In conjunction with Rhizome's brand new curated page on Kickstarter, we are featuring select projects from the site on the blog. If you would like to let us know about your fund raising efforts on Kickstarter, shoot us an email at editor(at)rhizome.org
►155 Freeman: Triple Canopy, Light Industry, Public School
This September, three New York-based nonprofits—Triple Canopy, an online magazine, Light Industry, a cinema, and The Public School New York, an open-source classroom with no curriculum—will launch a new arts-and-culture center at 155 Freeman Street, in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Together, our groups will organize performances, classes, artist talks, readings, panels, workshops, concerts, and weekly film screenings—all of which will be open to the public. Most events are free or cost less than $7—and we like it this way!
By contributing to our Kickstarter campaign, you can help us establish this truly alternative space, supporting our first year of programming and the work of the many innovative artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and educators with whom we collaborate.
Throughout 2010, Triple Canopy, Light Industry, and The Public School operated out of a formerly vacant storefront near Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn. We organized a robust and diverse series of nearly 100 programs, which attracted more than 5,000 people. They ranged from an installation of an interactive solar system by artist Matt Mullican; a staging of Melville's “Bartleby” by theater collective Group Theory; an evening with pioneering New York video collective Videofreex, producers of America's first pirate TV station; Urban Foraging, a workshop on the collection and preparation of wild weeds; and Disorganizing Sound, a class on improvised music facilitated by sound artists, musicians, and historians.
►Ghosts - large format giclee prints
This project is comprised of found images of ghosts with descriptive text provided by the photographer (or someone with knowledge of the photo). In an attempt to remove image noise, I repeatedly blurred the images by using a Gaussian function (found in Photoshop) until only their most basic elements were left, revealing the visual "essences" of the ghosts.
I found it interesting to not only further abstract what were, in most cases, already very vague images of apparitions, orbs, and lights, but to combine those abstracted images with the text as supplied by the photographer (or someone with knowledge of the photo). In a way, the text is both a necessary element to provide a context to these formless fields of color, and also an interesting gauge of how we look at and contextualize the unknown (the text from one photo reads: "This was taken at Barnsley Gardens in Georgia last April 2007. There was nothing in this room to cause this orb/ectoplasm to be in this photo. This is incredible and probably the single most amazing ghost pic I've ever seen, let alone taken.").
►Prepared Televisions for Voice
Lately I've been modifitying black and white TVs to make them audio reactive. I've been sussing out variations on the popular Wobblevision hack and I've found a good number of them.
Later this month I've got an installation going up at the Bent Festival in New York, which is an annual festival for circuit benders, audio experimenters, synth builders, and DIY electronics enthusiasts. The project, Prepared Televisions for Voice, will have 15 TVs linked together that create a visual display which reacts to the sound in the room.
