Palladio

The Way Things Go: When Appropriators Collide

2008-07-13T09:26:31-04:00

A still from Christian Marclay's 1995 video "Telephones." [Link] Appropriated from ---??

via NYTimes:

Art
The Image Is Familiar; the Pitch Isn't
By MIA FINEMAN
Published: July 13, 2008

IN February 2007 the Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay was installing a solo exhibition of his work in Paris when he received an e-mail message from a friend about a commercial for the Apple iPhone that had been broadcast during the Academy Awards show.

Slide Show: Art and Advertising
The 30-second spot featured a rapid-fire montage of clips from television shows and Hollywood films of actors and cartoon characters -- including Lucille Ball, Humphrey Bogart, Dustin Hoffman and Betty Rubble -- picking up the telephone and saying "Hello." It ended with a shot of the soon-to-be-released iPhone.

Mr. Marclay tracked down the ad on YouTube and watched it.

"I was very surprised," he said recently by phone from London. Like many in the art world he saw an uncanny resemblance between the iPhone commercial and his own 1995 video "Telephones," which opens with a similar montage of film clips showing actors answering the phone. That seven-and-a-half-minute video, one of Mr. Marclay's signature works, has been exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States.

About a year before, Mr. Marclay said, Apple had approached the Paula Cooper Gallery, which represents his work in New York, about using "Telephones" in an advertisement.

"I told them I didn't want to do it," he said. His main concern, he said, was that "advertisers on that scale have so much power and visibility" and that "everyone would think of my video as the Apple iPhone ad."

Mr. Marclay said he spoke with a lawyer after learning of the commercial but decided not to pursue legal action. "When people with that much power and money copy you, there's not much you can do," he said.

In any case he did not want a controversy to draw attention to his own appropriations of scenes from other sources -- mostly Hollywood movies -- without permission from the copyright holders.

"I don't consider what I do stealing," Mr. Marclay said. "I'm quoting cultural references that everyone is familiar with. I make art that reflects the culture I live in." And unlike advertisers, he said, "I'm not trying to sell phones."

Contacted by telephone and e-mail, neither Apple nor its advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat/Day, would comment on the iPhone ad for this article.

A still from a 2007 commercial for the Apple iPhone.

Artists have been appropriating images from Madison Avenue for decades. In the 1960s Andy Warhol made silk-screened copies of Brillo boxes and Campbell's soup cans. In the 1980s Richard Prince rephotographed magazine ads for Marlboro cigarettes, enlarged the pictures and exhibited them as his own. Works like these are comments on consumer culture that also challenge the idea of originality itself.

But what happens when the tables are turned? In recent years a number of advertising campaigns have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. And the artists who believe their images and ideas have been appropriated are not happy about it.

Donn Zaretsky, a lawyer in New York who specializes in art law, is often approached by artists who perceive echoes of their own work in advertisements. "It does seem like advertising people are pushing the envelope on this," he said. "They're being more and more brazen in their borrowing. On the one hand they should be mining the art world for inspiration, and you would expect them to be referencing works that people are familiar with. But more and more they seem to be getting into the territory of blatant rip-offs."

The law governing the unauthorized use of copyrighted images and ideas, he said, is notoriously murky. "Copyright law doesn't protect ideas, it only protects expression. The question is, where do you draw the line? Is the agency being inspired by the idea? Or did they copy the artist's expression?"

When artists go after advertisers in such cases, the disputes are most often settled out of court. But there have been a few notable cases in which artists successfully sued advertisers for copyright infringement.

In 1987 a federal court granted summary judgment to the artist Saul Steinberg, who claimed that a poster for the Columbia Pictures film "Moscow on the Hudson" copied his famous New Yorker cover "View of the World From 9th Avenue." (Like Steinberg's drawing, the poster had a detailed rendering of four Manhattan city blocks in the foreground and a sketchy view of the rest of the world in the background.)

In May 2007 a French judge ordered the fashion designer John Galliano to pay 200,000 euros, or about $270,000, to the photographer William Klein in a dispute over a series of magazine ads that mimicked Mr. Klein's technique of painting bright strokes of color on enlarged contact sheets.

Recently Mr. Zaretsky was approached by the artist Spencer Tunick, who is known for his photographs of large installations of naked people in public places around the world. Mr. Tunick was concerned about a television commercial for Vaseline shown in Europe and the United States in 2007.

The 60-second spot, called "Sea of Skin," features large groups of naked men and women posed in artful configurations in various outdoor settings. They stand and sway in a forest, sit on a concrete rooftop, bounce gently in a glacial lake and wave their arms on a city street.

"There was such a close resemblance to my work that it was uncanny," Mr. Tunick said in an interview. "When I saw the ad, I thought it was definitely inspired by my photographs and videos of installations."

Was it? Not according to Kevin Roddy, the executive creative director at Bartle Bogle Hegarty in New York, who developed the commercial for Vaseline's parent company, Unilever.

"I'm familiar with Spencer's work," Mr. Roddy said, "but I can't say that was an influence at all. Spencer is about masses of people and nudity. We're about representing the functionality of skin. Sure, it's hundreds of thousands of bodies, but they’re meant to represent one thing: skin."

Mr. Tunick said he had not decided whether to pursue legal action.

In some cases artists who see variations on their own images may be victims of their own popular success.

In the late 1990s there were several well-publicized disputes in which young British art stars accused advertisers of pilfering their ideas. The conflicts arose around the time the so-called Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.'s, were featured in "Sensation," a 1997 London exhibition of contemporary art from the collection of the British advertising mogul Charles Saatchi that later traveled to Berlin and New York.

In 1998 one of those artists, Gillian Wearing, complained that a Volkswagen commercial featuring people holding handwritten signs had copied the style and idea of her series of photographs titled "Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say" (1992-93).

For her series Ms. Wearing photographed people on the street holding paper signs on which they had written brief statements describing their feelings or states of mind. In the best-known image a smirking young man in a business suit holds a sign that reads, "I'm desperate." Similarly the Volkswagen ad includes a shot of a tough-looking security guard who holds a sign bearing the word "sensitive." Ms. Wearing did not pursue legal action.

The following year Damien Hirst threatened to sue British Airways over a billboard for its low-cost subsidiary Go that featured a grid of colored dots. Mr. Hirst claimed that the design was based on his paintings of grids of colored dots against white backgrounds. At the time a spokesman for Mr. Hirst told the newspaper The Independent that he had discussed licensing his dot paintings to British Airways, but that the deal had fallen through.

Advertisers have traditionally tapped into the cultural cachet of fine art by commissioning works for hire. From 1950 to 1975 a Chicago company, the Container Corporation of America, commissioned dozens of artists -- including Fernand Léger, René Magritte and Willem de Kooning -- to create paintings that were reproduced in print ads that ran in upscale magazines like Fortune.

In 1985 Absolut vodka began its famous magazine ad campaign featuring variations on the distinctive shape of its bottle, executed by hundreds of contemporary artists, among them Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Lisa Yuskavage.

But plenty of other artists have staunchly resisted agencies' requests to license their work.

Mr. Tunick said he had been asked to work on campaigns for Dove, Lipton, Microsoft and Blue Cross Blue Shield, among others. "I think I get two e-mails a week from ad executives or publicists who want to use my work, and I always tell them I’m not an advertising photographer," he said.

The Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss have turned down numerous requests from ad agencies interested in licensing their award-winning 30-minute short film, "Der Lauf der Dinge" ("The Way Things Go"). Produced in 1987, it follows a Rube Goldberg-style chain reaction in which everyday objects like string, balloons, buckets and tires are propelled by means of fire, pouring liquids and gravity.

Yet in April 2003 Honda ran a two-minute television commercial, "Cog," in which various parts of a car -- tires, seats, windshield wipers -- form a dominolike chain reaction that culminates when an Accord rolls down a ramp as a voice-over (read by Garrison Keillor) intones, "Isn't it great when things just work?"

At the time Mr. Fischli told Creative Review magazine: "We've been getting a lot of mail saying, 'Oh, you've sold the idea to Honda.' We don't want people to think this. We made 'Der Lauf der Dinge' for consumption as art."

In a strange twist the Honda "Cog" ad, which was developed by Wieden & Kennedy, has inspired several parodies of its own, including commercials for BBC Radio and the British directory assistance service 118. The chain reaction of creative influence, imitation and homage was the focus of a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London during a retrospective of Mr. Fischli and Mr. Weiss's work there in 2006.

In an age when sampling and appropriation have become widespread practices in contemporary art and in the culture at large, some find it paradoxical that artists are now guarding their own creations more vigilantly.

Michael Lobel, a professor of 20th-century art at Purchase College who has written about Roy Lichtenstein and Richard Prince, said the easy availability of digital images on the Web had helped foster this defensiveness.

"There's a broader consciousness among artists about owning their work and keeping tight control over its distribution," he said. "The more available images have become, the more of a countermovement there is to clamp down on them."

Mr. Lobel said that while he sympathizes with artists who believe their work has been copied, they also need to recognize their own reliance on existing images. "Culture is about ongoing borrowing," he said. "It's about taking images, ideas and motifs and opening them up to new uses."

The cycle of influence goes round and round: Ad agencies borrow from artists who borrow from advertising. Isn't it great when things just work?

SCANNERS - The 2007 NY Video Festival: Ben Neill + Bill Jones in "Circuits Maximus"

2007-07-14T16:20:47-04:00

SCANNERS image: "Winona Ryder," from Voom Portraits by Robert Wilson (courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery)

Friday, July 27 9pm: Ben Neill will play his hybrid electro-acoustic “mutant trumpet” in the liminal spaces created by video artist Bill Jones in Circuits Maximus, a special live music and interactive video event.

via filmlinc.com:

Scanners: The 2007 New York Video Festival
July 27 – 29

A co-presentation of the Film Society and Lincoln Center Festival 2007

Welcome to Scanners, a compendium of works that cover the latest in the digital spectrum. When we first presented such a collection at the 1992 New York Film Festival, the genre was called video art. After 16 years and four program title changes, it’s called (by some) digital media. And it doesn’t necessarily start out digitally––or even analog-ly.

This year, free-form narrative will wow your senses in Edin Vélez’s multi-layered A Certain Foolish Consistency, while the documentary Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm reveals all you want to know about the O-word and more. Securing funding for these types of projects is never easy; our program of shorts Renewable Resources celebrates 20 years of Renew Media’s support for independent media artists. LivingVoom shows what happens when a television channel takes a beautiful aesthetic leap, devoting itself to video art as ambient media. THE SHAPE OF THE FORM, OPTICAL GARDEN, POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE and FRIGHT NIGHT each offer a look at some fantastic new works in short form for your enjoyment. CIRCUITS MAXIMUS is a live event with some of the best and brightest artists in music and media. And Scanners would not be complete without Armond White’s annual survey of music videos, with his irreverent commentary to go with it.

Of course, the lines between film, video and those things hanging out on your hard drive have been officially erased. In order to stay on top of the latest trends, Scanners will soon become a bimonthly event, giving us the ability to share the latest, as it happens. So come along now for an amazing ride, and join us again––sooner than you think!

Press Office
DOWNLOAD PRESS RELEASE / Hi-Res IMAGES

Circuits Maximus
Series: Scanners: The 2007 New York Video Festival
Country: USA, Release: 2007

A special live music and interactive video event

We are pleased to present an evening of performances by three musician/video duos. Bobby Previte’s manic drums, played in real time with no loops or laptops, match VJ veteran Benton-C (Benton Bainbridge), painting with light. Ben Neill will play his hybrid electro-acoustic “mutant trumpet” in the liminal spaces created by video artist Bill Jones’ conjunction of performance and installation art. And composer Dorit Chrysler’s Theremin will join with media artist c.h.i.a.k.i. (Chiaki Watanabe) on muxology v.2, a media project that combines electro-acoustic sound with kinetic images. As if that weren’t enough, a special fourth-set encore will place all six artists onstage in a multi-media super jam. Do not miss this one––even if we tried, it will never happen the same way again.

For a listing of films in the Festival go to Program Overview.

Click on Calendar to view the schedule, film descriptions and, to purchase tickets online.

Scanners has been organized by Kathy Brew, Chris Chang and Marian Masone, with Berta Sichel of Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofia. The program is made possible by the Experimental Television Center’s Presentation Funds program, which is supported by the New York State Council on the Arts and mediaThe Foundation.

Catsup Catchup

2007-05-26T09:42:02-04:00

Photo: A.J. Mast for The New York Times
Amateur filmmaker Dan Burke recreates a scene where he brushed his teeth with ketchup for a Heinz ketchup commercial contest at his home in Dayton, Ohio.

via NYTimes:

The High Price of Creating Free Ads
By LOUISE STORY
Published: May 26, 2007

From an advertiser’s perspective, it sounds so easy: invite the public to create commercials for your brand, hold a contest to pick the best one and sit back while average Americans do the creative work.

But look at the videos H. J. Heinz is getting on YouTube.

In one of them, a teenage boy rubs ketchup over his face like acne cream, then puts pickles on his eyes. One contestant chugs ketchup straight from the bottle, while another brushes his teeth, washes his hair and shaves his face with Heinz’s product. Often the ketchup looks more like blood than a condiment.

Heinz has said it will pick five of the entries and show them on television, though it has not committed itself to a channel or a time slot. One winner will get $57,000. But so far it’s safe to say that none of the entries have quite the resonance of, say, the classic Carly Simon “Anticipation” ad where the ketchup creeps oh so slowly out of the bottle.

Heinz Top This TV Challenge
Entry #138: Dan's Heinz Commercial

Consumer brand companies have been busy introducing campaigns like Heinz’s that rely on user-generated content, an approach that combines the populist appeal of reality television with the old-fashioned gimmick of a sweepstakes to select a new advertising jingle. Pepsi, Jeep, Dove and Sprint have all staged promotions of this sort, as has Doritos, which proudly publicized in February that the consumers who made one of its Super Bowl ad did so on a $12 budget.

But these companies have found that inviting consumers to create their advertising is often more stressful, costly and time-consuming than just rolling up their sleeves and doing the work themselves. Many entries are mediocre, if not downright bad, and sifting through them requires full-time attention. And even the most well-known brands often spend millions of dollars upfront to get the word out to consumers.

Some people, meanwhile, have been using the contests as an opportunity to scrawl digital graffiti on the sponsor and its brand. Rejected Heinz submissions have been showing up on YouTube anyway, and visitors to Heinz’s page on the site have written that the ketchup maker is clearly looking for “cheap labor” and that Heinz is “lazy” to ask consumers to do its marketing work.

“That’s kind of a popular misnomer that, somehow, it’s cheaper to do this,” said David Ciesinski, vice president for Heinz Ketchup. “On the contrary, it’s at least as expensive, if not more.”

Heinz has hired an outside promotions firm to watch all the videos and forward questionable ones to Heinz employees in its Pittsburgh headquarters. So far, they have rejected more than 370 submissions (at least 320 remain posted on YouTube). The gross-out factor is not among their screening criteria — rather, most of the failed entries were longer than the 30-second time limit, entirely irrelevant to the contest or included songs protected by copyright. Some of the videos displayed brands other than Heinz (a big no-no) or were rejected because “they wouldn’t be appropriate to show mom,” Mr. Ciesinski said.

Heinz hopes to show more than five of them, if there are enough that convey a positive, appealing message about Heinz ketchup, he said. But advertising executives who have seen some of the entries say that Heinz may be hard pressed to find any that it is proud to run on television in September.

“These are just so bad,” said Linda Kaplan Thaler, chief executive of the Kaplan Thaler Group, an advertising agency in New York that is not involved with Heinz’s contest.

One of the most viewed Heinz videos — seen, at last count, more than 12,800 times — ends with a close-up of a mouth with crooked, yellowed teeth. When Ms. Kaplan Thaler saw it, she wondered, “Were his teeth the result of, maybe, too much Heinz?”

Heinz Top This TV Challenge
Entry #4: My Entry For The Heinz Commercial Contest

Scott Goodson, chief executive of StrawberryFrog, an advertising agency based in New York, said the shortcomings of contest entries — not just those for Heinz — refuted predictions that user-generated content might siphon work away from agencies. “This Heinz campaign, much like the same ones done by Doritos, Converse and Dodge, only goes to show how hard it is to do great advertising,” he said.

In a traditional ad campaign, a client like Heinz will meet with its advertising agencies to come up with a central idea, often a tagline like MasterCard’s “Priceless.” The creative departments then design the ads while the media planners figure out where they should run. Except for the occasional focus group, consumers are largely on the receiving end. [read on...]

Mr. Mellencamp: Right On Target

2007-01-22T11:03:29-05:00

Photo: Mark Cornelison for The New York Times
The singer John Mellencamp in Bloomington, Ind.; Mr. Mellencamp, who has lived in Indiana all his life, often writes about small-town life.

via NYTimes:
Changes in Mellencamp Country
By ALAN LIGHT
Published: January 22, 2007

"People say I sold out," John Mellencamp said, explaining his decision to license a song for a Chevrolet commercial. "No, I got sold out. Sometime during the '90s record companies made the decision that us guys who had been around for a long time and had sold millions of records and were household names just weren't as interesting as girls in stretch dresses."

Mr. Mellencamp, whose 21st album, "Freedom's Road," arrives in stores tomorrow, had long expressed objections to the use of pop songs in advertising. But he said a turning point for him came last year, after he heard "Highway Companion," the latest album by his contemporary Tom Petty. He liked it and thought the single "Saving Grace" would be a hit, but then never heard the song on the radio or saw it on the video channels. Fearing a similar fate for his own music, Mr. Mellencamp said he decided to accept Chevrolet's offer to use "Our Country," which he had been performing live for a few years and appears on the new album, as the theme for its Silverado truck.

"The bottom line is, I'm a songwriter, and I want people to hear my songs," he said. "I'm not saying it's right. I'm not suggesting it for anybody else. This is just what I did this time to reinvent myself and stay in business. Sometimes I get sad about it really. I still don't think that people should sell their songs for advertising."

Mr. Mellencamp has caught flak from some of his fans, and the Silverado spot, which has been in heavy rotation on sports broadcasts since it was first shown during last fall's World Series, has spawned some controversy. The ad mixes images of the Statue of Liberty and Rosa Parks with footage from Hurricane Katrina and the Vietnam War. A columnist at Slate.com called the commercial's blend of patriotism and tragedy, in service of selling a product, "exploitative" and "wrong."

Chain-smoking through an interview in a sprawling suite at the Carlyle Hotel (he and his wife, the model Elaine Irwin, were upgraded because "the commode in our first room was broken"), Mr. Mellencamp maintained that the ad's downbeat tone was his own decision. "Part of the deal I made was: O.K., I'll do this, but I'm in charge. Make it look like a John Mellencamp video. I don’t want to see 'Our Country' as rah-rah flag waving. Let's show the flood, let’s show the war, let’s show the whole thing. The fact that they rolled a truck out at the end made no difference to me."

Bill Ludwig, chief creative officer of Chevrolet's ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, said in a statement that he hoped the campaign would evoke "the bruises and scars that have shaped our nation."

One question now is what impact a commercial that has been running for months can have on sales of a new album. Some executives at Universal Republic, Mr. Mellencamp's label, are concerned that the exposure peaked too soon, and that the audience has already tired of the song. Mr. Mellencamp admits that the situation has put radio programmers "in a position they've never been in before," adding that he never anticipated that the ad would be played so frequently. "They sure pounded it," he said with a chuckle. "I had no idea."

"Our Country" illustrates one side of "Freedom's Road," with its swing-for-the-fences themes exemplified by titles like "The Americans." The album's most striking songs, though, display a more intimate depiction of the small-town life that Mr. Mellencamp, 55 and a lifelong Indiana resident, knows so well. The acoustic "Rural Route" is an account of a crystal meth-fueled murder in which the victim's body was found at the edge of his parents' property.

"About halfway through the record I didn't really know what it was supposed to be about," Mr. Mellencamp said. "I had so many political songs akin to 'Masters of War,' that kind of stuff. But then I recorded a song called 'Ghost Towns Along the Highway,' and I said that's what this record is about.

"That's a very personal song because it's not really about a physical place, but about the decisions that we've made and the path that we've chosen. Corporate America has absolutely changed everything. Bloomington, where I live, has a beautiful square, there's some restaurants, but everyone wants to go shopping someplace else. So when everything becomes the Mc-Whatever, then you lose what I always enjoyed about living where I live."

Joan Baez, who sings on a song titled "Jim Crow," said she had long admired the subtlety of Mr. Mellencamp's work. "When people try to write protest songs, they get so trite and overstated," she said in a telephone interview. "This song was completely fresh. I never heard anything like it."

One thing Mr. Mellencamp never questioned was the sound he wanted for this album. "What I know and what I love is garage music," he said, citing '60s bands like the Byrds, Count Five and the Youngbloods as inspirations. "Whenever we’re messing around, that's what the guys in the band all play." For his previous album, "Trouble No More" (2003), he said: "I had gone so far down this folk thing, recording with Appalachian instruments. I wanted to go back to what we know how to do."

"Freedom's Road" was recorded over many months and many grueling sessions, in Mr. Mellencamp's rehearsal space, literally a garage. "At the time I was totally unaware we were making a record," he said. "But then I thought: We're never going to be able to beat these versions. It sounds as if they just walked in and played. And for a sound like that, you’ve got to go through hell to get it."

Though Mr. Mellencamp opted to avoid a more overtly politicized album, he couldn’t resist including "Rodeo Clown," a harsh attack on President Bush and the Iraq war, with lines about "blood on the hands of the rich politicians" and "blood on the hands of an arrogant nation." The song isn't listed on the packaging and appears several minutes after the album's last track.

"When I wrote that song two years ago," Mr. Mellencamp said, "the truth was nowhere in sight. But as the climate changed, now that song feels right on target."

Romancing the Spiegeltent with XIX

2006-07-25T14:53:51-04:00

XIX, is the new band composed of Ben Neill, Bill Jones, Mimi Goese, John Conte and Jim Mussen, recently hit the Summerscape at Bard-- reviewed @ Tony Fletcher's JAMMING and reBlogged here:

Spiegel on the Hudson

It was a 100-mile round trip by the time I collected and brought home the childsitter, but it was well worth it. Last night (Thursday July 20) Posie and I traveled across the Hudson to the Bard College Campus in Annandale, and its unique summerstage – a Spiegeltent.

The SpiegelTent and outdoor dining/bar area: not your average festival tent.

To quote the Bard programme, Speigeltents are

Hand-hewn pavilions used as traveling entertainment halls and wine-tasting marquees since the early 20th century. There are only a few of these unique and legendary "tents of mirrors" left in the world today. Built of wood, mirrors, canvas and leaded glass and detailed in velvet and brocade, each has its own personality and style.

The Spiegeltent at Bard features no less than 1700 mirrors (no, that's not a typo); the family business in Brussels that built it also traveled to New York to erect it. Without doubt, it's the most beautiful and fascinating outdoor venue I've been to in many a year.

Bard has clearly tried to make the most of it. As part of its wider summer performance series, the SpiegelPalais has been featuring outdoor dining in the early evenings, cabaret and concerts in the mid-evenings (DJ Spooky and Carl Hancock Rux have already performed there this summer), and a local DJ late at night.

The stained glass windows up top and down below render the interior of the SpiegelTent a work of art.

We attended for the mid-evening concert. Two people I know well from separate circles – Ben Neill, and singer Mimi Goese – were performing together as part of Neill's XIX concept, a series of mostly instrumental pieces influenced by 19th Century classical romanticism.

Ben Neill is one of the few musicians able to cross effortlessly between avant-garde, electronica and jazz, and that's partly down to his secret weapon: he’s the inventor and sole performer of the mutantrumpet, an adapted brass instrument that allows him to send MIDI signals via breath and touch, thereby engaging sequences, backing tracks and effects, without putting hand on a keyboard or computer. (An Apple does hum quietly alongside him, but the music is entirely human, driven by instinct and feel; sequences are extended or shortened on a whim and a nod just as in any jazz band.) He's recorded for labels as diverse as Verve, Astralwerks and Six Degrees, and worked with all manner of left-field musicians, old school and new.

At the Spiegelpalais he started off his set by leading Rickenbacker-toting bassist John Conte and drummer Jim Mussen through a series of chill pieces that more easily qualified as trip-hop than 19th Century romanticism. (Apparently, he sampled simple notes and phrases from music of that era, but by the time it's refiltered through his trumpet and myriad effects, you wouldn’t know it.) It was perfect music for a mid-summer evening, but as I’ve found before with Neill, it needed that special something to take it to the next level.

Ben Neill and Mimi Goese: briding avant-garde, electronica, jazz and pop.

Last night that came in the form of Mimi Goese, former singer and co-songwriter with Hugo Largo, and whose collaboration with Moby under her own band name Mimi recently showed up in a key Sopranos scene. Mimi has a voice of considerable repute – it's not overstating the case to say she fits right in there between Kate Bush and Liz Frazer – and a carefree, angelic and playful stage persona that may have caused Natalie Merchant, who was in the small audience, to do a double-take. Mimi joined Neill’s trio onstage twice, for two songs a time that moved the group into a slightly more conventional format. What lyrics could be discerned were understandably elemental, with lots of dream and nature imagery. Inbetween her appearances, Neill, Conte and Mussen upped the tempo, heading into Miles Davis land with one particular piece that Neill told me afterwards directly uses a classical composer's piano melody. (I didn’t recognize the composer's name, let alone the tune.)

Throughout, Neill's long-time partner, Bill Jones, created digital video imagery in real time, further elongating a that ran the gamut from classical to jazz, avant-garde to electronica, and trip-hop to pop. It was an absolute joy.

The moment the set finished, the resident Spiegelband (think "alternative Oompah") began performing out in the garden, while staff removed the tables from the middle of the tent to create a late-night dance floor. Bard, it should be noted, is in the middle of nowhere, and the concert was not desperately well-attended. I therefore figured the DJ set would be a bust - but we noticed a couple of dozen younger people (younger than us, at any rate, and without child-sitters on an hourly rate to worry about) filtering in to enjoy dance music in the beautiful countryside. Sadly, we had to leave before the DJ kicked in. Equally sadly, as designated driver with so many miles ahead of me, I also didn’t get to enjoy the SpiegelPalais’ drinks, which exclusively featured two of my favorite companies: Millbrook Wines, and Magic Hat beers. My one sip of the Tocai Fruilani that Posie ordered confirmed for me that Millbrook was smart to import and plant this Italian grape in the Hudson Valley. I know people who drink this wine by the case, and I don’t blame them.

Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper.

The SpiegelPalais wraps up already next weekend. Between now and then, you can take advantage of early evening dining, various cabaret and drag shows, the late night DJ, and a weekend afternoon musical performance of a Hans Christian Andersen story. Of course, you have to live within driving distance – and that, as you can tell, is an elastic concept round these parts - but if you do, then as I said up top: it’s a journey worth making.

Permanent link to this article

Lean, mean, brash, crass and about as deep as a shot glass....

2006-01-10T10:20:54-05:00

Palladio's own Zoe Lister-Jones in Off-Broadway smash hit:

NYTimes:
THEATER REVIEW:
'THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED'
Actor in the Closet, Agent in Control
By BEN BRANTLEY
Published: January 10, 2006
[excerpts]

Lean, mean, brash, crass and about as deep as a shot glass, Diane the Hollywood agent is just the tonic New York theatergoers need in the gray depths of an urban winter. Played by Julie White in an irresistible adrenaline rush of a performance, Diane can be thought of as the wicked witch or the fairy godmother of "The Little Dog Laughed," the tangy new fable of fame and its discontents by Douglas Carter Beane that opened last night at the Second Stage Theater. Either way, she's certainly more of a pick-me-up than your average jukebox musical.

Directed by Scott Ellis - with a terrific cast that includes Neal Huff as Diane's client, a sexually confused movie star, and Johnny Galecki as the rent boy who loves him - "The Little Dog Laughed" is the tastiest homegrown comedy of manners to hit New York since, well, Mr. Beane's "As Bees in Honey Drown." [...]

What has garnered the most advance attention for "Little Dog" has been the promise that it would be about a closeted gay actor who knows his homosexuality is incompatible with being a matinee idol. Sure enough, the character of Mitchell (Mr. Huff) is suggestively familiar enough that certain contemporary male stars (names withheld in view of possible litigation) should probably stay away from this show if they want to avoid sleepless nights. (Diane muses wonderingly on her client's naïve idea of taking his mother as a date to an awards ceremony "so that no one will know he's gay.") [...]

What makes "Little Dog" more than an extended satiric sketch, though, is Mr. Beane's use of the big lie to consider more subtle forms of self-deception - from Mitchell and Alex's insistence to each other that they aren't really gay to the emotion-deflecting armor of downtown hipness assumed by Alex and his girlfriend, Ellen (Zoe Lister-Jones).

Like "Bees," "Little Dog" unfolds in artful counterpoints of lyrical internal monologues and quick scenes, with two or three vignettes sometimes occurring simultaneously. (Allen Moyer's sleek paneled set allows this to happen with beguiling fluidness.) Much of the dialogue is eminently quotable out of context. (Ellen on wishing she had figured out earlier that club-hopping was boring: "I might have done a little more drugs and paid a little less attention.")

But the one-liners are always particular to their speakers. Don't feel restless if in the early scenes it seems as if the performers (Ms. White aside) aren't landing their jokes; it's because they're grounding their characters instead of going for laughs.

And surprisingly intricate characters they turn out to be. Mr. Huff (of "Take Me Out") presents a Mitchell who is both charming and blurred around the edges, the way actors without parts to play can be. You can see why Alex would both fall hard for and be exasperated by him. Mr. Galecki, best known as Darlene's spineless boyfriend on "Roseanne," finds the unexpected will and resilience in a man who at first registers as a passive drifter. Ms. Lister-Jones, who has less to work with, still shapes a complete portrait of a conflicted and corruptible young woman.

All these folks - along with other, unseen characters, like the self-righteous gay playwright and battalions of lawyers and producers - are to some degree the pawns of Diane, who is to movies what Faye Dunaway was to television in "Network," a business's calculating heart made flesh. Fortunately, Ms. White's Diane isn't the melodramatic masochist that Ms. Dunaway's Diana was. [read on...]

The Little Dog Laughed Off-Broadway

2005-11-16T20:35:48-05:00

Palladio's Zoe Lister-Jones ("Molly") will appear in the upcoming world premiere production of Douglas Carter Beane's comedy The Little Dog Laughed Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre:

Galecki, Huff, Lister-Jones, White Set for Beane's The Little Dog Laughed
By: Brian Scott Lipton, Theater News Nov 14, 2005

The Little Dog Laughed (Off-Broadway)
A playful look inside the world of Hollywood from playwright Douglas Carter Beane.

Gay Hollywood: Cast Complete for Debut of Beane's The Little Dog Laughed
By Ernio Hernandez, Playbill, 14 Nov 2005

Johnny Galecki, Neal Huff, Zoe Lister-Jones and Julie White will appear in the upcoming world premiere production of Douglas Carter Beane's comedy The Little Dog Laughed Off-Broadway at Second Stage Theatre.

Scott Ellis (Twelve Angry Men) directs the new work from playwright Beane (As Bees in Honey Drown) which will start performances Dec. 13 and open Jan. 10, 2006 for a run currently slated through Jan. 29.

The Little Dog Laughed satirizes the world of tabloid gossip, Hollywood and celebrities in a story that centers around a Hollywood agent, her very up-and-coming boy-toy client, a sexy young drifter and his girlfriend.

"It's sort of the last taboo - which movie stars are gay? Because everyone sort of knows it, but no one talks about it," Beane explains about his latest work. "The last time I was in L.A. I mentioned this play to a movie producer. I said 'it's about a closeted movie star' and [the producer] literally gasped as if I said it was about a mass murderer. He said 'Oh no, oh no - don't say that - don't talk about that.'"

The cast of The Little Dog Laughed will feature Johnny Galecki ("Happy Endings," "The Opposite of Sex," "Roseanne"), Neal Huff (Take Me Out, The Foreigner), Zoe Lister-Jones (Codependence: A One Woman Show) and Julie White (Bad Dates, Fiction).

Beane has also penned the plays Music From a Sparkling Planet, The Country Club, Advice From a Caterpillar, White Lies and Devil May Care as well as the screenplay for "To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar." A founding member and Artistic Director of the Drama Dept., he also recently wrote the book for the Off-Broadway musical The Big Time.

Ellis directed last season's Broadway staging of Twelve Angry Men. Other credits include That Championship Season (at Second Stage Theatre, the company’s first show in its current home), The Man Who Had All the Luck, The Rainmaker, 1776, She Loves Me, A Month in the Country and Steel Pier. He is also set to helm the upcoming Roundabout Theatre Company revival of Entertaining Mr. Sloane with Alec Baldwin, Chris Carmack, Richard Easton and Lisa Emery.

The design team for The Little Dog Laughed will feature Allen Moyer (set) Jeff Mahshie (costumes), Donald Holder (lighting) and Lewis Flinn (sound).

Tickets to The Little Dog Laughed at Second Stage, 307 West 43rd Street (just off Eighth Ave.), are available by calling (212) 246-4422 or (800) 766-6048 or online at www.SecondStageTheatre.com.

More on Mobisodes: "24: Conspiracy"

2005-10-17T11:43:45-04:00

Mobisode: "24 Conspiracy"

via NYTimes:
Now Playing on a Tiny Screen
By LAURA M. HOLSON
Published: October 17, 2005

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 16 - When Eric Young directed his first episodes for the cellphone serial drama "24: Conspiracy," it was the bullet holes that vexed him most. Mr. Young, hired to create 24 one-minute mobile episodes for a spinoff of the hit series "24," learned that making video for a pocket-size screen is far different from making it for a 27-inch television set.

About 70 percent of the images he used were close-ups of actors, because panoramic shots appeared blurry. He said he used tiny speakers to hear what "the sound of a neck cracking" would be like on a cellphone after one of the episode's characters died from a snapped vertebra. But for gunshot wounds, the director was forced to make the bullet holes extra large and to double the amount of blood so they could be easily identified on the small screen.

"We are all experimenting to see what works," Mr. Young said. "Every new medium finds its own way and rules. It will be true for this one, too."

In the past year, media companies have begun experimenting with broadcasting original programming made specifically for mobile phones to increase awareness of their television shows and movies. And interest in such programming may grow further: last week, Apple introduced a video iPod, which, while not a mobile phone, is another test of consumers' interest in portable entertainment. [read on...]

DJ Food: Raiding the 20th Century

2005-10-07T11:19:39-04:00

image source

reBlogged from BoingBoing [originally from UbuWeb]:

40-min MP3 of the history of bastard pop, remix and mashup

By Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: This is a 40-minute MP3 of a British radio broadcast called "DJ Food - Raiding the 20th Century" that attempted to sum up the entire cut-up/remix/mash up music movement. It's lots of crazy, whacky, jarring, harmonious, tricksy, and serendipitous sound, and it made me laugh and think. The landing page for the MP3 has an exhaustive list of the samples employed.

Pt 1 - Time Machine

20th Century Fox theme intro
Negativland - Downloading (Seeland)
MCSleazy / Franzie Boys - Triple Take (Half Inch Recordings 12")
DJ BC - Surebladi (mp3)
Danger Mouse - Encore (CD)
Wayne Butane - Elderly (Sucks Bigtime)
Big City Orchestra - Bulldog (The Beatlerape)
Jay-Z - Encore (accapella) (Roc A Fella)
The Beatles - Glass Onion (2 versions) (Apple LP)
Avril Plays The Beatles (mp3)
Loo and Placido - Safari Love (mp3)
Jrb - Busta vs Steptoe & Son (mp3)
Loo & Placido - Kids Will Rock You (mp3)
Braces Tower - Special Child (mp3)
Exactshit - Crazy (CDR)
Cropstar - Crazy Prado (mp3)
Tacteel vs Britney - Overprotected (CD-R)
Will Smith vs Mr Trick - Nod Ya Head (Boot Camp 7")
Osymyso - Intro inspection (Radar 12")
fLeXuS - It Ain't Nothin' (CD-R)
unknown - Spandau Fillet (mp3)
Go Home Productions - Turn Out The Light Slave And Give Me Some Rhythm (mp3)
Go Home Productions - Work It Out With A Foxy Lady (mp3)
Beyonce - Crazy In Love (poj mix) (mp3)
Skkatter - Diddy (mp3)
Wobbly - Yo Yo Yo Yoyo, Hey... (Wild Why)
Frenchbloke & Son - Sound of da S Club (CD-R)
Lemon Jelly - Soft Rock (LJ 7")
dsico - Bille Jean Dancehall Edit (mp3)
People Like Us - Nobody Does (ubuweb mp3)
2 Many Djs - Smells Like Booty (mp3)
fLeXuS - White Love (CD - R)
Evil Twin - The Lady & The Lake (CD-R)
Justin Timberlake - Like I Love U (Ochre remix) (mp3)
Osymyso - Intro Expansion Pt 2 (mp3)
Go Home Productions. - Ray Of Gob (Half Inch Recordings 12")
Madonna - WTF? (mp3)
Player - Angel of Theft (Blood 12")
Osymyso - Wegoddim (mp3)
Flashbulb - Mama Said Knock You Out (mp3)

Link (Thanks, Ben!)

Update: Here's the official Raiding the 20th Century page, but they've taken the MP3 down.

Update 2: Here's a torrent (Thanks, David!)

Paul Spinrad's The VJ Book

2005-10-07T10:39:24-04:00

via Eyebeam reBlog:

Paul Spinrad's The VJ Book

Paul Spinrad just published a new book called "The VJ Book: Inspirations and Practical Advice for Live Visuals Performance." (Paul is also the author of the classic RE/Search Guide To Bodily Fluids.) Even if you're not into making video art, the book has great history and interviews with the likes of filmmaker Craig Baldwin, Laserium creator Ivan Dryer, and curator Kathleen Forde. It's also packaged with a software and videoclip DVD so you can trip out in your own home. As I said in my blurb on the book jacket: "The revolution may not be televised, but it's certainly being projected."

Link

Originally posted by David Pescovitz from Boing Boing Blog, ReBlogged by bg on Oct 6, 2005 at 09:15 PM

Cillit Bang Kills Self

2005-10-07T10:08:06-04:00

via Eyebeam reBlog :

Viral advertising backfires

From the U.K this Guardian article says,"household products usually promise to help get rid of dirt, but one leading brand has been shamed into cleaning up its own act after an internet marketing campaign backfired spectacularly.

Representatives working for the popular Cillit Bang brand apologised last night after being caught using a fictional character to leave a series of thinly veiled advertisements on blogs and other websites.A number of websites were hit last week with messages from Barry Scott, the overenthusiastic spokesman seen on Cillit Bang's cheesy TV commercials. When it emerged that Scott was a fabrication and the messages had been left by members of the brand's marketing team, bloggers tracked down those responsible".

Cleaner caught playing dirty on the net

Originally posted by Jim_Downing from Smart Mobs, ReBlogged by bg on Oct 6, 2005 at 09:12 PM

Introducing Palladio Mobisodes

2005-09-25T12:03:58-04:00

PALLADIO: Mobisode 1 (The Friday Massacre) from billjones and Vimeo.

Wake Me Up When September Ends

2005-09-24T10:28:28-04:00

reBlogged from NEWSgrist:

Big props go to Karmagrrrl for both the "almost too perfect" mash-up (dated 9/8/05) and for the NYTimes broadcast:

Critic's Notebook - NYTimes, September 24, 2005:
Art of the Internet: A Protest Song, Reloaded
By SARAH BOXER

Some songs have all the luck. They lead double, even triple lives, meaning everything to everyone, and meaning it passionately.

Last month, Green Day's "Wake Me Up When September Ends" was serving both as a protest song against the war in Iraq and as a patriotic ballad. It was (and still is) one of the most requested music videos on MTV. Now, thanks to the Internet, it is a song about the devastation that followed Katrina.

The song's original music video, made by Samuel Bayer (who also filmed the video of Nirvana's classic "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), is full of pathos and sap. It shows a young couple in love, then quarreling and finally separated by war. As the young man fights in Iraq thinking about sunnier days, the young woman sits home waiting and fretting.

Although the band intended the music video as an antiwar protest, Kelefa Sanneh, a pop music critic for The New York Times, pointed out that it also "works pretty well as a support-our-troops statement." One blogger recently posted the Green Day video with the tag "Great Recruitment Video." Maybe he was being facetious, maybe not.

Today, it's the same old song with a different meaning. Two weeks ago, Karmagrrrl, a blogger also known as Zadi, paired the Green Day ballad with television news coverage of Katrina and posted it at her Web site, smashface.com/vlog. Her video fits the lyrics like a glove.

Karmagrrrl's video begins with a view of green trees out the window of a bus. "Summer has come and passed, the innocent can never last," the song goes. "Wake me up when September ends." On the floor of the bus, you see a pair of red sneakers toeing the headline "HELP US" on a folded copy of The New York Post from Sept. 1. The picture in the newspaper shows a pair of feet in cardboard sandals.

From that point on, "Wake Me Up" is set to images of Katrina seen on MSNBC, CNN and "The Oprah Winfrey Show." As the rain rages on MSNBC, the song swells: "Here comes the rain again, falling from the stars." A streetlight falls onto the wet street: "Drenched in my pain again, becoming who we are." Videotape of corpses carried on stretchers goes with this lyric: "As my memory rests, but never forgets what I lost." It's almost too perfect.

Watch the video (QuickTime)

Mobisodes, Coca-Cola and Ringtones

2005-09-20T12:36:16-04:00

reBlogged from networked_performance:

Signs of the Times

Mobifilms and Ringtone Vending Machines

"Nokia is offering five online lessons in making movies for mobile phones. [Via Picturephoning]. And "Ireland will be the first European market to see a new generation of coke-vending machines, which will also sell mobile phone top-ups, ringtones and music. UK-based Inspired Broadcast Networks has signed a deal with Coca-Cola to distribute digital content from its soft drink vending machines. The vending machines will be linked to Inspired's online content management system using DSL broadband connections. The content will be transferred to the purchaser's phone through their mobile operator's network, or may also be transferred directly to the phone using Bluetooth. In the future, the company plans to allow people to collect their content by plugging their phones' memory cards into a drive on the coke machine." [The Register]" [blogged by John on Ratchet Up!]

posted by jo at networked_performance September 19, 2005 12:08 PM

Cronenberg: Not Selling Out

2005-09-19T12:17:33-04:00

image: still from Videodrome

via NYTimes, September 18, 2005:
David Cronenberg's Body Language
By JONATHAN DEE

At the Cannes Film Festival this past May for the premiere of his new film, "A History of Violence," the director David Cronenberg got into some trouble for announcing that with this, his 15th feature film, he had sold out. "I've been waiting for years to sell out," he told a scrum of journalists. "It's just that nobody offered me anything before now." He was joking, of course, but over his 30-year career, the director of "The Fly," "Dead Ringers," "Crash" and a dozen other profoundly disturbing films has accrued the kind of hyperdevoted fan base that tends not to find that kind of talk funny at all. The news that the 62-year-old Cronenberg had apparently broken the compact never to change in any way caused his fans to light up the Internet with cries of mourning and condemnation. "You have to watch what you say," he admitted to me recently, "just because they're so passionate. If nobody cared what you said, then it wouldn't be an issue."

But what if he wasn't joking? [...]

image source

[...] it should come as no great surprise that Cronenberg's "History of Violence" - an expensively-made studio film, adapted from a woefully simplistic graphic novel full of vigilantism and explosions and organized-crime vendettas - turns out to be a lean, suspenseful meditation on whether our will or our past determines who we are, a fusion of Max Frisch's great novel of identity, "I'm Not Stiller," with the broad-stroke urgency of a comic book. It's a more substantial movie, somehow, than it has any right to be. Some artists are so gloriously, compulsively themselves that they couldn't sell out properly if they tried.

[full article]

via NYTimes:
Filmography: David Cronenberg
Trailer: 'A History of Violence'

Posthorn at NIME05 Festival, Vancouver

2005-05-25T23:32:35-04:00

image source

NIME 2005 - May 26-28
The 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

Concert Program - School of Music, Recital Hall
THURSDAY, 19:30-21:30: OPENING Concert [full program]

Posthorn
Ben Neill, Bill Jones, composer/performers
10 minutes

Posthorn is a live performance piece for my self-designed mutantrumpet/electronics system. The work is titled after and based on the "Posthorn solo", a section of the third movement of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 3, originally composed in 1898.

In Posthorn three computer programs respond to my playing in real time. The pitches and dynamics of my acoustic performance are translated into MIDI information, then sent to all three programs simultaneously. The first program enables me to trigger and modify the playback of MIDI sequences from the mutantrumpet. The output of the program triggers a sample of the orchestral chord which immediately precedes the entrance of the Posthorn solo in the original symphony. As the piece progresses the sample is modified in pitch, duration and density by the dynamic and pitch content of my acoustic playing as well as the mutantrumpet1s on-board MIDI controllers. The second software is a live sampling program which enables me to grab samples and modify them in real time with the same set of controllers. In Posthorn I live sample my own playing as well as the samples of the symphony that are being triggered. I also recall samples of other performances of the piece and combine them with the material that is evolving in real time. The third program runs on a second computer and translates the MIDI data from the mutantrumpet into real time video control. The MIDI input manipulates live digital video samples of 19th century landscape paintings and live action footage of pastoral landscapes.

While the basic shape of Posthorn is fixed according to the melodic structure of the Mahler piece, its details are improvised, depending on how I unfold the melodic material and the dynamics with which I play. My decisions are influenced by feedback from the system, which guides the work into unforeseen areas each time it is performed.
-- Ben Neill

PlayStations of the Cross

2005-05-01T10:40:07-04:00

< Nathan Fox

A new article by Jonathan Dee in the New York Times Magazine:

PlayStations of the Cross
By JONATHAN DEE
Published: May 1, 2005

The Rev. Ralph Bagley is on a very 21st-century sort of mission: introducing the word of God into what he calls the ''dark Satanic arena'' of the video-game business. But he has an old-fashioned calling to back it up. ''I've always just loved video games,'' he says. ''I was one of the guys playing Pong. When I became a Christian in 1992, I still wanted to play, but it was hard when the best-quality games out there were Doom, Quake -- Satanic stuff, you know? Stuff that if I went to church on Sunday and came home and wanted to play a video game, I kind of felt a little bit guilty about it. I tried to find other games out there that were Christian, and there were none. Absolutely nothing. I'm the kind of guy that when I see something that's not being done, I want to do it myself.''

Bagley, an Oregon-based publisher of a Christian tabloid newspaper, had an idea for a game in which persecuted Christians are rescued from the catacombs of ancient Rome; after taking a class in early Christian history for accuracy's sake, he pitched the game to six different investors -- Christian and secular alike -- and they all turned him down flat.

So Bagley put his project on the proverbial shelf, and there it sat until the shootings at Columbine High School.

''Two of the investors that I had originally contacted, and they didn't know each other, called me back after Columbine,'' he told me recently, ''and said, Listen, you know, I've been hearing this stuff on the news'' -- much of the follow-up coverage focused on the teen killers' devotion to ''first-person shooter'' video games like Doom and Quake -- ''and now I kind of feel like maybe I should support this.'' With almost a million dollars in seed money, Bagley not only developed his ancient-Rome game, Catechumen -- an early term for a convert -- but also founded his own Christian game-development studio, which he named N'Lightning Software.

''We're going to hold the word of God up and illuminate the place,'' Bagley likes to say. ''We're taking the land back from Satan.''

It's a mission that's not always popular, either among secular gamers or among his fellow Christians. A great many people of faith believe the video-game business is so irredeemable that the best response is simply to bar the door. And beyond the violence and witchcraft, there are more subtle theological objections having to do with gaming's unprecedented exercise in creative decontrol and free will. As one essay in a Christian publication recently had it, ''In a virtual world, what happens when the bad guy wins?''

There are those who honor God by renouncing worldly things, and then there are those to whom the world itself, in all its aspects, is a battleground on which they are unwilling to cede any territory to God's opponents -- even the corrupt, disreputable, seemingly unsalvageable territory of the interactive-entertainment business. An evangelical Christian who talks about the demonization of video games is not necessarily employing a metaphor. In a scenario right out of a game itself, in a landscape where all hope of redemption seemed abandoned long ago, the soldiers of God are amassing.

''It didn't seem like a good idea,'' says Peter Fokos, a longtime game developer who mortgaged his house and liquidated his retirement fund to start his own Christian development studio, Digital Praise. ''But if you look at the Bible, a lot of things are like that. Not a good idea, but God wants you to do them anyway.''

If the notion of a market in faith-based video games seems unlikely, so too, 15 years ago, did the idea of Christian pop music as a moneymaking enterprise. Christian pop is now responsible for 7 percent of the total pop-music market, with more than 43 million albums sold last year -- not a niche but a major element in music-industry demographics. That's the example Christian game developers mean to follow. ''I kind of liken it to the westward expansion,'' Scott Wong, president of a Washington State company called Brethren Entertainment, told me. ''Just like you'd have the one pioneer who would go out ahead of the rest and be eaten by bears or killed by Indians or something, 10 or 15 years ago you'd see some music companies that would sprout up and then die off. They might have had something good, but at that point there wasn't any infrastructure to hold it up. Christian video games I think will follow the same track.'' [Read on...]

Clifford Odets: THE BIG KNIFE

2005-04-21T12:04:19-04:00

{Featuring Palladio's Cort Garretson}

THE BIG KNIFE
By Clifford Odets
Directed and Produced by Daryl Wein

May 4th - May 8th, every night @ 8pm & Sun @ 5pm
FOR RESERVATIONS CALL: 212 561 9126 or www.thebigknife.com

NYU KIMMEL CENTER - EISNER & LUBIN THEATER
60 Washington Square South, 4th Floor

{First play to be produced in the new 400 seat Kimmel theater}

Opening Night - Wed. May 4th @ 8pm
         Thur. May 5th @ 8pm
         Fri. May 6th @ 8pm
         Sat. May 7th @ 8pm
Closing Night - Sun. May 8th @ 5pm

Student ID: $8 General Admission: $12

with CORT GARRETSON, STEFANIE ESTES, MARSALL ELLIOTT, ALLISON KARMAN, MAGGIE LAUGHRAN, ADAM LUSTICK, NICOLE MOORE, DAVE TOOMEY, MATT WALL, BRIAN SACCA.

Sponsored by Eclectic Encore Props
Supported by NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department

Witness the last few days of Charlie Castle, a top movie star and an idealist, whose years of compromise with his beliefs for the sake of a Hollywood career have resulted in the slow destruction of his personality. As he struggles to escape from the net of insincerity and falsehood, his efforts can only result in ultimate defeat.

"Not many playwrights can create characters as perceptive as these. Mr. Odets' dialogue is also fresh and dynamic."
- NEW YORK TIMES

"One of Mr. Odets' most underrated and important plays"
- THE NEW YORKER

"Written with bold strokes of authenticity, it combines philosophy with stark realism to produce a provocative play based on the subject 'success'...and moral values."
- VARIETY

Viral Marketing + The Fake Polo Ad

2005-04-07T12:30:30-04:00

via FRIEZE:

Informant

Viral Marketing is aimed at a public jaded by traditional advertising - where will it end?

By George Pendle

When is an ad not an ad? When it has no product to sell. A man leaves his house, gets into his Volkswagen Polo and drives to a busy café. Having parked the car, he opens his jacket to reveal a bomb strapped to his chest. His intentions are clear. However, when he detonates himself, the blast is absorbed within the body of the car. The suicide bomber dies as unscathed pedestrians walk calmly by. The Volkswagen logo appears on the screen along with the slogan: Small but Tough.

With its play on contemporary fears this 20-second film appeared to be one of the more successful examples of the recent craze for ‘viral marketing’: advertisements too risqué for traditional media and spread by word of mouth and forwarded e-mails. However within a week of its appearance, and with complaints pouring in to the car manufacturer’s head offices, Volkswagen admitted that it had not created the advert. The film had been constructed by a little-known advertising firm hoping to drum up interest in their skills. In this they had succeeded, but more importantly they had seriously upped the ante in the quasi-subversiveness that permeates much of viral marketing.

Inexpensive to produce and able to provide its viewers with an ultimately false sense of exclusionary cool, viral marketing is aimed at a public jaded by traditional advertising techniques. Designed to transform the passive observer into an active participant, it does not give you the hard sell; instead it sidles up to you and acts like a new and interesting friend. As our interest is piqued by these skewed and often mystifying ads, we find ourselves being enticed into participation. If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will.

Take subservientchicken.com. It offers a webcam’s view of a man in a chicken costume and suspenders standing in a nondescript living-room. When you type a command onto the page, such as ‘make a sandwich’ or ‘pray’, the chicken-man obediently follows your commands. It spoofs the Internet’s penchant for voyeuristic pornography sites, and makes the viewer feel part of a strangely absurdist and clandestine club, despite the fact that the website has gained over 400 million hits since its launch last year. The strange thing is that, although commissioned by Burger King, the company’s presence barely registers.

Indeed if one looks at the more convoluted types of viral marketing, such as Sharp’s Dagobert Steinitz campaign, an interactive-fiction multimedia romp, the product seems to recede ever further into the backdrop. The Steinitz mystery concerns the myth surrounding a shaman-esque anthropologist who hid three urns around the world and left a set of cryptic clues as to their where-abouts. The campaign stretches across three oblique television commercials, seven websites and innumerable chat rooms, each of which imparts snippets of the convoluted narrative. While the product, ‘a television’, appears on some of the websites, it seems so at odds with the rest of the Byzantine story that any mention of it can be quickly skimmed over. Indeed, so involving is the storyline that it is almost as if the ad has shaken off its product and escaped to live an independent life of its own.

As the volume of viral marketing has increased, so have our expectations. The bizarreness that used to be encountered quite freely on the Internet is now under suspicion. Could that monkey urinating into its own mouth be shilling for Listerine? Is that woman masturbating a donkey on the books for Oil of Olay? With such grave misgivings in the consumer’s mind the ad companies have been forced to fly lower and lower under the radar to succeed. This has, in turn, led to the worry of ‘ad creep’.

More and more forms of media – from mobile phones to video games – are becoming embedded with advertisements. As a result, there is a genuine anxiety that society will soon have no advertising because advertising itself will become perfectly absorbed into everyday life. Advertising, we are warned, will come to mimic the very ideas we use to define ourselves. Indeed we won’t even think of it as advertising; we’ll think of it as pure experience.

However, the fake Volkswagen ad suggests another, more benign, possibility. If the increasing dislocation between advertising and product continues, what if the product were itself to disappear? At the very least it could become one of many cultural signifiers in an otherwise independent work of art.

Even those ads that are, for the moment, umbilically linked to their product stand a chance of transcending their origins. In years to come, when Burger King and Sharp trade no more, the subservient chicken may well be taken for a genuine fetish of the early 21st century. The long, fake biography of Dagobert Steinitz, once set free from his advertising shackles, could well intrude on an encyclopaedia of anthropology. As time wipes clean the slate of intention, even less successful viral ads may be granted immortality; for, once they are stripped of their consumerist connotations, they can linger on like obscure totems, whose reason for existence has become quite unknown.

Is it Art? Is it Advertising?

2005-03-08T16:18:56-05:00

Review of Palladio:

IS IT ART? IS IT ADVERTISING?
By Holly Daggers
The Forward Motion Theatre

Bill Jones and Ben Neill premiere
PALLADIO: a playable film

"In the future there will be no photographs. In the future there will be no objects at all.... In the future there will only be Art," says the bombastic unseen narrator of Palladio, a new film by Bill Jones with live music by Ben Neill and live video remixing by Jones. That's Art as Lifestyle apparently: The kind of Art which is experienced through portable media players..., Art as Style..., Art in the age of Steve Jobs where iPods are as cool as the commercials that sell them....

Johnnie is an Artist. We know this because he is seen brooding around NYC in stylish black jackets standing against shop windows and posing like a model in Central Park — pretty, young, and moody. Though we never actually see him create anything he is by turns a VJ, a painter, and eventually a rock guitarist. Picture Morissey as a VJ, but squint until he becomes a shameless label-whore. In his first scene he plays a concert at downtown’s a/v cabaret Remote Lounge, and his self-centered melancholia is compromised by his video accompaniment: a VJ remix of sampled television commercials — but not the pretty parts, just the advertising…, the parts where the corporate logo fades in and an announcer reads the market-researched ad-slogan. A tongue-in-cheek bite at sampler-culture.

Mal is a disillusioned advertising executive (coincidentally the same ad exec responsible for all those sampled ads) who loves seeing his corporate soap-selling transformed into a profound new artform. In fact, he is inspired to dump the trappings of his Madison Avenue office and reinvent his company in the image of Johnnie’s art. He assembles a colony of media stylists at his palatial Hudson Valley estate Palladio, then releases a large coffee table book (also called Palladio) and sets out on an international book tour to herald his edgy new discovery to the world. With the intent of ending the trend of irony in advertising, he hopes to convince corporations to throw their advertising dollars behind the sincerity of Art.

Molly is “the girlfriend”, the woman who inspires creativity by virtue of her inability to commit in a relationship. She was Johnnie’s girlfriend back in art school, but dumped him when he got too serious. She becomes Mal’s girlfriend briefly only to be stolen away by Johnnie again while Mal is abroad on his publicity tour. “Sometimes I feel like just a body” she confesses to the camera, and that about sums up her character. Molly talks endlessly into her cellphone about drifting through life and unsatisfying sexual encounters to an unseen friend, therapist, or possibly one of those 1-900 confession hotlines.

Bill Jones and Ben Neill mix live a/v with cinema in Palladio

These characters are well-acted but superficial sketches, intentionally so as Palladio the Movie constantly breaks into commercial interruption. A drive up to Mal’s estate in a yellow hummer segues laughingly into a series of Hummer ads including the slogan “Nothing feels like a Hummer”, and a sentimental reunion between Johnnie and Molly breaks into a sacherine MasterCard ad with almost identical characters and staging. As Mal’s dreamteam of young creatives is assembled, Jones cuts away to the steamy opener of a daytime soapopera and the analogy is immediately obvious. Who has time for character development in the age of fast downloads and screensaver art? We know what these actors represent, no need to bore us with the details. Is it surprising that an audience can dispose of the backstory trappings that make characters three-dimensional, when we don’t need any overworked effort to recognize romance in a 10-second diamond commercial, or the jungle-thrill of driving a Hummer to the supermarket…? In the age of laptop music and iMovie masterpieces, time and effort are of the past. Quality is now measured in megapixels and value is directly related to the price of plug-ins.

The logo saturated televisionworld that baby boomers have created — the very same instant-gourmet existance Mal wants to defeat — is the only world Johnnie and Molly have ever known. They are nothing but labels, commercials, product placement. Reputation is replaced with brandname recognition. They don’t know who they are or why they’re here, and they certainly don’t extend any effort in finding out, but they know they want to be stars. Their lives are measured in page hits and blogger-like confessions; their audience is anonymous downloads, and Johnnie’s final concert-by-cellphone is cut tragicly short when he implodes from a network overload of wireless callers…. Mal is the real hero here, trying desperately to bring sincerity to advertising, and find friendship in a generation that does nothing but sell him out. Ultimately he makes the mistake of trusting Johnnie, who selfishly steals his girlfriend as quickly as he pirated Mal’s commercials. Don’t trust anyone under 30!