Harry Merry!!
October 18th, 2008as himself
Stevie Storm Video by Marianne van Maaren
There is so much to say about this amazing guy. But right now we are in the middle of a million things getting ready for tomorrow’s event and we are actually about to pick him up from the airport! So here, we just wanted to get this up tonight. More soon!!!! Google him! Come over tomorrow! Details below and on the ‘center‘ and ‘events‘ pages! Kiss Kiss!!!!!!! Here is what someone else said:
“Harry’s keyboard has been producing Bach, Beatles and some clever barrel organ sounds ever since Harry got his organ back from the factory. Where he had send it with the task to rearrange it so it could produce the sounds and structures he needed. Harry Merry’s hilarious apearance and total baroque musical style is often misunderstood in the popscene, mainly seen as a funny gimmick. He first got recognised in the Rotterdam artscene as a representant of typical dutch avantgarde music. Like Willem Breuker uses march music, Harry uses the street organ sound and sings with a strong dutch accent and puts these typical elements in a new perspective. Harry is a talented composer being ironic and absurd, singing in his own unique way about the Panorama paper, moody busdrivers and Hoydenish Ambrosial.”
Beautiful reviews here and here 
UNDER CONSTRUCTION!! MORE SOON! COME SEE HIM LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!
Sock
October 13th, 2008a somewhat-improvised one-man-all-vocal/electronic operetta/interactive puppet-show/fantastic voyage in which “A man wakes up to find one of his socks missing, follows its thread to an alternate dimension, and has to dupe its keeper into returning it…”
Live @ i^3, Leap Day 2008 - Edited by Ross Citrin
***The Lord will also be playing a set at our upcoming Radical Computer Music Event, sandwiched right in-between the Great Gaeoudjiparl and Harry Merry of Holland! Come see a completely different but no less unique set from Lord of the Yum-Yum, Chicago’s premiere avant-vocal entertainer:
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18TH
A Night With 3 Musical Visionaries…
7PM: “MORT AUX VACHES EKSTRA”, a netcast neo-electronic musical workshop by GOODIEPAL (Lodon Via Internet)
9:15-ISH: LORD OF THE YUM-YUM LIVE
10-ISH: HARRY MERRY LIVE (ON TOUR FROM ROTTERDAM)
DOORS: 6:30
$10 DONATION
ADDRESS AT BOTTOM OF PAGE (1 BLOCK FROM GRAND RED, 5 FROM CLARK+LAKE BLUE)
STREAMING LIVE HERE
Ok, so back to Lord of the Yum-Yum (a.k.a. Paul Velat). This guy is a complete original, once you have seen him live you could never forget him. There is no genre to describe his music. One could call him a ‘comedian’ or a ‘performance artist’, but no single term seems to do him justice. The Lord cites his influences as Johann Sebastian Bach, Lucille Ball, Rossini, the Minutemen, Andy Kaufmann, Andy Warhol, Jaap Blonk, Wesley Willis, Bob Newhart, and Devo (which all makes perfect sense, actually), and this diversity in personal interests combined with some serious talent (Paul holds a degree in Music from The Chicago College of Performing Arts and operates his own music school as a day job) makes his act a phenomenon that works equally well at an art space, gritty punk show, or elementary school. You have to see this shit to believe it:
A good 2007 article
Interstitial Festival Artists Report From the RNC
September 4th, 2008Our interstitial artists who were so committed to covering the DNC last week have now traveled to the RNC and seem to be getting even more excellent protest footage than before! Here’s a peak at what they’re up to now:
The latest from FluxRostrum:
“Interview with a Portland IndyMedia reporter who was snatched from the Poor People’s March Tuesday at the RNC in St. Paul mixed with footage from the incident and the march.”
This one features Vermin Supreme, the only anarchist presidential candidate:
“9/1 Protests at the RNC. The atmosphere in St. Paul is best described as a war zone. This video attempts to show some of why people are protesting. Reporters from the AP, NY Post, Indy Media Center, Pepper Spray Productions and 3 producers from Democracy Now have been arrested, including Amy Goodman.
This afternoon the bus was repeatedly harassed by St. Paul police. We were notified by our lawyers who were on the scene while we were attempting to cover the Poor People’s March. Eyewitnesses reported that they attempted to open the door both by hand and CROW BAR. They attempted to film inside the bus and claimed they were concerned about “liquids”. Our bus is legally parked in a paid lot with permission from the Parking lot. 2 private buses have been confiscated in St. Paul 1 bus carrying a marching band of activists have chosen to leave town. The police came by 3 times each time with more squad cars and equipment. At this time the bus, inhabitants and property are safe… and insecure. Much more about this later.”
And Franklin Lopez, we cannot even keep up with you, man!! Here are the latest episodes of “It’s the End of the World as We Know it, and I Feel Fine” (which I believe he is producing DAILY at this point):
Stay tuned to these and other independent media sites.
Interstitial Festival Artists Report from the DNC
August 26th, 20082 of the artists from our festival are currently camping out in Denver - shooting, editing and posting their videos on the web as the DNC unfolds. But in true interstitial spirit, they are focusing more on the in-between actions that are not in support of any particular candidate and will not be covered by the Broadcast:
From FluxRostrum (whom you will be hearing more about very soon):
BRINGING THE WAR HOME Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
IVAW Operation 1St Casualty DNC Tuesday 26th 2008
MIXED WITH
Anti Capitalist DNC Protestors being detained Monday night in Denver (above)
DNC FUNK THE WAR PROTEST Monday, August 25th, 2008
“Contingents from Code Pink, IVAW, the Green Party and Anarchists snake marched through downtown Denver without a permit. Anarchists took the streets and played cat and mouse with the cops all afternoon.”
Visit his site (a collective with other media-maker activists), Mobile Broadcast News to see more.
From The Stimluator (whom you heard about 2 posts ago):
DNC DISPATCH #3 Part One Wednesday, August 27, 2008
DNC DISPATCH #3 PART 2
POLICE ARREST AT DNC Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
“Police beat and arrested a protester during an Anti-Capitalist march on August 25th, approx. 8pm at the intersection of Tremont and 15th.”
Shot by Billy Nicholson
Also, be sure to check out DNC DISPATCH Parts 1 and 2 on his podcast, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It”
And if you like what you see, please check out the above websites in the next few days for more real-time coverage that you won’t see on TV.
If you’d to see the Broadcast version of what’s going down, of course you can see that here.
UPDATE: THESE GUYS ARE UPDATING THEIR VIDS CONSTANTLY, SO PLEASE VISIT THEIR SITES OFTEN TOMORROW (AND BEYOND)!
ALSO: THE EVENTS AND SPEECHES HAPPENING WITHIN THE DNC (MICHELLE OBAMA, THE CLINTONS, JOE BIDEN) ARE ALL PRETTY INCREDIBLE SO CHECK THOSE OUT IF YOU HAVEN”T ALREADY. THIS IS AN EXCITING ELECTION!
Blue Skies and Monsters
August 11th, 2008by Jad Fair
Jad Fair (originally of Half Japanese fame) is a truly interstitial character who has been creating purely from his gut ever since he and his brother David formed their seminal bedroom-punk band in 1975.
“the Fair brothers are self-taught and thoroughly unconventional musicians; their early raw, unvarnished sound careened between naïvely amateurish-sounding noodling, primitivism and avant-garde experimentation. Jad is best-known for playing an untuned electric guitar in a free style. After thirty years, he still does not play in any traditional manner; in the documentary “Half Japanese: The Band That Would Be King” he states that ‘the only chord I know is the one that connects the guitar to the amp.’ -Wikipedia
(BTW this documentary is pretty inspiring and definitely worth watching: see clip. Oh and here is a good one to illustrate Jad’s unique performance sprit. ‘But doesn’t he look and sound like a million other geeky indie rock dudes?’ The answer is yes: his style has been copied time and time again, but he has always been an original.)
These days Jad hasn’t lost one ounce of his optimism or sense of adventure; his music is more experimental than ever and he’s become a prolific visual artist. In fact, the piece we showed in our festival was a book of Jad’s current drawings and paper cut-outs, along with a looping DVD featuring nearly a hundred slideshows of this work (accompanied by his musical experiments with Lumberob, mixed in 5.1 surround.), live footage and unexplained extras.
Cutouts:
And before you say ‘a 5-year-old could have made these!’, watch this next one and imagine creating this stuff out of a blank sheet of paper and a pair of scissors):
Drawings:
Check out the music!
What I like to call the Richie Rich/Pepsi Series:
A short film entitled Umbrella by Pascal Le Gras (music by Jad & Lumberob)
Visit Jad’s website (or perhaps his 40 Myspace Pages), buy Blue Skies and Monsters and maybe even drop him a line! (he promises read all of his mail.)
“Jad Fair is the real deal. In a world of crumbling artistic values his artistic vision remains consistently honest, authentic and original. ” - John Zorn
Letter to the Future President #147
July 29th, 2008Franklin Lopez aka The Stimulator produces a pretty great activist podcast entitled “It’s the End of the World as We Know it”. We screened two of his (at the time) current shows at the festival, in addition to his touching, CrimethInc. inspired “Why I Love Shopping From Big Corporations”. But today we are more interested in this:
posted 7/26/08
“I was going to do a totally different remix, but when I was combing through McCain and Obama speeches, they both reminded me of something I have heard before. So I went back to Bush’s 2007 State of the Union and BAM! See for yourself. I have yet to hear McCain or Obama talk about public transport, consuming less, bicycles etc. etc. Who you gonna vote for now America?”
Hmmmm…
Franklin’s chosen medium - the short, viral, socially charged interstitial (n.) is, according to Gene Youngblood, the most powerful tool of our time.
Bio (taken from SXSW):
Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Lopez has been media jamming since he started subMedia in 1994. His CrimethInc inspired films have been screened worldwide and translated into several languages. His post-Katrina music video ‘George Bush Don’t Like Black People’ has been downloaded over one million times and counting. Lopez’s work has been featured and/or written about in The New York Times, Wired, Contour, BET, Current TV, Free Speech TV, the Georgia Straight and Creative Loafing to name a few. More recently he worked as TV producer for Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” In the works is a VLOG called “It’s the End of the World as We Know it and I Feel Fine” and issue #2 of subMedia’s Zine “Molotov!” You can view Lopez’s work on his web site subMedia.TV.
The Institute of Utopics
July 17th, 2008by Geoffrey Pugen *
Transform Your Nature
“Both science and popular culture are intricately woven of fact and fiction….Primates are a way into thinking about the world as a whole.” -Donna Haraway
The digital age has given humans the ability to extend and modify their identity via cyberspace. In response to this new cultural climate, people are returning to metaphors of the ‘animal’ and the ‘natural’ to investigate the character of our post-millennial environment. Theorists like Haraway have examined how we project our desires onto animals: as noble ideals, as sentimental fantasies, as repositories of evil, as the sublime or the abyss. Utopics is a media project that attempts to contribute to this complex terrain, a satirical yet deeply serious work that explores the myriad dysfunctional ways that humans attempt to ‘master’ our fellow animals and nature as a whole.
THE INSTITUTE OF UTOPICS is an experimental art project masquerading as a self-help lifestyle program and cult. It is presented as a multi-channel video installation or a feature length documentary depicting a mythological self-transformation program and community. The documentary follows various participants from around the world as they journey to Canada to partake in the Utopics program. Each of the users is struggling to find his or her identity and has become obsessed with Scott Martin, his teachings and his promise of personal change.
Utopics is an international metamorphosis program that promises to help individuals find true love and ultimate freedom by discovering their inner animal. Based out of Canada as an online fictional technological, spiritual and scientific institute , the program is free to use and distributes information about their program and all users. Their office and “Metamorphosis Retreat” Zenith is located in Northern Ontario, Canada. New participants register online to create their animal avatar and become users of the program. In order to fully complete the program, users must travel to Canada and participate in the retreat and its ceremonies.
The Utopics program embodies three phases:
1. Aerobia! 7 Steps to True Love:
2. The Key of Dreams
3. The Art of Remazing
The users practice the program as it relates to the animal they selected when they registered. As they continue to progress through the program they slowly lose their human identity, and morph into their online animal avatars. True believers will be given the ultimate reward: they will transcend their humanly existence and transform into their animal to return to nature and be free.
As a new media installation The Institute of Utopics converts a gallery space into a 6 channel video installation and interactive website display where viewers can sign up and join Utopics ( http://www.utopics.ca ). Each video is projected in a separate room or area in the gallery. The first video presents the fictional infomercial about becoming an animal. The next two videos document users progressing through the program and traveling from their cities around the world to Zenith, the Utopics annual retreat in Canada. The next two videos document the same users at the Zenith retreat exploring nature and their inner animal. The final video visualizes the final Utopics ceremony and dance at the retreat.
Online Component
By emulating popular social networking websites through gaming and blogging trends, the online component presents a futuristic society where people become obsessed with their virtual selves and the potential to live out their deepest desires through their animal avatars. Seduced by the Utopics website , users are recognized only as jpegs and usernames, and share the same collective will to create an online persona and find their inner animal. Reality and fiction are blended into an indistinguishable mix, and the whole process—from the structure of the program to the longing of its participants—is offered up for public display.
Viewers can browse the contents of the Utopics website by viewing various forms of semi-satirical hypermedia: infomercials demonstrating phases of the program, personal blogs detailing metamorphosis struggles, audio clips of nature, and video dream journals. Viewers are able to become part of the Utopics narrative by becoming a user and actualizing their transformation online. Once a user voluntarily enrolls into the program they begin a digital journey by documenting their ‘inner-life’ experiences and interpretations of the ‘natural’. By contributing to and performing in the program, Utopics participants actively change and sculpt the project’s overall story. Meanwhile, the Utopics website collects their information in a database and outputs visualizations of a virtual natural world: a new nature.
In a world of reality television, online gaming and virtual communities, people strive for anonymity and fame simultaneously. We have reached a point of anxiety about and disinterest in the ‘real’. People have turned inward for solace, or perhaps as a means of shielding themselves from the harsher realities of contemporary life. Yoga, spiritualism, religion and various other forms of self-renewal and individualism have frequently come to replace activism and engagement. Feelings of powerlessness prevail and we are left to various forms of entertainment, infotainment and other forms of diversion. Utopics examines these social dilemmas by creating commentary and combining organic systems with notions of change and social consciousness. The work moves between the binary of the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’, challenging how we experience everything from media and documentary forms, to email and gaming. Negotiating the space between these poles influences the decisions we make, our political choices and our daily practices.
*This post consists entirely of the words and media of the artist himself. We could not help but publish his entire explanation of the project as it is such a strong example of hypermedia and the interstitial approach that we are promoting. Visit Geoffrey’s website , check out his other work and sign up for Utopics to get the full impression of how deep this project goes!
The Vegetable Orchestra of Vienna
July 10th, 2008The one-of-kind Vienna Vegetable Orchestra is made up of 11 musicians who create all of their sounds from handmade vegetable instruments , ranging from leek violins to cucumberphones. They describe their compositions as ‘vegetable style’ - influenced by experimental contemporary, electronic music, musique concrete, noise, improvised music, and popmusic. New instruments are created for each concert and the leftover pieces are made into a soup which is served to the audience after the performance. The instruments themselves are given away to audience members or composted. This video, entitled "Presentation" illustrates the orchestra’s process of shopping for produce, experimenting with veggie sounds and building their instruments. It also includes clips from 3 live concerts:
The idea behind their latest album, Automate , was to create music that sounds electronic, but is played on only vegetable instruments. (great review here !) The orchestra is extremely inventive in more than just their approach to music and instrument design. Very special procedures must be implemented to amplify/record a sound as tiny as an onion peel or the squeak of a bell pepper, so the group is constantly experimenting with and pushing the boundaries of accoustic technologies.
One sound engineer and one video artist are also full-time members of this 13-person ensemble.
"In artistic, aesthetic and infrastructural decisions of importance all members of the orchestra have their equal vote. The ensemble is a mix of people with different artistic backgrounds - musicians, visual artists, architects, designers, media artists, writers and sound poets all come together here.
The further exploration and refinement of performable vegetable music is a central part of the orchestra’s aesthetic quest. Every individual background that is brought into the project is of vital importance in sustaining the fundamental artistic objective of the Vegetable Orchestra.The broad variety of creative approaches at the same time secures the artistic autonomy of this unique ensemble." -vegetableorchestra.org
The day we screened the video, a local performance artist spent the afternoon in our kitchen preparing a fresh soup as a live installation amidst the other pieces on display. We served it to the audience right before the screening as a nod to the orchestra’s performance ritual. Sarah had suggested that the cooks wear giant vegetable costumes while preparing/serving the soup, but the Vegetable Orchestra’s Ernst responded with an alarmed "No!". The orchestra is quite serious about what they do and always avoid performing in a comedy/novelty context. (Sorry, Vegetable Orchestra! I just love costumes! -sarah )
Gimme the Mermaid
July 7th, 2008
Tim Maloney
This video was secretly made after-hours at Walt Disney Television Animation , where Tim Maloney (aka Naked Rabbit) was working at the time. The track is from the Negativland’s CD and Book project, Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2 , and is an actual audio document of their infamous and oft-referenced copyright battle with Island Records. (If not familiar, read more here .)
"Mixing original materials and original music with things taken from corporately owned mass culture and the world around them, Negativland re-arranges these found bits and pieces to make them say and suggest things that they never intended to. In doing this kind of cultural archaeology and "culture jamming" (a term they coined way back in 1984), Negativland have been sued twice for copyright infringement.
Over the years Negativland’s "illegal" collage and appropriation based audio and visual works have touched on many things - pranks, media hoaxes, advertising, media literacy, the evolving art of collage, the bizarre banality of suburban existence, creative anti-corporate activism in a media saturated multi-national world, file sharing, intellectual property issues, wacky surrealism, evolving notions of art and ownership and law in a digital age, and artistic and humorous observations of mass media and mass culture." - negativland.com
i^3 festival blog
July 6th, 2008
The above posts are dedicated to the art and artists included in the first quadrennial (international | independent | interstitial) festival. These works were carefully chosen for their interstitial qualities and we hope they will foster many discussions on the state of art and the world around us. All comments are appreciated. To learn more about the festival and see our interstitial manifesto (in progress), simply explore the hyperlinks below!
Interstitial Love<3,
Category Terrorist