So, you might know Teengirl Fantasy from their much-lauded debut LP 7AM (2010) — or at least their masterfully trip-a-delic instant club hit, “Cheaters”. But if you don’t know Teengirl Fantasy, don’t fret, because once the newly reformed classic 1990s techno label R&S Records releases the new Teengirl Fantasy 12″ and LP this Spring, everyone in the universe will know who they are.

Nick Weiss and Logan Takahashi met while studying at Oberlin College. They became fast friends over a shared love of classic house and techno records. Together they began creating new styles of dance music, instead of just lazily ripping-off what had already been done before. Teengirl Fantasy is not simply just house music or dance music. Weiss and Takahashi blend together certain qualities of house music with aspects of trance and electronica, creating an almost experimental free-form concoction. Of course when you read experimental and free-form, I know that instantly registers as undanceable; but Teengirl Fantasy’s tracks possess an inherent sense of rhythm that throbs and pulses as steadily as quickened heartbeats. And not that we condone the use of psychedelic drugs, but we will say that Teengirl Fantasy is a blissed-out head-trip in every key. I suspect Weiss and Takahashi’s live set is going to blow more brains than David Cronenberg’s Scanners, so get ready to freak the hell out.

It is an undeniable fact that the legendary Learning Secrets veteran Jacques Renault knows how to blow minds too. A Washington, D.C. native, Renault moved to Chicago in 1997 to continue his studies of viola — but he got an education in dance music instead. Fully immersed in the Drum ‘n’ Bass scene, he held a residency at Smart Bar and became a buyer at the legendary Gramaphone Records. In 2002, Renault relocated to New York City, where he held residencies at Happy Endings, APT, Tribeca Grand and 205 Club. Along with his Runaway collaborator Marcos Cabral, Renault launched the labels On The Prowl and OTP Party Breaks; and with friend Nik Mercer, Renault began producing his own series of dance parties called Let’s Play House, a moving party that uses Brooklyn warehouses, Manhattan ballrooms, hotel lounges, and everything in between for its regular events.

Mark Caro, Chicago Tribune, writes, “Founded at Navy Pier in 1980 as the Chicago International Art Exposition and passing through other incarnations before being redubbed Next Art Chicago last year to mark its official merger with the younger Next exhibition, the fair had been facing increased competition from other national and international fairs while struggling to maintain a lineup of high-end dealers. It was scheduled to run April 27-29.”

Caro also mentions the fair’s prestigious, 3-decades long history as one of the preeminent, international art exhibitions, which makes it all the more unfathomable that it should no longer exist, of course!

Could this suggest that the art market in Chicago is downsizing? According to Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc.—absolutely.

Caro reports that, “After a thorough analysis of the art fair landscape, Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. (MMPI) has determined not to move forward with the production of the 2012 edition of Next Art Chicago and that Chicago will not remain a primary focus of its art fair business activities,’ Next Art Chicago executive director Staci Boris and director Ken Tyburski wrote in an email to vendors Wednesday.” Caro’s article in the Chicago Tribune continues with MMPI stating that popularity amongst art fairs, and thereby success, has, “gravitated towards the coasts.”

The new Texas Contemporary fair in Houston, near the Gulf Coast comes to mind. Along with, of course, veteran art fairs like Art Basel and Los Angeles Art Shows. Also, new fairs are cropping up in Los Angeles—like this year’s Affordable Art Fair.

Artchicago.com and nextartchicago.com sites still indicate that MMPI is involved and seem to suggest that the fairs are happening—this, in the midst of breaking news that they are certainly cancelled for the inevitable future.

Buzz Lightyear, Meet Moore

“Well, it happened. The great digital media convergence. All media types are one single media type called bits.”

This is Alvy Ray Smith talking, and the great digital media convergence is the outcome, he says, of Moore’s law which deals with transistor density. Or, In English: “Anything good about computers gets better by an order of magnitude every five years.” We humans can only see one order of magnitude (or one factor of 10) ahead of ourselves. (Interezzzting.) Knock me over when Smith – whose resume at Pixar includes him also as the guy who hired John Lassiter – clicks to a shot of the Organ Mountains in Las Cruces, New Mexico. I know that rickrack pink range. Smith grew up there. He consumed “A Brief History of Digital Light,” Dr. Alan Turing in 1948; A-bombs’ white glare going off to Smith’s left; Werner Von Braun’s rockets to the right. It’s a sickle shape chart he uses to demonstrate this Moore’s law business: “We’re approaching the 10billionx right now,” Smith says.

Mixed-Reality Gaming: Hack Their Balls

Cat, with Sphero, or Sphero, with cat

Paul Berberian’s got an entrepreneur’s long tail, if you read the bio. He is an Air Force Academy distinguished alum and he likes helicopters and joysticks. A lot. Gosphero.com, is home page of Sphero, a robotic ball, which Wired and CNET first encountered at CES 2011. You control Sphero the robotic ball with your smartphone, aka your supercomputer. Yes, sure, the ball’s had its picture taken with cats who do not, this is not reality, have opposable thumbs. (Not yet.) The deal in mixed-reality gaming, says Berberian, is that where innovation happens is also where it becomes very difficult to break through. What’s in games already? Simply: Barbie the doll at the reality continuum’s far left, grounded in the same gravity we nonplastic mortals live in. The other side, Angry Birds and Farmville. But en route to making robotic balls learn to play pool with your cat, what the robot has in common with your tipsy college friend, is it doesn’t know where the floor is. The “marker” that is where it has to find a real object in physical space, is hard for a robot. Super hard. Even so, notes Berberian, the future is already visible on the retail floor at a Best Buy or Target. They want to sell you something new: Not only apps, but accessories for your apps. Your smartphone controls them. As to that “million developer hack” needed to get to blended reality faster, Berberian offers before playing with balls in the aisle, “As of last night somebody hacked a Mac version (of Sphero)… “we’re ecstatic.. we want our balls to be hacked.” $129 retail. Here’s what Wired said.

 Earth Empathy

Earthvisionz Water-hackathon in Bangalore

Carla Johnson, founder and CEO of Earthvisionz, wears long hair, leggings and yes, excellent boots. Unlike many (most, 90%+, as she observes later on, regarding the developer community in general) of the male-delivered presentations today, her company’s story starts off – her telling of it starts off –  in the personal, as she comes home from work one evening and finds her smart high school daughter and her smart kid’s friends in the living room wondering, where’s Haiti and why did it just have that gynormous earthquake? Earthvisionz, picks up “where Google Earth left off.” Using some of the Google Earth software, namely the Sketch Up API “to build cities,” then they write a huge amount of code into something called “the world engine platform.” Go there and you’ll find “verticals” (this is a jargony sphere, face it) where a city’s assets from health-care to recycling to dog parks can be aggregated, or are being aggregated, and can be personalized to you in this crowd-sourced future that is now. “The world has become extremely exposed,” goes without saying, and needs saying. We’re being surveilled, we’re doing the surveilling. (In the media today: FreshAir’sshow on companies spying on us. ) To use the geological example of Haiti that was the teachable moment for Johnson’s daughter, the earthquake that hit Port au Prince could be visualized, and scaled, in Johnson’s living room, not as a flat-island topography, but as a mountainous fault zone. Says Johnson,  ”the next day we flew down there.”  It took me 20 seconds or more to realize that she didn’t mean, like Sean Penn; rather, virtually.

Winning the Conversation

I no sooner get home from Boulder than I’m watching the News/Hour and what is the word I hear roll off Rick Santorum’s lips but “doubt”? A frisson goes through me, remembering, suddenly, viscerally, Rob Schuham’s presentation last Friday afternoon. Schuham is a Boulder guy who co-founded, with Alex Bogusky, a company called FearLess Revolution. One of the clients has been Al Gore and something called Climate Reality Project. Had you heard of this before? I had not. And neither had Leanne, although last week I did join 350.org. Schuham after poking light fun at Harris Morris’s bespoke suit, and you don’t see so many French cuffs in Boulder, got right to business: The business of “winning the conversation” with facts about the climate reality of global warming, against those who have known – at least since the tobacco lobby invented deception relations – that it’s not essential to disprove the science, but to cast doubt is enough. Hence Rick Santorum’s voice Monday night karaoke-ing for the doubt brigade. Per Schuham, Climate Reality’s project was to “Take Down a Machine of Mistruths,” to bring energy, data and insights to climate reality. The plan and the deed involved deploying a 3000-strong human leadership corps to do “reality patrol.” Dominating Twitter and other social media channels @climatereality to fan the flames. Partnering with multimedia platforms like the aforementioned 350 dot org. 24-hours of “climate reality” TV global live-streamed from 24 time zones. In the 25th hour they took the event’s blood pressure. 8.65 million views and 6mm uniques had tuned in, for an average 58 minutes (Engagement, engagement, engagement, the new metric on the web and social media!)

The New Mix In Content Delivery

Ah, you’re tired. Think how I feel. This is a long post. Among other notable things said, were these: “It’s not the cloud, it’s the crowd.” A fact that deals in just how many jillions of people the world over are clamoring for varietals of the stuff this crowd talked over. Interesting if implicit: The shape of memories changes, among crowds. Here’s where some of this (to me) gets a little frightening, but one could argue it was similar as soon as Kodak sold steadycams. Andres Espineira, co-founder and CEO of Pixorial , admits that one person’s junk is another’s treasure; indeed, Pixorial, a video content sharing system, deals in that notion that analog memories can be converted to digital worlds too – and shared.

 

Then there is the excellent Graphicly, run by CEO Micah Baldwin, home to digital comics and a streaming channel for that brand of fictionalized entertainment out into the world. Ben Long’s 123guitartuner.com deals in the music  of “adaptive” blends. We all have a lot of choices but wanting more, more, more choices, is a hallmark of these the DiMe times, Long tells us. As to the live experience, the $8 hot dog, the question inevitably does come up, although so far not in my experience of watching MLB at home. Harris Morris, president of Harris Broadcast Communications, deals in “best screen” for live arena experiences. And in “best suit.” As to what is the uncanny valley, if you’ve read this far, you deserve to know. Here, on Wikipedia. It comes from a Japanese scientist who basically says that the closer robots get to looking human, the more we move over from the ecstasy of the sublime to the terror of the uncanny. Something Mike Kelley knew all about – and his robots were only stuffed animals.

“There is a relationship between the uncanny and the familiar…” he said.

And yet, and yet. For those many who might have thought that Santa Fe had become a depressing strip mall for the 1%, they were wrong.  Spring has sprung for our ice-bound art scene in the form of Caldera Gallery, 926 Baca Street #6, the most innovative and dangerous gallery cauldron to open in the past year, possibly the decade.

Caldera is part performance art hub, part talent incubator, and part people-powered culture machine. It’s one of the only galleries around that embraces the avant memes of our time: unhorse expectations, embrace ‘authenticity’, and divorce money from art.  Caldera is our local anti-Damien Hirst (“Spots and Sharks and Maggots and Money”) outpost.

THOSE RESPONSIBLE

Sandra Wang and native son Crockett Bodelson, collectively known as SCUBA, along with compatriot Chris Brodsky, are to blame.  Exhausted by the limitations of San Francisco, they came to Saint Assisi’s other namesake, Santa Fe.  Post Due Return, it became clear that artistic opportunities and fresh blood were flowing not just into town, but in town, via some local energies.  “We felt like we could do projects [in Santa Fe] that were on another scale, and do what we really want with people’s art, including our own,” says Bodelson.

THE BIG IDEA

A self-described “artist-run play space”, Caldera’s focus is outreach and experimentation on a “multi-dimensional level”.   The mission is to show art with a strong emphasis on community, to actively engage that community, and to challenge the mainstream.   Bodelson elaborates on this:  “We want people who don’t necessarily paint, who doodle, who think what they’re making is not even art… and put them next to professional artists.  If you get people to be a part of it, all of sudden they’ll want to come back.  Engage people, then people will engage with you.”  An art gallery without an established demographic?  Practice the thought.

ACTION, CROCKETT

Caldera has test-driven these ideas with two very popular shows: Hide and Seek and PS, I Love You.  Hide and Seek entailed a display of maps and tools in the gallery which audiences used, on a location-driven treasure hunt, to seek and find the artwork.  “It came out of the idea: ‘how can we have an art show without the art?’  The first thing that came to mind was treasure hunt-hiding the art, though much (of it) was in plain sight.  It lets the audience take a step back from: ‘This is the art, look at it’.  The adventure, not knowing where it was going, drew them in.”

The most recent show, PS, I Love You, (roughly centered on Valentine’s Day), continued the theme.  For this show, Caldera invited a wide range of artist to create hundreds of envelopes. “Buyers” put a personal message into each envelope.  Then the artists, dressed in hot pink jumpsuits, hand-delivered the work.  Delivery destinations included SITE Santa Fe, local restaurants, a hospital, a house party, and living rooms.  It was a wild success. The presentation “fooled everyone into thinking it was just a singing telegram, but that’s also part of the art piece.”

WHAT’S NEXT

So far the response has been “very, very positive.”  Drawing on this momentum, Caldera is planning a wide range of shows. On February 29^th, Caldera will present Skip’s Day, a dinner-theater event at Counter Culture Café (bonus: part of the proceeds go to support Fine Art for Children and Teens).  Each audience member will get a hand-painted ceramic from Caldera.

Beyond this, ideas for future shows include an annual Hide & Seek, a ‘food as art’ show, and a ‘Survivor’ show, in which artists make what their version of a survival kit.  All will be open to a broad range of creators. “You don’t have to be an artist to make a survival kit.”

Most of all, Caldera wants to bring in new audiences and spread the word.  “We’re trying to run [Caldera] in a way that opens up the demographic that goes to an art gallery.”

Any visit to Caldera will be an adventure, but what’s life without a bit of risk?  And what is art without fresh ideas?

Huffington Post has pics of the famous folks, who came out to celebrate by parading in costume—including Will Ferrell, Harry Connick Jr., Hilary Swank and Cyndi Lauper.

Photo by Skip Bolen/Getty Images

The New York Times reveals other sweet (and salty) treats beyond King Cake, which are also overindulged in today, Fat Tuesday.

Tulane University also got involved on an artistic level, they currently have an art exhibition of Mardi Gras themed work on display. More information here. On exhibit are drawings of the first parade designs.

A float design from the 1886 Krewe of Proteus parade by Carlotta Bonnecaze, from the Tulane Carnival Collection.

And, although the party is dead at the moment, NoLa.com has a live parade cam up and running—live video feeds are set-up in other parts of the city as well. So, for all the interested voyeurs out there—have at it; it could be the closest you’ll get to real thing.

DJ Dirt Girl, polka-dotted with enormous eyeballs on her tights, keeps time with a deep rhythmic beat. Her electronic pulse will zone in and out for the next two hours, summoning a womb experience.  Christopher appears at the podium and stands alongside a projected image of Jacob Ruisdael’s drawing Jewish Cemetery (c.1660).  Reading his own analysis, he recites like an archaic professor boring his students: “On time we rest all things.”  I’m not sure how to contextualize this but it seems profound; perhaps I just learned something I already knew.

On the opposite wall are George Melies’ super-imposed hyper humans cavorting on the moon in Trip to the Moon.  Not part of Meow Wolf’s imaginative enterprise, it nonetheless aligns with a general frenzy and displacement of time’s plodding. Three black cat-suited women sit cross-legged at a bench, working an assembly line.

The first intently cuts white yarn to six inches.  She places the skeins in a neat pile. The second ties these intervals together, uniting a whole into what I interpret as a timeline. The third woman unties the knot that her predecessor just made, while the fourth interrupts occasionally.  A simulated past, present, and future, these black cat-suits institute time only to untie it.

Enclosed by an indefinite audience, the flickerings of Melies’ dated film, the voice of adolescent  pontificators, and the actions of female timekeepers, I conclude that throughout time, no great mind — including Meow Wolf’s collective — has grasped this tricky conceptual nexus.

An interruption of tonight’s scheduled programming:

Evoking Big Brother, Meow Wolf takes over the big screen with a neo-punk futuristic video. Benji speaks in high-pitched tones, voice-altered, about cultural identity and feeling “post-geographic.”  Meow Wolf just coined a hyper-chic term.

An IM conversation plays on screen:

”Yo”

“Wut”

“I’m concerned time is dead”

“I’m skyping u”

With this amendment to Nietzsche, the film continues in a hyperreal aesthetic that I thought only the Japanese could envision.

As the climax of Meow Wolf’s rogue evening, a couple of friends are hanging out on 12/21/12, celebrating the Mayan prophecy. The first scene plays like a broken record, about two minutes on repeat. Just when I think that’s the point, the scene changes and repeats its new sequence several times.  Then again and again, each for shorter intervals until the actors become so self-aware, that they think time is actually lapsing.  It’s the repetition that makes the pretty brunette maniacally scream, “Is this death?”   Another girl stomps her foot and announces, “I refuse to die!” After the of cacophony of anxious hipsters disassociate time from time, their crashing plane ceases and the actors calmly walk out of the cushioned Time Capsule Lounge.

On time we rest, and SITE Santa Fe is closing for the night.

Huffington Post has SNL videos up, and according to the Chicago Tribune‘s music critic Greg Kot, “‘Comeback Kid’ is the closest approximation [on the new album, "Reign of Terror"] of the ultra-catchy singles that peppered “Treats,” but the production is more refined, the claustrophobic aggression of the debut replaced by sweet, wobbly vocals, and a more spacious arrangement.”

But we might not imagine a mural which touts an anti-American slogan like, “Down with U.S.A.,” or depictions of the statue of liberty as a skeleton, which the Associated Press reported February 2, 2012 represents several murals throughout Tehran, Iran—as “Government-sponsored murals became a centerpiece of the Islamic establishment’s image-building machine,” writes the publication in “Revolutionary art: Iran murals gallery of defiance.”

Politically-oriented art offers a context within which to examine American politics. Further, with the media largely controlling American access to information, and our obliviousness to foreign relations clouded by ethnocentricities, it starts to seem that we are more America the Blind, than the free.

Akin to this, Time Magazine’s cover art differs greatly in the United States versus other countries, often subverting overtly controversial topics in favor of more prosaic messages.

Although the streets are an ideal place to splay political art, Tom Molloy chooses to contain his more subtly subversive work inside the white box on the occasion of his show New World. Currently in exhibition at Lora Reynolds Gallery in Austin through April 14, 2012—Molloy’s sentiments are aimed at the U.S., and interpret the deal-making of politics, the irony of American patriotism, and the error of our democratic ways.

Political art such as Molloy’s calls attention to our ethnocentricities, pushing us to seek alternative news sources, and become active. It’s patriotism in the truest sense of the word, and it’s here in one of our U.S. capital cities.

Molloy includes a c-print, large-format photograph, titled Flag, which depicts an American flag wrapped in plastic with a price sticker, $9.59, and a label which reads, made in China.

Tom Molloy, Flag

Feature image: Tom Molloy, Shake (detail Mubarak/Bush), 2011

Friley has built an impressively dedicated fan base like so many lo-fi indie bands from the 1990s, with a constant onslaught of seven-inchreleases, various compilation tracks and cassingles. Yes, cassingles — and what is most amazing about this is that he is only 23-years-old, so he grew up in the post-cassette world. Of course he also has also toured a lot… From what I have heard and read, Friley recreates Idiot Glee’s songs onstage with just a keyboard and a synthesizer, looping his voice through various effects boxes. After being so perplexed and amazed by Paddywhack over the last few months, I am really curious how well Idiot Glee’s songs will translate live. And, well… I will find out soon enough! Idiot Glee will be performing in Austin on February 17th at St. David‘s Episcopal Church. He will be opening for Islands.