The Ups & Downs: Brian Kim Stefans

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The Ups & Downs
Scriptor 1.0 by Brian Kim Stefans
Friday June 5 & Saturday June 6 from 7-10pm
with a short artist's talk each night at 8pm
at workspace

The Ups & Downs is an installation series. The show goes up, the show goes down. Opening party on Friday night and closing party the next night, on Saturday. No time for exhibitions. Low impact, ephemeral and immersive art. People with lots of People. The market. It’s a party. Time for the underground. It’s a ball. It’s for The People. This has been made for you. You look familiar? The show must go on. Installed and De-installed. Up. Down. Now what? Now then…



artist's statement:
The Scriptor series is meant to bring free form doodling into the digital world. For the project, I created my own letterform creation program that, purposefully, lacks many of the elements of professional graphics programs such as Illustrator and Flash that encourage symmetry, cut-and-paste, and the mathematically precise placement of objects that we associate with digital design, not to mention much digital art. These letterforms and doodles are all "by hand," and "by eye" - they are a version of penmanship for the screen, but one in which each line or stroke of the letterform can be animated algorithmically (something you can't do with digital fonts). The words themselves are parsed from news articles - interesting phrases are randomly picked out, given randomly generated sizes, placements and trajectories, as well as a "crazy level" (that's the name of the variable in the program) that determines their legibility. This "crazy level" can grow or shrink - once the "crazy level" reaches a certain pitch, the letter explodes, but in some instances letters can be brought back from the brink of disaster to reach a stable state again.



Scriptor teases the eye into a game of determining when a form is merely a scrawl and/or when it makes that invisible transition into an icon, a "letter" - or, inkblot-test style, into something else. These are not films - nothing you see on the screen will ever happen again (or, for that matter, ever happened).

artist's bio:
Brian Kim Stefans is a poet and digital artist whose recent books include Kluge: A Meditation, and other works (Roof, 2007), What is Said to the Poet Concerning Flowers (Factory School, 2006), and Before Starting Over: Essays and Interviews (Salt Publishing, 2007). His digital works such as "The Dreamlife of Letters" and "Star Wars, One Letter at a Time" have been shown in gallery settings worldwide; many of these can be found at his website, www.arras.net. He is an Assistant Professor of English at UCLA, specializing in poetry and electronic writing.

Performance / Lectures !!

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Perfomance / Lectures !!
David Buuck & Liz Glynn
Saturday, May 23 from 4-7pm
at Outpost for Contemporary Art



Liz Glynn uses objects and actions to explore the ambition of empire and the pleasure of ruin. Her practice seeks to embody dynamic cycles of growth, possibility, and decay by evidencing process, encouraging participation, and inciting future action. Her work has been presented at venues including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Machine Project, the REDCAT Lounge, John Connolly Presents (NYC), and is currently on view as part of The Generational: Younger than Jesus at the New Museum in NYC. Reviews of her work have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, Art Lies, Domus, and Archaeology Magazine among others. She has attended residencies at O’ Artoteca in Milan, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts, and her BA from Harvard College.



David Buuck will give a performative talk & image (de)tour of recent projects initiated by BARGE (The Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics), including multi-platform investigations of various sites in the San Francisco Bay Area. Using text, photos, performance, walking tours, psychogeography, music, & found materials, these projects explore how various methodologies might engage & respond to the specific historical & material conditions of a given site or field of inquiry. As an extension of these inquiries, notions such as the 'artist talk' or the 'slide lecture' become arenas for performance & improvisation as well.

BARGE was started by David Buuck in 2003. BARGE has organized several (de)tours around the Bay Area, investigating regional sites & spaces that are underrepresented & overlooked in more conventional touristic, commercial, & socio-political notions of place & public space. BARGE investigates how vernacular landscapes — from highways & billboards to waterfronts & public utilities, from industrial lots & server farms to military bases & surveillance zones — are constructed & inhabited, while also exploring the ways in which engaged psychogeography can provide new modes of counter-tourism & activism. Recent investigations include Buried Treasure Island (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 2008), "!7 Reasons Why" (Mission17 Gallery, 2009), & "Matta-Clark Parks" (Root Division Gallery, 2009). David Buuck's The Shunt is just out from Palm Press, and recent writing has appeared in SITE/CITE/CITY (2008), Artweek, Bombay Gin, With+Stand, Try, & elsewhere.

Closing!

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Ecliptic
By Dorsey Dunn
&
Set for a Play that Doesn’t Exist
By Janne Larsen in collaboration with Mathew Timmons
Last Chance to see these shows!
Friday, May 8 from 7-10pm
Saturday, May 9 from 12noon-5pm
at Outpost for Contemporary Art

Ecliptic
By Dorsey Dunn
projected text, sound; dimensions variable

Ecliptic is a single piece of narrative movement projected on up to three adjoining walls. It is a capturing of the interior voice and a visualization of the recessional quality of the mind’s present moment. From the right, a discontinuous stream of language pops suddenly into view. The words move leftward at a walking pace, their thin line of monologue traveling unfettered through space. The words form a twenty-minute looped interior monologue which is written such that the observer may pick up threads of the conversation’s main themes at any time: the text ‘updates’ itself, and tracks back on itself, frequently. A minimalist bed of ambient sound accompanies the projection.


Set for a Play that Doesn’t Exist
By Janne Larsen in collaboration with Mathew Timmons

The Play that Doesn’t Exist, ‘An Information of Skin’ centers on the absence of characters and the buildup of detritus. The Play that Doesn’t Exist, ‘Detritus’ is about the building of flesh upon flesh. The Play that Doesn’t Exist, ‘Dermatitis’ celebrates Demeter’s gift of cereal to humankind as two (or three, maybe four) characters banter over the longest breakfast that turns successively into lunch then dinner and then again into breakfast. The Play that Doesn’t Exist is a war between time passing and the nature of our humanity celebrating Demeter’s gift of flesh upon flesh upon flesh upon flesh upon flesh. Duration is the constant timeline as time struggles with becoming new again—an emotional overhaul, confronting and discarding it’s own skin. Characters struggle with and are eventually won over by anonymity and absence as they find themselves immersed within a Set for a Play that Doesn’t Exist.

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Dorsey Dunn is a Los Angeles-based artist. His work in sound, text and image, in the form of installations, performances and written and recorded works, is an extended meditation on the perimeters of language, the movements of silence, and the vagaries of comprehension. Languages, spoken and sounded, in their multiplicities of gesture and meaning, are a primary concern, as are considerations of memory, spatial presence, and will. Dorsey regularly exhibits and performs his sound-led installations and music in the US and internationally. He has received invitations to exhibitions and residencies around the world, most recently to Q-O2 Gallery in Brussels; the new media lab TESLA in Berlin; Jack Straw New Media Gallery in Seattle; Festival International de Arte Digital, Rosario, Argentina; MusicAcoustica in Beijing; and Is Arti in Vilnius and Kaunas, Lithuania. Previously, he edited an international literary magazine, Trafika, based in Prague and New York. He was educated in New York City.

Bridging the gap between installation art and set design, Janne Larsen translates text and dimensionality into new forms of expression. Her work explores spatial development in performance and gallery dynamics. Through social experiments in art, Larsen breaks through the fourth wall by challenging the structures behind preconceived notions of art and performance. Janne Larsen received her B.A in philosophy from DePaul University and in 2007 received her M.F.A from CalArts. A Los Angeles based installation artist and set designer, Janne Larsen has exhibited at Telic Arts Exchange, workspace, L.A Municipal Gallery, UCLA’s Kerkhoff Gallery, The Fine Arts complex at Cal State L.A., Art House Gallery, BetaLevel, and the Museum of Contemporary Art DC. She has also designed sets at Pomona College, Bootleg, The Odyssey, Caltech, and Cal Arts. Janne has recently been published in the magazine, “Zen Monster” and is currently working on a book of illustrations entitled “Tea Parties” with Amanda Tomme. In the upcoming year, sponsored by the Greek Ministry of Culture, Janne expects to bring the tragedy, Medea, to the Daveli Cave outside of Athens, Greece.

Mathew Timmons is a writer, curator and critic in Los Angeles. He is General Director of General Projects at various locations including Outpost for Contemporary Art and The Ups & Downs, an installation series, at workspace. He also co-edits/curates Insert Press (w/ Stan Apps), LA-Lit (w/ Stephanie Rioux), Late Night Snack (w/ Harold Abramowitz) and he is the Los Angeles editor of Joyland. A chapbook, Lip Service is recently out from Slack Buddha Press. His first full-length book, The New Poetics (Les Figues Press), his micro-book collaboration with Marcus Civin, a particular vocabulary (P S Books), and a chapbook, Lip Music (By the Skin of Me Teeth), are forthcoming. His work may be found in various journals, including: P-Queue, Holy Beep!, Flim Forum, The Physical Poets, NōD, PRECIPICe, Or, Moonlit, aslongasittakes, eohippus labs, Area Sneaks, Artweek, The Magazine and The Encyclopedia Project.