Machines That Feel 7.29.06 at CAID

[burnlab]

DethLab presents

Machines That Feel

(in association with the LINK Festival)

Machines That Feel is a one evening multimedia exploration of the relationships between humanity and technology, curated by Bethany Shorb and Michael Doyle. Machines That Feel proposes that nothing is more purely human than what we create with our own hands and imagination - that technology need not be seen as cold and synthetic, but is in fact our most sophisticated means of expression.

featuring:

• Detroit debut screening of RELINE2, a collection of short films by leading-edge video artists.

• Film featuring robotic instruments created by Cranbrook Designer-in-Residence and performance artist Elliott Earls.

• Live performance by 800 Beloved.

• Live performance by Spectral Mornings.

• DJ set by DethLab with video by C-TRL labs.

the evening of Saturday, July 29th, 2006

midnight - 4am

The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID)

5141 Rosa Parks Blvd.

Detroit MI 48208

313.899.2243

http://www.thecaid.org

$5 evening membership fee

schedule (tentative):

12am: RELINE2

1am: Spectral Mornings

1:45am: Elliott Earls

2:00am: 800 Beloved

2:45am: Dethlab/C-TRL

Artist bios and information:

RELINE2 [Detroit debut screening]

image from "Drawdown" by Perry/Steiner

http://www.phoenixperry.com/grad/reline

http://www.reline.net

The goal of the RELINE series is to compile an array of work showcasing artists engaged in the creation of new visual forms deriving from experimental techniques and the re-orientation of high-end production processes. Part video archive, part work of art itself, RELINE serves the dual goal of contextualizing and developing an emerging media form. This compilation aspires to establish a solid ground from which to create and distribute video in a world with an increasing desire to have a dialog with its screen and explore the possibilities beyond the constraints of broadcast content.

RELINE2 artists investigate modern mythology, examine environments, explode form, and play with similes between machine and body. From buildings ripping apart by unseen forces to characters on strange journeys in wild imagined spaces, these videos explore the integration of technology into every strata of our lives. Through the use of custom software, unique processing methods, and envelope-pushing applications of traditional production tools, these pieces push technical limits and very bounds of style and imagination. This second collection is marked by a stronger conceptual focus, with technology playing an enabling role instead of being the primary agenda. Works in this collection offer an insight into the current world and it's potential future as imagined through graphic re-interpretations, biotechnology, architecture, and the environment.

The first RELINE DVD has been a worldwide success, providing exposure for the represented video artists and experimental video art as a medium. Screenings include: Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), the Guggenheim Bilbao (Spain), The Lincoln Center (NYC), Austin Museum of Digital Art, Santa Fe Art Institute and galleries and festivals through out the US and Europe. This will be the first Detroit screening of RELINE2, which will be released on DVD in September 2006.

Reline creators Scott Pagano and Phoenix Perry began with a vision to create a lasting record of the emergence of technology based art in 2001. Their collective vision fuels this project and its future development.

Elliott Earls [robotic instruments / video]

photo by David Wasklewicz

http://www.theapolloprogram.com

http://www.cranbrookart.edu/2d/earls.htm

Elliott Earls was appointed Designer-in-Residence and Head of the 2-D Design Department in 2001. Upon graduation from Cranbrook in 1993, Earls's experimentation with nonlinear digital video, spoken word poetry, music composition and design led him to form The Apollo Program. The Apollo Program's commercial clients include Elektra Entertainment, Nonesuch Records, Little Brown & Co., Scribner Publishing Co., Elemond Casabella (Italy), The Cartoon Network (U.K.), Polygram Classics and Jazz, The Voyager Company and Janus Films. His commercial work includes two recent television commercials for The Cartoon Network in the United Kingdom as well as an interactive documentary on the work of Frank Gehry for Casabella in Italy. As a typographer, his original type design is distributed worldwide by Emigre Inc. Earls's posters entitled " The Conversion of Saint Paul," "Throwing Apples at the Sun," "The Temptation of Saint Wolfgang," and "She a Capulet" are part of the permanent collection of The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution. Earls's latest enhanced CD/poster package was recently added to the Cooper-Hewitt's research file.

As a performance artist, Earls was awarded an Emerging Artist grant by Manhattan's prestigious Wooster Group. He was a featured performer at the Wooster Group's Performing Garage from July 5-12, 1999. Elliott has performed at the Cr+tiel Theater Festival, France; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Oak Street Theater in Portland, Maine; at Experimenta 99, Lisbon, Portugal; Opera Totale in Mestre/Venice; and Living Surfaces in Park City, Utah. Elliott also performed for six months at HERE in Soho, New York City. In addition, he was a featured performer during the 1999 and 2000 Culture Mart Festivals in Soho. On May 16, 1999, "Eye Sling Shot Lions" premiered at the 1997 New York Video Festival at Lincoln Center. "Eye Sling Shot Lions" was also shown at Plazzo Della Triennale di /Milano during Tratto di Continnuo; at Nightwave in Rimini, Italy, during the "Remaking History" symposium at The American Center for Design, at Fabrica, Traviso, Italy; and most recently at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles, California. Earls's first release "Throwing Apples at the Sun" has been reviewed in Emigre, ID Magazine, Urb, Heckler, Creative Review, Creativity, and Eye magazines. It was featured in May 1996 in Venice, Italy, during Digital Zuppe. It also won numerous awards and was included in ID Magazine's 1996 Annual Design Review, the 1996 American Center for Design 100 Show, and the 1996 New York Art Director's Club Show. Earls's work has been featured in the books The Graphic Edge, Cool Type, Faces on the Edge, Type in the Digital Age, One and Two Color Graphics, and Cutting Edge Typography. Earls's essay, "WD40: A Tool Kit in a Can; Or, The Importance of David Holzman's Diary" appeared in Emigre No. 35, and his essay entitled "Bone Fragments and Bits of Teeth" was published in the American Center for Design's Statements.

Earls spent September 2000 - May 2001 as a designer-in-residence at Fabrica, Benetton's studio/research center in Traviso, Italy. He has taught typography, design and multimedia at the State University of New York at Purchase. His serial examination of "spiritual gangsters" has been published by Emigre. Earls has also spent time as a visiting artist at numerous American universities, and he has given workshops on design, culture and new media in Europe and America.

800 Beloved [live performance]

photo by Bethany Shorb

http://www.purevolume.com/800beloved

http://www.myspace.com/800beloved

800 beloved is a recording and performing moniker taken from an (800) telephone number. Creatively directed by singer/songwriter/producer Sean Lynch, the 800 in the project's name represents the use of standard commercial pop sensibilities, while "beloved" alludes to Lynch's often gloomy narratives. Characteristically, his production mixes subliminal distortions and traditional new wave and shoegaze elements with hooks some have hailed as cute and clever as pop songsmiths, the Gos Gos. Lynch began work on the LP in September of 05, tracking the songs in the ambiance of a funeral parlor, and is expected to release it by September/October 06. The current performing incarnation of 800 beloved is comprised of Aceveado (drums), Kosiba (programming), and Nuernberg (bass) who join Lynch (baritone/vocals) for this summers showings.

Spectral Mornings [live performance]

photo by Sean Patrick

http://www.spectralmornings.com

http://www.myspace.com/spectral

Spectral Mornings, an electronic duo consisting of Trevor Edmonds and Dan Streeting, was formed in 2003. Both members approached the creation of music from different directions before working together as Spectral Mornings, and the band's musical output today represents the combination of these two styles and backgrounds as a whole that is, in many ways, more than each of its parts.

The duo's music has evolved constantly since that starting point in 2003. Spectral Mornings' first songs were short, simple techno songs, often including the guitar that Trevor began his musical career playing. Over the next year and a half, however, the band's songwriting skills and performance abilities began to mature, resulting in some of the band's best, most current work. The band now focuses on epic, ever-changing songs, many pushing the ten-minute mark. This reflects the duo's more recent interests in post-punk, ambient music, and post-rock, all built on an electronic foundation of techno and house music. Trevor and Dan are constantly experimenting with new methods of creating sounds, dabbling in circuit-bending, various pieces of software, recorded environmental sounds, and acoustic instruments, as well as their core instruments of laptops and synthesizers. The band's goal is to create highly emotional sounds by subconsciously affecting its listeners on a gut-level, instinctual basis. Having reached this state with a few pieces, Spectral Mornings feel they are just now getting their feet wet.

C-TRL labs

image from "Musee Hofstadt" by Simunovich/OffenBac

http://www.c-trl.com

New York City based C-TRL labs is the commercial studio, laboratory and playground of artists Nika OffenBac and Devan Simunovich.

Nika OffenBac's work has spanned machine art, video performance, installation and experimental film. Initially trained as a metalsmith, she holds a BA in Interactive Design from The California College of Art, with emphasis on visual logic systems for robotics and sensor driven environments. An active member of the San Francisco underground, she has VJ'd and orchestrated elaborate club environments under the auspices of D7. She has worked on documentaries internationally, and with established artist such as composer Pamela Z, emmy winning director Carlos Bolado, and the research group Sponge, as well as performing with artists like Ellen Alien and Ritchie Hawtin. Currently based in New York, she continues to amass professional experience in the film and broadcast world in addition to co-founding C-TRL labs.

Devan Simunovich is a New York based visual artist with roots in the San Francisco lo-tech community, contributing to early Blasthaus, B.O.L.T. and Omnimedia events with lo bit visuals and vintage machine installations. Devan has built a visual vocabulary spanning web and interactive design, broadcast animation and experimental video. He has shown works at festivals internationally, As a VJ he has performed extensively and held residencies in the SF and NYC. He has VJ'd for Dj Krush, Ritchie Hawtin, Theivery Corporation, Kruder & Dorfmeister and The Crystal Method among others.

DethLab [curators / DJs]

photo by Bethany Shorb

http://www.dethlab.net

http://www.myspace.com/dethlab

The hyper-productive duo with a history for being two steps too far ahead for their own good, Bethany Shorb and Michael Doyle seek to define "the new black" with their Dethlab project, connecting the dots between trends in music, fashion, design and culture: mashing Ballardian reality with a romance for the glory days of postpunk and the cyberpunk future promised by Blade Runner. Like a modern day McLaren and Westwood, Doyle and Shorb are obsessive consumers, creators and curators of all things dark, innovative and beautiful... often with tongue firmly in cheek. Dethlab have brought artists such Vitalic, Solvent and Kill Memory Crash to their residency at OSLO, have performed with the likes of T. Raumschmiere, Chemlab and Ectomorph, have facilitated antics such as tea parties and period costumed croquet socials in abandoned factories, and have used nearly as much fake blood as GWAR since the project's inception one year ago.

Holding an MFA from Cranbrook, New York area native Bethany Shorb has dabbled and excelled in disciplines ranging from sculpture, to fashion and graphic design, to photography, to multimedia and music. She has performed around the country as Toybreaker and a member of seminal noise band God and His Bitches. As founder of Cyberoptix, she has designed a vast catalog of innovative couture, including the costumes for Skinny Puppy's 2004 world tour. Her work has been featured in magazines such as FiberArts, Make and Industrial Nation.

After living in New York during the rise and fall of both the dot-com bubble and electroclash, designer, lecturer, curator and blogger, Michael Doyle moved to Detroit and promptly co-founded the Dorkwave collective. Doyle coined the name and concise manifesto, "music for freaks", after one impropmtu night DJ'ing with Rob Theakston at the legendary UNTITLED parties. Doyle has served on the CAID board of directors, and is currently a senior designer with Royal Oak-based experience design firm o2 Creative Solutions. His design work can be seen everywhere from auto show exhibits and museums to record covers, and his group blog Burnlab.net has been a favorite bookmark among taste makers for more than six years.

As DJs, Dethlab's "Deth, FX and 666" treatments have turned the tamest of electro and microhouse records into thundering gnarz anthems, and their extensive collections of French electropunk and Belgian EBM records have both inspired and frightened audiences from Noir Leather fetish balls to the 2006 Movement Festival. The duo describes their sound as "the devil's disco", and lists a combined "ten years of art school" as their primary influence.

[burnlab]

Read the Metro Times feature: clicky

Also: FREE BEER! (for real.)

800 Beloved, Dethlab, videos about cybernetic parasites, pneumatic drum machines, and free beer.. all for five bucks.