Bas Jan Ader
Several weeks ago, during a Sunday at MOMA, my legs started to hurt – a (probably) psycho-somatic condition I have gotten every time I’ve been to a museum since childhood. I was seeing the “In & Out of Amsterdam” exhibition and in an effort to sit and chill for a few minutes, I wandered into a dark little room…a black box with a silent film running…. a five-minute piece, on a loop, of venetian blinds opening and closing. The room was empty so I sat alone in the dark and meditated on the repetition and the play between the black of the room and the light of the film.
As I sat there, my thoughts began to play, as they do when allowed, and I pretended I was in my own place, my own little theater where people could come and sit in a dark room, maybe on the floor like I was, and watch other people’s five-minute films. The art stars in NYC have a tradition of treating the open mic as holy, as a place where risks can be taken… in other words, a place where art happens.
Where do filmmakers or, more specifically, emergent artists who are just beginning to play with the tools and technologies of visual performance…. where do they have to go that is the equivalent of the open mic? I think the 60′s had more ‘art-holes’ for film than we do now, that was also a time when artists were starting to play with new toys – movie camera prices dropped exponentially after WWII – and a new kind of creativity exploded. Today, most digital experiments are presented on virtual destinations like YouTube and Flickr, and the ritual of public performance is slowly disappearing. I thought, “wow, maybe this place, this little black box in my head, is a space where we can do both: where we can bring our art out into the world, and present it in front of living people, without the fear of failure.” This was how it started.
[incidentally, the venetian blind film was a piece called Louverdrape by Bas Jan Ader, the Dutch artist who was lost at sea in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic on a 13-foot boat. The name of my first theater company was Ikaros. I'll let you do the research and/or the math, and connect your own metaphysical dots.]
A week later, my I had my good friends Bruce, Emilie, Amy and Mike over to dinner at my place in Bushwick. Somewhere between tofu loaf and rounds of red wine I told them this story, and threw out the idea that “hey, wouldn’t it be cool if there were a store-front, an art hole open mic for film, the way there is for performance. Where artists who are out there making this stuff, maybe only because they’re artists and want to make it (gasp), can come and have a beer and throw their 10 minutes of weirdness up on the wall for a crowd of people who are there because they love it too?” We all agreed that would be just rad. I’d had the phrase “lo-fi” in my head all week – Stacey from the Music & Talent dept at work had used it to refer to Flip cam video during our Monday meeting. And “lounge,” well, that’s the most comforting word in the English language… plus I love alliteration. “lo-fi lounge” just made sense and was just rad with everyone else as well. There was our name.
Then it was all about what can we do now? One of the distinctions of digital art paired with network technology is the potential for artistic collaboration on a scale that has never existed before. Artists all over the world are borrowing remix and mashup techniques from the music world and applying them to visual art. Remixing has a long and honored tradition in the art world, i.e. borrowing an idea, image, sound, color… from one thing and using it’s intrinsic qualities PLUS its semiotic meaning and using it as an element in a totally new work. This is, to some degree, how all things are created. Today, however, copyright laws have been modified in favor of protecting corporate interests and whereas at the turn of the 20th century a copyright term lasted 28 years, today it can last up to 120. This – along with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1996 – has tightened restriction on the appropriation of works to the point where nothing is free to be borrowed, built upon, parodied, or pondered. There is still a concept of “fair use,” but the threat of corporate litigation is, in effect, using the market to censor, just as the DMCA is requiring technology itself to censor.
So for our first event, we settled on the “Re/Mixed Media Festival“, and are aiming for Spring, 2010. The concept is simple, it’s a festival of short (under 10 minute) works by emerging artists who are using the mashup/remix technique to make their films. It’s a way of putting ourselves out into the neighborhood, to get to know other artists (both local and non-local), and to make a clear statement about our views that creativity and innovation need to be acknowledged when laws are written, that copyright law is in serious need of reform, and that art wants to be free to play.
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