Media Archeology: Texas Focus 2010
The best treasures are often found in your very own backyard. Aurora Picture Show and the University of Houston Mitchell Center for the Arts present a media archeological dig right from the heartland of Texas featuring artists including Luke Savisky of Austin, Potter Belmar Labs of San Antonio and Graffiti Research Labs of Houston. As part of our annual Media Archeology multimedia festival, these artists will host site-specific media events that explore the past and the present through tools that have been manipulated and repurposed such as film, light, sound, and live performance.
For the opening night of Media Archeology: Texas Focus, Graffiti Research Lab Houston will present a night of laser graffiti, or interactive light. Laser Graffiti is a participatory installation where attendees will use a laser to draw with light on the side of the Menil Collection, just across the street from the Aurora Office and Library. Participate via your cell phone and be heard as your text messages to GRL Houston are turned into graffiti with TextTag and projected onto the wall of the Menil. See graffiti from past and present and experience a live video / music performance piece on the subject of graffiti (Art vs Crime).
The second night of the festival will feature Potter Belmar Labs of San Antonio.
In June of 1969, arsonists set fire to Houston's Heights Theater during a run of the controversial film "I am Curious (Yellow)," by Swedish writer/director, Vilgot Sjöman. Live cinema artists Potter-Belmar Labs will investigate this history within the context of late-60s Houston, taking into account the broader censorship movement of the age as well as the phenomenon of reactionary violence in our own time. Potter-Belmar's live cinema performance will center on a remix of Sjoman’s film, exploiting the kaleidoscope shape of the film in their performance. Mature content warning.
The final night of the festival will feature Luke Savisky of Austin.
Along the bayou on the darkest edge of downtown Houston, the enormous, looming cylindrical shapes of four abandoned grain silos will be brought alive by “E/x,” Luke Savisky's site-specific multi-projection performance installation at the Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s East End site. His recent large-scale interactive work, “Eye of Texas” (see photograph) was projected onto the 85ft tall Green treatment plant water tower and awestruck audiences in downtown Austin for the First Night festival.
For “E/x,” projected faces and bodies of performance participants will move through and interact with the shapes of the silos within pulsing layers of color and motion imagery created for the project by Savisky. Live imagery, original film footage and found elements from his 16mm, 35mm and digital archive will combine to evoke themes of defense, confinement, emergence and transformation. Accompanied by a soundscape composed by ambient masters, Stars of the Lid, the resulting experience will be sure to create a haunting, otherworldly scene against the glimmering urban skyline of Houston.
The three-night festival not only includes a laser light show projected on the side of the Menil Collection with Graffiti Research Labs-Houston, but also a remix of the famous controversial film "I am Curious Yellow" with Potter Belmar Labs in Heights Theater (infamously set on fire during a screening of the film in 1969), and an interactive live projection on the side of the enormous abandoned grain silos in Houston's East End with artist Luke Savisky.
