Hella Solutions blog: "Document. Share. Inspire."

With all these electronic devices being such a central tool in media work how do we keep them charged?! Batteries are fairly toxic and using one-use types is a poor environmental choice for everyday use. Here’s a link to a site that has some good advice on recharging:

http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-21.htm

Happy Charging!

Culture jamming – imho – is best seen by the works created by the minds that are the Billboard Liberation Front. By subtlety modifying advertisements in the public space, these “culture jammers” express an opinion about how they feel about the public space being inundated with advertisements (so-called “a-political” advertisements). Letting advertisers take up massive amounts of space creates an environment where it becomes increasingly more impossible (read too expensive) for artistic and political voices to have a place in the public sphere to express themselves – freedom of speech is effectively taken away by the fact that in order to adequately speak you have to have millions of dollars.

Another point to remember is that advertising is NOT a-political; rather it is a HIGHLY political medium (capitalism is about as political as you can get, right?!).

So, culture jammers see our common public sphere being acquired by private, political interests and this acquisition is at the expense of cultural interests that reside outside of capital. I totally agree and love the idea of re-interpreting advertisements and putting them back out into the public. I can’t say I’m as good as the folks at BLF but, personally, I don’t really think it’s about “being good”.

About the image. The public transportation train in the SF Bay ARea is called BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) and their police force has committed some serious blunders in their time but most recently they went over the edge. One night on the train there was a ruckus and the police took some people aside for questioning and felt one (Oscar Grant) was being uncooperative. So one of the officers forced Oscar to the ground and while Oscar lay face down on the concrete, with his arm twisted behind him, the cop proceeded to shoot him in the back. Dead. This whole scene was caught on video from various sources and no where is it clear that Oscar was ever resisting nor was his behavior warranting the use of a taser (the weapon the cop says he was intending to go for). Anyway, it’s a really, really sad story of which BART has not really made any significant changes that people can see. I mean they haven’t shot anyone lately so I reckon that’s a good thing. But when I saw BART’s new “…and you’re there” advertisements the first thing that came to mind was the above image. Not a masterpiece but you get the point.

Here’s an older image of mine. One in which I received my very own cease-and-desist letter from those wonderfully wealthy corporate attorneys at BofA…

[original BART image; BART video; original BofA advert]

I’ve got a couple of events that might be of interest for those in the SF Bay Area. One is audio focused (music) and the other is a little less but I think it’s very applicable for anybody working in the art or media field.

Switchboard Music Festival 2010: The third annual Switchboard Music Festival is an 8-hour, non- stop music spectacle presenting composers and musicians who push the boundaries of their respective genres. No other Bay Area music festival or concert series offers such an eclectic, genre-crossing, convention-breaking, bastardizing group of experimentalists, innovators, and musical omnivores in a single event.

Sunday, 28 March, 2010
02:00 PM – 11:00 PM

Cost:
$10 – $40 sliding scale

Venue:
Dance Mission
3316 24th Street at Mission
San Francisco, CA

Artist Talk: Right Here Right Now: [NOT HAPPENING - SEE COMMENT] How do we engage with art in an immediate, unmediated way? Through choreography and composition, 2009 AIRs Kara Davis and Aaron Ximm both work toward the specific goal of creating immediate experiences that absorb, capture and immerse their audiences. Davis is a dancer and choreographer who pushes the possibilities of improvisation and ignores the traditional boundaries between audience and performer. Ximm creates intimate, site-specific sound installations that translate fleeting moments captured by field recordings into present experiences. This program is a unique opportunity to engage with performance and experiential installation created by Davis and Ximm in response to their surroundings at Headlands.

Sunday, 29 August, 2010
07:30 PM – 09:00 PM

Cost:
Free

Venue:
Headlands Center for the Arts
944 Fort Barry
Sausalito, CA 94965