling apart. In the face of this we’ve developed a rebirth of personal, absurdist humor that centers on finding connection in an increasingly chaotic world.

Does that make it smart? Probably not. Is it some profound work of art? Maybe. Did I use this an excuse to watch more TikToks in the name of research? Reader, you know me all too well.

But the world right now is, for lack of a better word, a complete garbage fire. There are protests and riots, along with the ongoing pandemic, a brewing economic depression along with two inch Murder Hornets. And there’s things you can do. Wash your hands, wear a mask, sign petitions and support black voices. But when you’ve done all that, when the weight of the world pushes towards the breaking point, there’s a near-infinite well of original and innovative content on TikTok. It’s not perfect, but, to quote playwright Edwin Milton Royle, “Vaudeville may be a kind of lunch counter art, but art is so vague and lunch is so real”.

June 2, 2020

I’ll warn you in advance, this one’s a doozy.

Seriously, if you’re sensitive to graphic content, as abstract as it may be, I’d suggest skipping this week’s subject and sticking to something more pleasant. There’s got to be some videos out there of unlikely animal friendships, perhaps a three-legged dog making friends with a blind gerbil. Something soothing to the senses and tugging at the pathos. I almost avoided writing about this at all, but if we’re talking about internet oddities it’d be a crime not to mention a certain series that has haunted the web since 2005.

So, friends, let me introduce you to Salad Fingers.

Salad Fingers is a work of flash animation by British animator David Firth. It started on Newgrounds, a website dedicated to animated shorts and games, but as time went on it eventually made its way onto Youtube. As I write this, there are eleven episodes spanning fifteen years, with years between the later episodes. It’s surreal to observe the work as a whole. I grew up watching Salad Fingers, and I know for a fact that I have fragmented sense memories of Firth’s work buried deep in my subconscious. But it had been a while since I really took a deep dive into the series, so with little else to do in quarantine I did what made the most sense to me – …and binged every episode. And boy howdy do I regret it.

But what is Salad Fingers about, you ask? That’s a tricky question. The first episode, a two-minute sort of pilot, introduces us to the titular character. He’s a man with inhumanly long fingers living in an unnamed desolate wasteland, and he likes to use his spidery appendages to touch anything sharp or rusty – especially rusty spoons. That’s as much as we’re given, and the other ten episodes are dedicated to exploring the world around him, but even more so exploring the world inside his head.

Firth has a knack of implementing just enough detail as to create a mood, and he’s chosen to use that skill to create a truly disturbing atmosphere. Even given the limitations of Flash in 2005, when Salad Fingers pierces his finger on an exposed nail, it doesn’t matter that it looks like the drawing of some demented child. I cringed then and I cringe now.

That same episode – Episode 2, called “Friends” – has an ending that has stuck with me for fourteen years. I must’ve been ten at the most when I first saw it, and every so often I’ll suddenly remember that final shot and I’ll feel my stomach drop as if I’m a child again, frightened without being able to explain why. Watching it again over a decade later I found it just as simple and shocking. Because David Firth makes a practice in ending Salad Fingers without an ending. Things just stop without any real thematic closure. We’re given a brief peek into the life of Mr. Fingers, and however long or short it may be, it never ends well.

The most fascinating part of Salad Fingers for me is how it serves as a model for the growth of Firth, both in his storytelling and animation quality. Compare the plot of the first episode to the eleventh. In “Spoons”, the first episode, Salad Fingers looks for a rusty spoon and doesn’t find one. That’s it. Then in the latest episode 11, “Glass Brother”, Salad Fingers covers his finger puppet in flesh to turn him into a “real boy”, and then has to rescue him from the mirror world after he gets taken by his reflection. There’s a definite refinement in plot structure, and with it a huge leap in visual quality. You see it from Episode 8 on, when the flat colors and simple animation suddenly turn much more dynamic, more detailed, with even simple touches like the movement of the pupils adding so much to an already-uneasy mood.

But it’s gross. Salad Fingers is gross and dark, and I’ve definitely let out a mild but sustained scream while watching some of the later episodes, when things turn from short fever dreams to a seemingly endless nightmare. But should you watch it? I wish I could meet myself at age ten and ask that question – should you be watching this?

The answer, at least I’d like to think so, is yes. As terrified as Salad Fingers made me, it presented a sort of imagination that to this day is incomparable to anything I’ve seen. And something shocking strengthens your creative immune system in a way. Without Firth’s work I’m not saying that I’d be completely bereft of artistic merit, but he definitely gave me a few tricks up my sleeve for my own practice. Not to mention, the classic reactions of the friends that I’ve made watch his stuff.

So, if you like horror, watch Salad Fingers. Watch it if you tend towards the dark, or if you like feeling uncomfortable as hard and strange as it may be. If none of that is for you, look up a video by The Dodo on Youtube called “This Pittie Loves Bringing His Stuffed Animals to His Parents”. You can thank me later.

But send this to your horror buff friend. Give ‘em something fun to distract them.

April 14, 2020

Let’s face it: we could all use something nice. Quarantine’s been extended, people are continuing to lose their livelihoods, and it really does seem as if some otherworldly force has grabbed the planet and forced it into a sudden and ugly halt. So for this issue of Down the Rabbit Hole, I’d like to offer something you can lose yourself in in a different way. A rabbit, so to speak, a soft and pleasant creature you can take some time out of your day and watch nibble on leaves.

Today, I’d like you to meet Joe Pera, and his show, Joe Pera Talks With You.

Joe Pera is an actor/comedian, and profound enigma. The frequently asked questions that come up when you Google him only prove the latter, from one person asking “Does Joe Pera have special needs?” (No, he doesn’t), to another wanting to know “What is the point of Joe Pera Talks With You?” (A question that, according to the Internet, has no real answer). He is a man in the vein of Bob Ross or Mister Rogers, a thoroughly inoffensive figure who dedicates his show to talking about dancing, breakfast options, and the different kinds of rocks in his hometown. There is a plot, in a sense, but in every episode it seems inconsequential to the true goal of the episode – to talk about the very simple subject in the episode’s title, be it cold weather sports or creating a bean arch. And there’s something beautiful about that, especially in days like these.

What have you been doing lately? Since I work in a kind of unconventional food startup, I’m lucky enough to still have a job, but my days off have consisted of much of the same. I nap a lot and go on walks around my neighborhood. I watch arthouse movies. Every so often, I’ll check the news and immediately regret it. There’s so much going on that’s rapidly beyond my control, it’s become very important to focus on the things that are right in front of me. I heard somewhere that there’s only three days of the week now – yesterday, today and tomorrow – and the best I can do is look for the little joys that’ll keep me going through that cycle.

So there’s an immense comfort, and almost a source of inspiration that comes from Pera’s work. Take the episode Joe Pera Reads You The Church Announcements, probably my personal favorite of the series. The framing device is what the title states, with the semi-fictionalized Joe Pera reading the weekly announcements for St. Benedict’s Parish. Volunteers are needed, a toy drive is approaching – but there’s something more important than that. You see, Joe Pera only just now discovered The Who, more specifically their song “Baba O’Riley”. He immediately falls in love with the track after hearing it on the radio, and proceeds to call every station he could find to request it. We see him jump around the house to the music playing on repeat, dancing and generally rocking out.

He tells this church all of this until the pastor finally ushers him out. But he doesn’t mind, because he has a newly-installed CD player in his car and can listen to “Baba O’Riley” as he drives off into the snowy day. And that’s it. That’s the episode.

There’s something powerful about a form of storytelling that focuses on the small stuff. Because we’ve all been in Pera’s place, haven’t we? I myself have recently unearthed a strange and entirely unironic love for the music of Jimmy Buffett, and let me tell you, nothing spices up a quarantine more than a nice bath with those friendly islands jams playing in the background. But enthusiasm is a tricky thing, and it easily becomes passé, especially when it’s something that’s already gone through the ebb and flow of popularity. Try getting really into Tech Decks, for instance. Remember Tech Decks? The little skateboards that you pilot with your fingers? Really make that a substantial part of your life and try and share it with anyone else, and watch the reactions range from polite indifference to confusion or blatant mockery.

But Joe Pera doesn’t care about that. He cares about his dog and going on long drives to enjoy the scenery in fall. He cares about the different types of Christmas trees and their individual merits, and his favorite part about breakfast is dipping his toast in his egg yolk, which is so absolutely relatable that it I feel in in my very soul.

So, this is what/how I’m trying to realign myself. Because life has taken its scope and has somehow both minimized it and stretched it past the breaking point. I’m choosing to keep the latter in my periphery and focus on the former, the little stuff that’s far more manageable for someone with a realistic amount of power – which, right now, doesn’t amount to much.

It’s not all bad, though. I have a cat that lets me pet her tummy, and I’m close to my family. Maybe I’ll start an herb garden, but I might also spend a little extra time in bed. It’s all about taking care of yourself and living your best life, as unconventional or menial as it may seem.

Maybe we’ll learn in this time that nothing in this life is truly menial. And If we can’t learn it ourselves, perhaps Joe Pera can teach us.

Take care of yourself, friends.

March 24, 2020

Scary times we’re living in.

In Santa Clara County we’ve been put under a Shelter-in-Place, a semi-lockdown to hopefully slow the spread of COVID-19. Events across the city have been postponed or cancelled, people have lost their jobs, and with the weather outside, the storm that’s approaching feels both literal and metaphorical.

I can’t bring you an exhibit to go to, as we’re not really supposed to be going anywhere (non-essential) right now, but I still want to share with you some art. So I’m taking this unusual time to showcase creators that you can find online at no cost. Sure, you can spend your time obsessively following the news and washing your hands (which you should definitely keep doing), but why not spend some time falling down a spiral staircase of Internet neo-surrealism?

And I can’t think of anything better and more confusing then the works of Alan Resnick and AB Video Solutions, a creative collective based out of Baltimore, Maryland.

I first encountered Alan Resnick through his series alantutorial, a Youtube channel that, as of this writing, operated from 2011-2014. It was a parody the tutorial trend that was dominating most online content at the time, but produced clumsy shorts with the exaggerated “Alan” persona on such subjects as How to Pick Up a Blue Chair Off the Ground and How to Take a Bunch of Pills. I loved the satire from the first video I saw, and even more than that I loved the narrative that was formed as the series continued.

Because this was no longer a basic premise. After some time “Alan” was thrown from his one ramshackle room into the world, into chaos, and into ever-grotesque danger. That’s what Resnick, and his colleagues at AB Video are so good at, taking a relatively simple idea and stretching and warping it until it’s horrifying and nearly indecipherable. And there’s an immense level of detail put into his work, especially in his short films created for Adult Swim. He adapts well to the standards of successful modern content, which requires a level of immersion beyond what previous iterations could ever hope for.

Take This House Has People In It, a piece that originally aired on Adult Swim during their 4am Infomercial block. It starts as a basic story as seen through surveillance cameras in a seemingly normal family home. There’s a grandmother watching TV, a little boy waiting for his birthday party to start, and two parents bickering over the body of their angsty teen daughter lying on the floor, apparently in the middle of some kind of tantrum. But something is off. There’s a figure skulking around outside, and their daughter is slowly sinking into the ground. On its own it’s a solid short film that leaves you with a lot of questions, but while it might only make things more perturbing there is more to the story – all it takes is a little bit of digging online.

For instance – that TV show we hear snippets of throughout the film? That’s season five, episode nine of The Sculptor’s Clayground, a Bob Ross-style art show hosted by Alan Resnick. There’s also a website for AB Surveillance Solutions, the fictional company that provides surveillance for the family in the short. If you pull it up you might notice that there’s a location in the upper right corner where you can enter a username and password. There are layers here, and a tremendous amount of work putting into creating a world you can dive into. 

It seems to me that that’s massively important in times like these. We’re stuck in our houses in a time of great tension all across the globe, so it makes sense that there’d be a desire for distraction. What can we do? I know I personally could drink to excess, or take advantage of the many dispensaries still open in my area (“It’s medicine,” an earnest budtender insisted to my mom). What I’d rather do, though, is lose time in a well-constructed world. And movies provide that, sure, but what Resnick does is called an Alternate Reality Game for a reason. 

All of his shorts are on YouTube or Adult Swim – his newest work, May I Please Enter?, is probably my favorite. But if you have a few hours to kill, watch This House Has People In It, and then go to the website for AB Video Solutions. The username is 00437, and the password is bedsheets.

See where you can go from there.

February 19, 2020

Article by Miranda Seaver

Venue: Anno Domini Gallery

Featuring: SKRAPS solo exhibition of Yasushi Matsui

Memory is fleeting. Some things fade into obscurity, and what remains shifts slightly over time, becoming colored and warped as if left in the sun. Senses overlap and eventually create something new based solely on what our brains deemed the most important. I was raised with cameras upon cameras, things that can help with constant documentation and create a massive backlog of picture-perfect moments that I never have the time to look through. Is this the best way to go about life? I used to think so. Now, however, I am more inclined to lean into transience, as Yasushi Matsui does in his print collection SKRAPS.

SKRAPS is a neo-zine currently hosted in Anno Domini, a small independent art gallery in downtown San Jose that specializes in the cutting edge. But Matsui’s zine is not a physical book you can leaf through. Instead he’s taken the artwork from his travels and displayed it on the wall in a cluster of thrift store frames, creating an experience you can view both all at once and one at a time.

Matsui is a modern-day nomad, living out of his van in California, and out of his backpack during his overseas trips. You can see representations of both of these in the large front and back “covers” that bookend the wall of frames. Early on he knew he wanted to remember his experiences, so he picked up scraps of papers and hand-bound them into makeshift sketchbooks that he then used to document his life. The original journals are on display, and keeping with the DIY aesthetic so common in zine culture, he’s scanned his overlapping designs and printed them out on hand-made Washi paper, an ancient process Matsui picked up from a master papermaker in the Atago region of Japan.

There’s something very special in seeing the fruit of Matsui’s traveling as seen through his eyes. He doesn’t provide an exact depiction of his journeys, instead finding his interest in creating something more conceptual. Visual memory combines with the surreal to create mesmerizing images, and standing in front of the zine as a whole you’re given plenty of opportunity to find something new. There’s a butterfly with a view of the ocean in its outstretched wings, flowers blooming from the body of bird and a desert horizon laid out in the torso of a coyote. It’s the type of thing that’s meant to be taken in, eyes scanning the wall from one end to the other, your attention occasionally being caught to certain images like a sweater to a stray branch.

What I think really brings out Matsui’s work is its intent. SKRAPS was made as a private journal, a documentation for his own reference that was only printed for the public on a whim. Because of that there’s no outside influence. We’re seeing Matsui’s memories in a way that only he could decipher, and even then the initial meaning of the work may be long since lost to time. It’s like looking at a stranger’s dream journal – it doesn’t really make a lot of sense, but it’s clear it meant something to someone at some point in time. And there’s something magical about that.

Much like memory, Matsui works in impermanence. He has only made one copy of each of his prints, and once they’re taken from the collection they’re gone for good. SKRAPS also contains two canvas tapestries that were created during a live painting event, a testament to a moment that will never happen again. And once Matsui’s work leaves Anno Domini, it’s unsure where he’ll pop up next. Perhaps Tahoe, or Mexico, or even someplace like Indonesia.

So, take in SKRAPS while it’s still in one piece. It’s absolutely something worth remembering.

January 28, 2020

Article by Miranda Seaver

Venue: The Regency Ballroom

Featuring: The Edwardian World’s Faire 2020

I was a weird kid. If you know me, even tangentially, this probably doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

I spent a majority of my formative years dressed in ill-fitting thrift store suits, making campfires at the park and carving Pink Floyd lyrics into tree stumps with my brother’s switchblade. I’ve since grown up, and every so often I have been hit with a sense of un-direction. I mean, where do weird kids go when they aren’t kids anymore?

On January 24, I learned the answer to that question: they go to The Edwardian World’s Faire.

The Edwardian Ball is described on their website as “an elegant and whimsical celebration of art, music, theatre, fashion, technology, circus, and the beloved creations of the late, great author and illustrator Edward Gorey”. You may recognize Gorey from his grim black and white drawings depicting old-timey, high society-types. Or, if you’re like me, perhaps you have vague memories of The Gashlycrumb Tinies, an alphabet book consisting entirely of children dying terrible deaths. I’ll admit I don’t know much about his work aside from the feeling of indescribable dread it gave me when I was young, so I turned to a more knowledgable friend to ask what she believed attracted people to the Gorey’s work and aesthetic.

“His macabre subjects and the gallows humor,” she said, “accompanied by the lifework that can range from stark to densely-packed with lines… And a lot of it, though not necessarily macabre, just feels bizarre.”

So what type of people are drawn together in the same of such a bizarre man?

I arrived to The Regency Ballroom about an hour ahead of time, which worked in my favor as the line stacked up quickly. What really struck me first was how elaborate the costumes I saw were. There was a blend of fashion and technology that fit in well coming from the culture of Silicon Valley. I was lucky enough to be in line behind Greg and Lora Price from Steamy Tech in Santa Clara. Their ensemble was drawing in a lot of attention from passersby, especially Greg with his modified top hat containing four wooden walls of light and moving gears. This was built by hand, as was the pendent around Lora’s neck that lit up and acted as a sort of decibel meter.

Steamy Tech works with laser cutters, 3-D printers, and basic programming to create motorized trinkets and kits you can put together on your own. And Greg and Lora are regulars at the Edwardian Ball, coming each year with a new wooden pin to give out. I saw several guests donning this year’s pin of a scroll and quill, along with designs from previous years. It was clear to me that there was a tight-knit community surrounding the Ball, of which Greg and Lora were a vital part.

When the doors finally opened to the crowd I was one of the first inside. And god, there was a lot to look at. The Edwardian Ball takes up three floors of the Regency Ballroom. When you first enter there’s the Grand Ballroom, a vast space with people on stilts and posed on platforms. There were a lot of photo opportunities, from the flying alligator in the center of the room to the set pieces modeling different Edward Gorey stories from previous years. Below that is the Vendor Bazaar, where artisans sell their handcrafted goods, and two stories up is a more intimate space, with the Fireplace Stage and the Museum of Wonders.

Needless to say, I was lost in a heartbeat and overwhelmed almost immediately. Three floors, each packed with entertainment for the entirety of the night. There was a period of time while the line along the block was filing in (There was a metal detector at the door and almost everyone’s costumes had some amount of metal in them), and I used that period to take in the space while it was still relatively empty.

I enjoyed the Museum of Wonders, a hall of oddities reminiscent of a carnival funhouse with a cage containing the severed hands of the Baba Yaga, and a mermaid skeleton displayed in a case. Outside of that I got to see Belinda Blair’s Mechanical Doll, a performance piece where Blair posed as an animatronic doll that would come to life and play a song on her ukulele for anyone willing to toss her a few coins or trinkets.

The street performer energy was strong here, from the actual performers to the lavishly dressed patrons. There was a figure in a fox mask with an luminescent cape that glided through the ball on a pair of roller blades, and another one in a massive skeletal headpiece. The show was incredible, yes, with performances by the dancers of Le Cancan Bijou and the incredible acrobatics and contortionists of The Vau de Vire Society. But what really struck me about the Edwardian Ball were the people that were attending it.

I got the chance to speak with a few of them, and with the ghost of my younger self on my mind, I asked them all what they would say to the weird kids of the past and future.

There was a range of answers, but what I heard again and again was that things get better. One man advised that old clothes come in handy – which, as a lifelong Goodwill advocate, I can definitely agree with. And I spoke with a young woman in a mohawk and ballgown about her thoughts on the subject.

“Don’t stop being weird,” she said. “Other guys are going to some lame house party tonight, and I’m going to have a fabulous time watching people be themselves and be amazing and feel great about themselves. And what’s not great about that?”

This really struck me. Because, while Edward Gorey’s work is rather restrained, the Ball is anything but. These people are here to celebrate – celebrate themselves, each other, and the spark in Gorey’s work that pushed them to continue. And there’s something wonderful about that. There’s a magical quality in the spectacle of it all, the sense of joy without judgement.

When I left the party was still going on, and I left with with a sense of community that I’d never known before. After this weekend the patrons of the Ball will go back to their everyday lives, scattered all across the Bay Area. They’ll be working their jobs, going about their days, perhaps even passing you on the street. You might see them draped in regalia, or they might look so inconspicuous that you don’t notice them at all.

So take their advice, reader, and keep it weird. You might feel like you’re the only one, but that’s far from the truth.

They’re out there. We’re out there. You just have to know where to look.

January 3, 2020

Article by Miranda Seaver

Venue: San José Museum of Art

Featuring: Almost Human: Digital Art from the Permanent Collection

I love my robots.

There’s an Amazon Echo in my bedroom who fills my room with lo-fi hip-hop beats on nights when insomnia has the best of me. There’s a second Echo in the living room – we call her “Computer” to prevent any miscommunication between her and her sister – and a Google Home in my parent’s room. We talk to them several times a day, to ask questions when we’re stoned and curious or hungry to win an argument. It’s a strange relationship between us and our new artificial assistants. Yes, they’ve been proven to listen to their surroundings at all times, so we’ve essentially volunteered to bug our house in the name of Capitalism. But it’s 2019, and that’s just the type of thing people are willing to do now.

This is the world of Almost Human, from the permanent collection of the San José Museum of Art. Black Mirror, eat your heart out.

If you have your finger on the pulse of the SJ art scene, you might notice that some pieces from Almost Human were featured at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art a while back, but the exhibit has truly been given the chance to flourish in the new and larger space. They’ve also added some interactive elements, including Ian Cheng’s Emissary Forks for You, a self-described “neurological gym” starring a virtual dog (A Shiba, for those who want the full picture) who guides you through the gallery from the screen of a Google Tango tablet.

I’m always a fan of any art that pulls me from the muck of the everyday, and that’s exactly what happened as I circled the room, head down to the tablet in my hands, and watched in wonder as the environment shifted around me. Each reset of the simulation is a different route, and you could potentially play ad infinitum, following the occasional demands of your tiny pupper until you get bored, or dizzy, or until the tablet freezes like it did for me after ten minutes of wandering. Which doesn’t come as much of a surprise if you consider the limits of basic game design, and it certainly doesn’t take away from the experience as a whole.

What I believe to be the most outstanding, and most relevant theme of Almost Human is the overlap between technology and humanity. It’s seen in more literal ways, such as in Jim Campbell’s duo piece Photograph of My Mother and Portrait of My Father, where he presents two photos of his parents that blur and turn clear following the rhythm of the his body. You can stand in front of both of them and watch his life echo over their own, two generations phasing in and out over each other. It’s like watching life without life. Truly a surreal experience.

I found the most enjoyment, however, in the chance to watch what appears to be technology in the process of learning, and doing so in a way that’s almost childlike. I saw it in Diane Thater’s Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2), five flat screen monitors arranged in a star-shape on the floor, each showing a single shot of a monarch butterfly. They’ve stretched the shot over all screens, giving the image a disjointed and hazy quality, similar to how it feels to try and recall a memory from infancy. It’s there, yes, but your brain holds it a different way, distorting the image slightly and bathing it in the faint glow of nostalgia.

My favorite work in the whole exhibit is Listening Post by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin. It’s a massive wall of LED modules on support beams, along with speakers hanging strategically around a near-black room. The piece’s main feature is its algorithms and custom software that pulls data from online chatrooms and organizes them into “movements” that are then displayed on screen and narrated through the speakers, creating a soundscape that travels around the space.

I sat there for a long time, in the dark, watching this massive machine displaying statements from its massive cache of uncensored internet data. At one point it was just spelling, scrolling through letters to make words. I could’ve sat there for a lot longer, if nothing else then to see how much information this software had gathered.

Because, strange as it may seem, we’re rapidly approaching a time when that’s all we can do. We’re in an age where we’re no longer “surfing the web” with chunky desktop computers and cacophonous dial-up modems. Technology is creating a new form of art that feels entirely present to the now, an elusive, yet constantly-present moment that is born, aged, and dead all at the same time. It’s art that’s ageless and constantly evolving. And it’s only going to grow – but into what, I can’t say.

All in all, Almost Human is definitely an exhibit worth experiencing. Bring your Echo if you have one. I bet she’d like it.

October 17, 2019

Article by Miranda Seaver

Venue: San José Museum of Art

Featuring: Beta Space: Pae White – Exhibition

I am a child.

I must be six, maybe seven, and my parents have dragged me along with them to the hardware store. They have their own business to attend to, so much so that they’ve all but tossed me aside so they could focus their attention on doorknobs and light fixtures. And since this is still the dawn of the Smartphone Age, I have nothing to distract myself. So I take to wandering through the aisles, toying vaguely with these artifacts of a life miles away form my own. It’s not much, but few things pass the time better than ascribing great intent to a meaningless subject.

Well over a decade later I still fall into similar habits. Some people call it “window shopping”, but that doesn’t quite capture what I’m sure we all did as children. The separation, I think, is comprehension. If you walked into somewhere like a hardware store today, you could likely place most of the items on the shelves. As a child, however, disconnected from context and vocabulary, it’s all shapes. Textures. Colors and light. That’s where the magic of these kinds of exploration comes in – from the gentle vulnerability of surrendering yourself to the sense memory of a new situation.

This is where we find ourselves in Beta Space, Pae White’s collection of old and new work organized to celebrate the San Jose Museum of Art’s 50th anniversary.

Pae White is a multimedia artist specializing in the exceptional quality existing in what most would consider mundane. Her current exhibit contains two notable installations that take up the space with an astounding scope. There’s foreverago (2017), a massive tapestry running at 127 feet long. It snakes through the center of the exhibit’s small room, coiling into little alcoves one can stand and be surrounded by cotton, cashmere and metal. You can watch it for it’s details, specially the scattered insects and depictions of psychoactive plants. Or you can let your eyes blur and focus on the colors and shapes, patches of silver and gold, and the most perfect shade of mauve.

The second biggest piece is AGAMEMNOMICS (2013), a massive collection of toys and tchotchkes lined up in a long case that stretches across most of the room. The work started off when White found a number of forgotten toys while in Vienna. With them she fashioned a chess set, and she took photos of nine different pieces and sent them to artists and fabricators all across the world, from Los Angeles to Germany and China. From there they created their own interpretation of the toy, made in the material of their choice. From that point on she amassed a series of mirrors in front of mirrors, reflections echoed enough to fade familiarity into only its barest outline.

And suddenly you’re a child again, wandering around your guardian’s orbit and taking in things you’re too young to understand. It’s a warm feeling, especially in the realm of art world academia, to see an exhibit from your heart and not your head. White’s work has been described as kinesthetic, being “as much a bodily as visual experience that plays with the senses”. Her focus is on our relationship with the ordinary, something that all too many of us take advantage of on a day-to-day basis.

You can do that for yourself even outside of Beta Space. Perhaps when you wake up in the morning you can dedicated a bit more thought to the things you usually ignore. Feel the way the bristles of your brush feel against your teeth, or how the heat gathers in your coffee cup. Curiosity doesn’t go away – not really – it just sometimes needs a little push to rise to the surface. That’s what Pae White is working towards.

So let her help you. Come loose yourself in Beta Space – at least, until your parents are ready to go.

June 10, 2019

Article by Greg Cutler | TUE, JUN 4, 2019, 7:30PM – 9:00PM

Venue: Castro Theatre

Featuring: David Byrne

Each Long Now Foundation Seminar is a unique, one of a kind performance. The talks are never repeated. They can only be experienced fully in-person. They are live events. The world needs more live events.

David Byrne: Good News and Sleeping Beauties will be available as a podcast that you can listen to after the event, but the informal “talk” quality of Long Now Foundation seminars is what is so enticing about these events.

David Byrne is not an academic, in the true sense. He is an artist. As such, he is interested in exploring the breadth of human experience. When he discovers a story that intrigues him he delves deeper into why things transpired the way they did.

Sometimes, a broadly accepted way of thinking that we all have come to take for granted, gets lost. Sometimes, an idea gets proposed, presented in a scientific paper, recorded, and discussed, but was ignored or proven too outlandish to fit in with commonly accepted thought. Sometimes, they are forgotten entirely. Sometimes, they are discovered (often by searching for adjacent truths), re-examined and determined to be the ultimate truth that becomes the common truth of the matter. These are the “sleeping beauties” of knowledge. They are known knowns. They were recorded. They were forgotten. They resurfaced. 

Byrne’s talk examines these “sleeping beauty” stories, one after another. Each story in his talk is more unbelievable than the next. His research into these stories reveals a common thread. Can we prevent this from happening? Ideas that are brilliant should not be suppressed because of politics, or the mob mentality of following a “divine” or “wise” leader. Life is hard. The average person looks to experts to tell us how to think and what to believe. We trust in people who have experience beyond our own. We attribute wisdom to wealth and influence. This seems to me to be a faulty way in which to progress our civilization. We must all work to be open-minded, not discount brilliant ideas, and be creative, critical thinkers.

The stories Byrne tells are numerous. His style of presenting is informal. He is a little disorganized. His slides got a little out of sync, but he soldiered on. He illuminated us on science and art. The art sleeping beauties struck a cord with me. As an artist, Byrne finds art that was lost or underground and by educating us about it, resurfaces it, breathing new life into it so that it can live on and inspire others.

The interview at the end of the talk, hosted by Stewart Brand, is to my mind, the best part of these seminars. Even though the Castro Theater was packed to the gills, a few people left halfway through the talk and missed the best part. Among other things, Byrne discussed how he searches the internet for inspiration. He finds art and scientific stories in a very organic way. He examines or listens to something that leads him to something else. He thinks, “Hmm, how did they do that?” or “Who did that?” and then he follows that trail. It’s like hunting for an elusive beast.

Finding gems of knowledge and sharing them with the world is also part of the mission of ArtsEarth.org; promoting the arts worldwide, at no cost to artists. In doing this, we think we are helping do the good work that Byrne and others are doing. We strive to eliminate the “sleeping beauties” of art.

Byrne is starting a new website called: Good News and Reasons to be Cheerful.

I invite you to listen to the full audio podcast of David Byrne: Good News & Sleeping Beauties available on June 11, 2019, on the Long Now Foundation website.

• Long Now Event Description: David Byrne: Good News and Sleeping Beauties

February 22, 2019

Article by Talia Colarusso | Photos by Lydia Bell

From the moment you pull down 5th avenue in Wynwood on a not so chilly December night you are instantly transported into a living breathing art exhibition unlike any other. From the local artists scraping for some first time recognition on the corner to the coveted photographer with 700k instagram followers who has drawn an international audience taking up space in the chic warehouse across the street, Art Basel is not an event to miss out on.

Red Dot Miami took things up a level this year, hosted in the famed Maya Studio in the heart of Wynwood Red Dot featured over 75 galleries and 500 artists in the span of four nights. From the moment you enter the sprawling studio space the bump of some trendy New York DJ can be heard playing in the background. But before you even have the time to pull your phone out and Shazam the song you are whisked away by the sheer amount of eclectic works splayed out in front of you. As you breeze through gallery after gallery with a chilled lychee martini in hand it is hard not to get swept up in the whimsicalness of an art exhibition of such grandeur size. It was hard to remember that outside of these walls we were still in the middle of Wynwood and not at some underground art show hosted in Berlin. The sheer amount of international artists featured in this exhibition was enough to take one’s breath away. From the contemporary to classic, to down right extreme there was something for everyone’s taste at Red Dot Miami. As always Art Basel has managed to blow my mind even more than the year before. If you have yet to check out Art Basel for yourself, keep an eye out for the dates for 2019’s Art Basel to be posted.