SPECULATIVE ART PROJECTS+CURATION RESEARCH+RESIDENCY EXPERIMENTS+ELECTRONIC BOOK MAKING+MAGAZINES-LOCATED IN THE HISTORIC CANAL DISTRICT OF HOLYOKE, MA 362 DWIGHT STREET - HOLYOKE, MASSACHUSETTS - holyokeresearcher@gmail.com

Sunday, August 21, 2011

2011

RETCON
((RETROACTIVECONTINUITY)))
OCTOBER 8TH + 14TH  2011
CURATED BY TORSTEN ZENAS BURNS & PRODUCED BY: KARI GATZKE
DATES / HOURS: 
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH: MOBILE GEOGRAPHY PERFORMANCE SERIES #4: 12-2PM
OPENING: 6-8PM - OUTDOOR VILM-ALLEY SCREENING: 8-11PM 
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14TH: RETCON / MUSICON PERFORMANCES: 6-11PM
CLOSING: 6-11PM - L-DOCK EXHIBITION (ALL EVENTS ARE FREE)
PARSONS HALL PROJECT SPACE was not always what it seemed to be,
for a brief time in 2009 between the Spring screening of SPECULATION(ELATION)2 and the Fall exhibition HHORRRAUTICA 4:(CRYPTO) there existed another curation event not shared with the public. This variable experience existed for only two days inside 362 Dwight Street, known then as Lake Hitchcock Center for the Arts. After re-contacting all of the participants it was decided that the RETCON projects would be shared sometime in the nearest future. We would like to give a special thanks to George Kuchar who inspired the first RETCON gathering and who now has prompted that this new continuity be rebooted. 
OPENING EVENT SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH - 6-11PM (FREE)
L-DOCK: RETCON
TED SZCZEPANSKI
MICHAEL O'MALLEY
JEFF DEROSE
DENIS LUZURIAGA
JORDAN BIREN AND URSULA BROOKBANK
CASPAR STRACKE


VILM ALLEY: RETCON
GEORGE KUCHAR
JEFF DEROSE
MONICA PANZARINO
MICHAEL O'MALLEY
CASPAR STRACKE
MARIE LOSIER


MOBILE GEOGRAPHY 
PERFORMANCE SERIES#4 
MICHAEL O'MALLEY: SPRAYING MANTIS


CLOSING EVENT FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14TH - 6-11PM (FREE)
L-DOCK EXHIBITION: RETCON
VILM ALLEY: RETCON:MUSICON
THE WARBLERS
Hedges


L-DOCK: RETCON
OPENING: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH - 6-8PM
RA - SIX PHOTOGRAPHS
We tend to think of the sun as a constant: "as sure as the sun will come up in the morning" is an oath to certitude; photographers know to set their cameras to numerical certainty when full sun is falling on their subjects; no one doubts that staring at the sun will blind.
The human eye can only see the sun in the fullness of its spectra: start to limit the range and one can see the roiling turbulence and magnetic ebb and flow, showing the chaos inherent in its creative power. 
These views of the sun are from NASA / ESA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory which images the sun's various wavelengths of visible and ultraviolet light; the prints are pigment on watercolor paper.
304long #2 Description (1 of 6)
sun viewed in helium flavored ultraviolet light. 4 color gum bichromate print, cadmium yellow, alizarin, windsor blue, lamp black, around 12 layers
source:
NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory 
Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) 304 angstrom wavelength EIT 304Å image captures an elongated erupting prominence -- Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool dense plasma suspended in the Sun's hot, thin corona. At times, they can erupt, escaping the Sun's atmosphere. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. The hottest areas appear almost white, while the darker red areas indicate cooler temperatures. Image taken 23 April 2001.
Ted Szczepanski's work combines digital and chemical photography;he sees the sun from Brooklyn, NY.

AWESOME - VARIABLE DATE / TIME - VIDEO
Through strategies of play, pleasure and interaction, my work focuses on the shifting dimensions of the built environment, kinesthetic experience and social relations. I build sculptures and installations that frame the body in a particular way. In so doing viewers become implicated in the psychological contradictions of detachment and intimacy, power and futility, comfort and control. He is also a professor of art at Pomona College, and makes incredible wood, oven-fired pizza from scratch. He recently participated in MACHINE PROJECTS Open Field residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

THE TYGER - 3:30 - 2010 - VIDEO
William Blake's poem (and spelling) juxtaposed with video I shot at the Robodock Technology & Arts Festival 2007 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. There are no actors in this video. You are seeing the events that I witnessed and captured that evening.Music by:Karen Langlie of Wisteriax.
I projected this video on the opposing wall in the room where I installed the companion piece, Threshold Limit. A inter-active sculpture consisting of 100 molotov cocktails, illuminated by LED’s and mounted to a 6 x 11 foot chain link fence.
 Jeff Derose creates video, sculpture and photography projects in Western Massachusetts and beyond. He recently screened video work at the Hosmer gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, and created an installation called “Lot’s Wife” at the Taber Art gallery in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  

THE CORN FIELDS OF PIONEER VALLEY - 5:25 / 2008 - VIDEO
Denis Luzuriaga is a visual artist working in Western Massachusetts. He combines video, painting, and sound in what can be termed "sense-scapes." Denis exhibits his work in galleries, exhibition spaces, and works with outsider artists performing irreverent versions of yester-year avant-garde such as Kurt Schwitters' "Ursonata" electrified.    Other projects include producing SWITCH a new art for television project being syndicated throughout Massachusetts, and hosting LAB a monthly gathering in Holyoke, Massachusetts or alternative locations where experiments with action and intermedia are shared by a local community of artists with guests from around the world.

SLVR.HNDS - 11:30 - 2010 - VIDEO
SLVR.HNDS begins in the absence of images with music composed and performed by Heather Lockie. A collaborative work, with roots in residency, that responds directly to the implicated psychical dimension of empathic production—Two un-named people engage in a sightless exploration of landscape and melodrama, as they seek, through other means, phenomena swept as wind through the haunted woods and waters around them.

 Los Angeles based artist Ursula Brookbank's work looks at what lies beneath, inside, and behind the artifacts of daily life. She approaches her work with a desire to get lost in the space of smoky cinematic narrative. 
 Jordan Biren is an artist for whom video is the poetic rehearsal of his artistic endeavor. 
His work has long pondered meaning as a migration behind the illusory promise of narrative utterance. His is work of a melancholic tension built around narrative dissolutions in the chasms of granular image, text, and sound. Narrative, rather, has inhered in his video as a vaporous impossibility against which the work is directed. He seeks in this the more enigmatic holes of unexplained human experience—those breaches covered over, as if unsightly, by the image, sound, and textual impulses of an arbitrary existence. Of late, his work has approached an equivalence of film aesthetic against which notions of video define a new, hybrid form of narrative province.

SKT 090 /CED: 2001 - 5:30 - 2003 - VIDEO 

SKT 090 /CED: 2001 - 5:30 - 2003 - Video
One of three video works produced on an obsolete video medium.
(The CED: Capacitance Electronic Disc player) It was the last technology in the tradition of Edison’s phonograph to read information from a disc with a stylus.This technology was in use for less than a decade and quickly replaced by Pioneer’s Laser Disc Technology.The video was recorded on an old slightly modified CED payer by RCA.What makes this particular model a unique performer is its highly individual and eccentric way of playing back the video.The machine, 17 Years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record but chops a scene into fragments less than a 1/4 sec long and re-assembles them by chance operation.Considering its historical context, there is some irony involved in this "accident" which is performed without human interaction. This collage machine mimes deconstructive editing techniques well-known in the video art from the Eighties.The fragile unpredictable nature of the machine reproducing the stored analogue information in such an illogical way produces a machine autonomy that questions the way real-time is adapted 
into film-time.CS
Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker from Germany, living and working in New York City since 1993.
His work is situated around architecture and urbanism, media archaeology as well as various social aspects of cinema. His films, videos and installation work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, retrospectives and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia.In 1999 he completed his first feature-length 35mm film project CIRCLE'S SHORT CIRCUIT which toured throughout the US and Europe and was selected for the American Century Part II exhibition at the Whitney Museum, NY. He is an active member of THE THING, a NY-based nexus for art and net culture.  Since 2005 he is the co-director along with Gabriela Monroy of video_dumbo a festival for contemporary video art in NYC, co-presented by the Dumbo Arts Center (dac).
VILM ALLEY: RETCON
OUTDOOR SCREENING: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH - 8-11PM (FREE)
GEORGE KUCHAR 
SECRETS OF THE SHADOW WORLD - 2:20:00 - 1999 - VIDEO(PART #1)
Secrets of the Shadow World - 1989-99, 135:00 - video
TEXT#1 - Kuchar writes: "With a new millennium almost upon us, images of space aliens invading the marketplace and sleeping habits of consumers worldwide, this miniseries abducts the viewers into the universe of John A. Keel (via a video time-warp supplied by me with Rockefeller Foundation funding). It's a leisurely expedition through a maze of kitchens and cerebral convolutions in search of the mysteries behind the mundane (or vice versa!). Mr. Keel, an author and stage magician, has made a profound impact on the pop-culture we swim in. His research and books on the UFO enigma have ignited an explosive wild-fire of imaginative invocations such as the X-FILES TV show and the Men in Black blockbuster movie. Yet you never hear about him and he never hears from the movie and television companies. In this video you see and hear him. You also see and hear a whole lot of other people and some animals. The whole show runs almost 2 hours and 20 minutes, but be sure to stay for part 3 as the UFO/Horror author, Whitley Streiber, teams up with my old star, Donna Kerness to reveal exclusive revelations on the 'visitor' experience. See this video... then read their books — and pray it's not true!"
TEXT#2 - This three-part mini-series explores the mysterious and the mundane in a splash of digital dioramas that wipe across the screen in a cascade of electronic barfs. Zeroing in on the paranormal theories of UFO author John A. Keel, this leisurely exposition, which was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, sweeps the viewer into a candy-colored world of scintillating mysteries made all the more intriguing by culinary digressions. Sit back and let the aromas of kitchen coziness clash with the stench of marauding monstrosities as the shadow world engulfs the many who probe its delectable appetizers. Here, in this kalaeidoscopic videotape, you will meet and marvel at the talking heads and chewing mouths that fill the soundtrack with the jingles of juju-land—jingles that sing of songs we, as a people of earth, have forgotten in our mad rush to fill the void with various vapors of vacuous virtue. Taste the treats of our ancestors and the hearty heritage of our heretics as we probe the black holes that litter the plane of cosmic luminescence above our heads. Feast upon the food of the Gods and regurgitate with scriptural elegance, the message that takes shape in the shimmering sludge.
Artist George Kuchar's remarkable oeuvre of over 200 films and videos holds a unique place in 20th century cinema. Theorist Gene Youngblood named him one of the great artists in the history of the moving image, and he is admired by many notable filmmakers including Todd Solondz, Gus Van Sant, David Lynch, and Brian De Palma. John Waters considers Kuchar and his brother Mike to be his biggest influence, "more than Kenneth Anger or The Wizard of Oz".
Kuchar's "Hold Me While I'm Naked", ranked one of 100 Best Films of the 20th Century by the Village Voice, continues to delight with its mixture of good-natured vulgarity and tawdry humor. His equally impressive graphic work reflects his involvement in the underground comic scene of the 1970's, where he rubbed shoulders with Art Spiegelman, Bill Griffith and Robert Crumb, publishing in the infamous underground comic "Arcade". 
George Kuchar's films and videos have been recognized through countless awards and grants, including The National Endowment for the Arts, The Eureka Fellowship Program, and a Ford Foundation Fellowship from United States Artists. He is the recipient of the prestigious Maya Deren Award for Independent Film and Video Artists from the American Film Institute, and the Los Angeles Film Critics Award for Independent/Experimental Film and Video. His most recent, major work, "Secrets of the Shadow World" received full funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. Kuchar's work has screened around the globe in cinemas, festivals, and major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

JEFF DEROSE
THE TYGER - 3:30 - 2010 - VIDEO
William Blake's poem (and spelling) juxtaposed with video I shot at the Robodock Technology & Arts Festival 2007 in Amsterdam, Netherlands. There are no actors in this video. You are seeing the events that I witnessed and captured that evening.Music by:Karen Langlie of Wisteriax.
I projected this video on the opposing wall in the room where I installed the companion piece, Threshold Limit. A inter-active sculpture consisting of 100 molotov cocktails, illuminated by LED’s and mounted to a 6 x 11 foot chain link fence.
 Jeff Derose creates video, sculpture and photography projects in Western Massachusetts and beyond. He recently screened video work at the Hosmer gallery in Northampton, Massachusetts, and created an installation called “Lot’s Wife” at the Taber Art gallery in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  

MONICA PANZARINO
MONICA PANZARINO SINGS THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER 
4:00 - 2011 - VIDEO
Monica Panzarino sings the Star-Spangled Banner with the help of the “Freqshift / Reverb Audio Bra”, a performance tool built by the artist. The bra uses hardware potentiometers (or knobs), an Arduino microcontroller, and a Max/MSP software patch to process the audio signal in real-time. The right “nipple” of the bra manipulates the frequency of the signal, and the left “nipple” adds reverb (MP).
Originally from New York City; currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Received a BFA in 2002 from the New York State College of Ceramics @ Alfred University, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. Work in video, sound and performance has exhibited both nationally and internationally. Recent venues include the 2011 Chicago Underground Film Festival, the European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück, Germany, video_dumbo in Brooklyn, New York, the 7th Busan International Video Festival in Busan, South Korea, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston, Massachusetts, the Cheekwood Botanical Garden & Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee, and K Space Contemporary in Corpus Christi,Texas.

MICHAEL O'MALLEY
PSYCHE - 1:00 - 2001 - VIDEO
Through strategies of play, pleasure and interaction, my work focuses on the shifting dimensions of the built environment, kinesthetic experience and social relations. I build sculptures and installations that frame the body in a particular way. In so doing viewers become implicated in the psychological contradictions of detachment and intimacy, power and futility, comfort and control. He is also a professor of art at Pomona College, and makes incredible wood, oven-fired pizza from scratch. He recently participated in MACHINE PROJECTS Open Field residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

CASPAR STRACKE
TORN - 6:00 - 2003 - VIDEO

TORN - 6:00 - 2003 - Video
One of three video works produced on an obsolete video medium.
(The CED: Capacitance Electronic Disc player) It was the last technology in the tradition of Edison’s phonograph to read information from a disc with a stylus.This technology was in use for less than a decade and quickly replaced by Pioneer’s Laser Disc Technology.The video was recorded on an old slightly modified CED payer by RCA.What makes this particular model a unique performer is its highly individual and eccentric way of playing back the video.The machine, 17 Years old, reads scratches on the disc not like crackles on an audio record but chops a scene into fragments less than a 1/4 sec long and re-assembles them by chance operation.Considering its historical context, there is some irony involved in this "accident" which is performed without human interaction. This collage machine mimes deconstructive editing techniques well-known in the video art from the Eighties.The fragile unpredictable nature of the machine reproducing the stored analogue information in such an illogical way produces a machine autonomy that questions the way real-time is adapted 
into film-time.CS
Caspar Stracke is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker from Germany, living and working in New York City since 1993.
His work is situated around architecture and urbanism, media archaeology as well as various social aspects of cinema. His films, videos and installation work has been shown in numerous exhibitions, retrospectives and festivals throughout North and South America, Europe and Asia. In 1999 he completed his first feature-length 35mm film project CIRCLE'S SHORT CIRCUIT which toured throughout the US and Europe and was selected for the American Century Part II exhibition at the Whitney Museum, NY. He is an active member of THE THING, a NY-based nexus for art and net culture.  Since 2005 he is the co-director along with Gabriela Monroy of video_dumbo a festival for contemporary video art in NYC, co-presented by the Dumbo Arts Center (dac).
MARIE LOSIER
PAPAL BROKEN DANCE - 6:00 - 2009 - FILM / VIDEO
Music video Papal Breakdance by PTV3-Genesis P-Orridge
With Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and many friends from Flux Factory!
A campy music video in the style of a scopitone from the early 1960s, with the wonderful cast of 10 boys in sexy red singlets and girls in red tutus, all dancing with joy with Genesis P-Orridge in a boxing ring…all the ingredients for a slap stick boxing match in music.
Marie Losier was born in France in 1972, and now lives in New York City where she is a filmmaker and curator. She has made a number of film portraits on avant-garde directors, musicians and composers such as Mike and George Kuchar, Guy Maddin, Richard Foreman, Tony Conrad and Genesis P-Orridge. Whimsical, poetic, dreamlike and unconventional, her films explore the life and work of these artists.
Her films and videos have screened at museums, galleries, biennials and festivals around the world. Her newest project and first feature film is a portrait of pioneering musician-artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (of Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV) and his partner Lady Jaye. She has also been exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art-MOMA, The Whitney Biennial, PS1, La Cinematheque Francaise, La Fondation Cartier, The Bozar Museum, The Tate Modern. She has also screened at many festivals and venues including the Berlinale, Rotterdam, Tribeca Film Festival, Lincoln Center, The Basel art Fair, The Copenhagen Film Festival, and the Harvard Film Archive. She has served on the jury at the Era New Horizons International Film Festival in Poland and the Buenos Aires Festival of International Cinema- BAFICI- where she was the subject of a full retrospective.
She had her first Solo Show- OUTTAKES at  Luxe Gallery NYC) in 2008, on outtakes from the feature film on Genesis P-Orridge.  She exhibited her video work, Papal Brokendance in a group show in France at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes-Popism V- an installation on musicals in contemporary video work, curated by Frank Lamy, head of the Mac Val Museum in Paris (November 2009 to January 2010).
She just opened her fist feature film on Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye, THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE at the FORUM at The Berlin Film Festival in February 2011, and won 2 awards the Caligari Award, and the Teddy Award. Since Berlin the film has been shown all over the world.



BROOM - VARIABLE DATE / TIME - VIDEO
Through strategies of play, pleasure and interaction, my work focuses on the shifting dimensions of the built environment, kinesthetic experience and social relations. I build sculptures and installations that frame the body in a particular way. In so doing viewers become implicated in the psychological contradictions of detachment and intimacy, power and futility, comfort and control. He is also a professor of art at Pomona College, and makes incredible wood, oven-fired pizza from scratch. He recently participated in MACHINE PROJECTS Open Field residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
MOBILE GEOGRAPHY 
PERFORMANCE SERIES#4 
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 8TH - 12-2PM   
MICHAEL O'MALLEY: SPRAYING MANTIS
Through strategies of play, pleasure and interaction, my work focuses on the shifting dimensions of the built environment, kinesthetic experience and social relations. I build sculptures and installations that frame the body in a particular way. In so doing viewers become implicated in the psychological contradictions of detachment and intimacy, power and futility, comfort and control. He is also a professor of art at Pomona College, and makes incredible wood, oven-fired pizza from scratch. He recently participated in MACHINE PROJECTS Open Field residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

VILM ALLEY: RETCON:MUSICON
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 14TH: PERFORMANCES: 6-10PM (FREE)
THE WARBLERS

The Warblers are an Amherst, Massachusetts based garage band that rekindle the joy of loud creative expression. 

The Warblers are: Migel--caterwauling and guitars, Suzanne LoManto-- laying down bass, Pete Baldrachi and Bruce Todd alternatively slamming drums, and Leo Hwang-Carlos on that wicked lead guitar.
The Warblers try to live by the motto:
"FUZZ, GOOD!  LOUD, GOOD! FAST, GOOD!"
A noted Massachusetts academician described the Warblers thusly, "The Warblers blend classic tones and influences filtered through the headphones of a post-punk cassette tape."
From THE MONTAGUE REPORTER, The Warblers have “found their perch on the main line between the Troggs and the Brain Drain-era Ramones.” 
And from the HARTFORD INDIE MUSIC EXAMINER, The “Warblers have their own signature sound--fuzzed out, garage-punk that’s a distillation of the Sonics, Sonic Youth and Sonic Boom.”

Hedges
Hedges is an experimental guitar duo featuring Adam Bosse and Matt Robidoux on guitars.
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