After ferrying over to the beach community of Fire Island last summer, we attended the inaugural Fire Island Opera Festival. With the image of the grandeur of traditional opera burned into our minds, we were…
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Among the dust in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada, we spent six days braving the mayhem of the 2013 Burning Man Festival. There were plenty of interesting and strange characters roaming the playa, but…
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Dimensions, Croatia’s four-day underground electronic music festival, is a veritable force for any fan to take on. The festival’s UK-based team gathers over 300 artists to perform in Fort Punta Christo’s seven unique venues, and…
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Pack your bags this month for Narrowsburg, New York and make a weekend out of Pig Mountain’s annual pig roast on 24 August 2013. This is the event’s third year of pig roasting and it looks…
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by Maj Hartov A celebration of art and creative practices, the LungA festival on the east coast of Iceland invites attendees to partake in a full week of activities during July each year. Set in a…
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Weave your way through the fair with a handy tool that fits right in your back pocket
Like many of the world’s art and design fairs, when the London Design Festival began 10 years ago, the biggest challenge was actually navigating the event itself. Always teeming with a surplus of exciting offerings from across the creative disciplines, fairs present a vast array of work under one…
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Two Düsseldorf artists bring their photo fanzines to the city’s experimental music festival
A combination of experimental art and music, the Open Source Festival hits Düsseldorf this Saturday, and two of the city’s leading artists will be there peddling the latest issue of their notoriously coveted fanzines. Produced in limited edition, Issue #41—entitled “Das März Heft”—comprises eight evocative images creators Katja Stuke and Oliver Sieber shot in Japan last March. Out of their standard run of 105 copies, 15 pack an extra special punch accompanied by a clear vinyl record from Elektrohorror, a project by Düsseldorf musician Sven Vieweg.
Festival-goers that don’t get their hands on the special OSF issue can still take home a unique edition. Stuke and Sieber are bringing enough photographs with them for around 50 people to create their own zine. Once the fanzines sell out and the festival is over, they will release a final batch of 35 copies, still comprised of entirely different photos reflecting their time spent in Tokyo, Sendai and Osaka, which will also be available for purchase online.
The creative duo behind Germany’s subversive ANTIFOTO photo show (which this year included Jason Evans, Ted Partin and Olivier Cablat to name a few), Stuke and Sieber are known for their candid portraits and have an extensive roster of international exhibitions in their portfolio along with their self-published zines. Pick one up from their website for €65, where you can check out several other books and projects.
Illustrations revisit the Roaring Twenties
by Joanna Prisco
For the last six months, New Yorkers have been hotly anticipating The Great GoogaMooga, a free food and music festival to take place in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this weekend, 19-20 May. Created by Superfly Presents—founders of Bonnaroo and Outside Lands—the GoogaMooga has sparked much dialogue among summer concertgoers for shifting the spotlight from the stage to the concessions. While food lies at the heart of the inaugural fest there’s a focus on design that sets it apart from its ubiquitous predecessors.
Superfly tapped the Rockwell Group to craft the aesthetic of the grounds, marrying a carnival atmosphere with 1960s-era spirit from which the festival takes its name. But at a handful of exclusive gatherings being held inside the Extra Mooga paid-ticketed area, guests will be transported even further back in time to a roaring, golden age.
“There will be four parties inside of the Boathouse,” explains Superfly co-founder Jonathan Mayers. “And they will all have a 1920s vibe, with each hosting chefs such as Marcus Samuelsson, The John Dory Oyster Bar, Fedora or Monkey Bar pairing food and drinks to that time period.”
To further infuse the ambience with ’20s flair, Mayers commissioned Paris-based illustrator Rick Tulka to create posters featuring New Yorker-esque caricatures of the events.
“I was introduced to Rick a few years ago by a mutual friend and I’m a huge fan of illustrations,” said Mayers. “So we sent him a bunch of images of Marcus, Gabe Stulman and imagery from the Monkey Bar and let him kind of run with it.” Having spent the past 36 years illustrating for publications ranging from MAD Magazine to The Wall Street Journal, Tulka’s creative process was uninhibited by the fact that his subjects were across the Atlantic.
“Since I am a humorous illustrator, it really helps when the client has a good sense of humor too,” said Tulka. “For me, the 1920s theme added a really nice touch to the feel of the images.” In keeping with the look of that decade, Tulka suggested the idea to print the posters in sepia. And since the illustrations were all caricatures with a main subject, he kept the backgrounds more line and less tone.
“I wanted the subjects to pop out,” said Tulka, who sprinkled various food-focused details throughout the posters with piles of shucked oysters on the floor here and knife-and-fork cufflinks there. The result is both charming and appetizing. “When the illustrator and the client are on the same page and work well together, it makes for a fun job,” said Tulka. “Oh, and listening to 1920s jazz while working didn’t hurt either!”
A series of experimental audio guides asks listeners to discern the truth about art
For their fifth annual fall festival, the French Institute Alliance Française turned the average museum audio tour into a mysterious game of fact or fiction. Made in collaboration with the conceptual sound collective Soundwalk, “Crossing the Line” leads listeners on an hour and a half tour of NYC’s Museum Mile along 5th Avenue, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Neue Gallerie, the Guggenheim and Central Park. The five remarkable writers narrating the tour devised authentic or imagined stories that ask the question “What do we rely on to determine the truth from fiction?”—this year’s festival theme.
Available in French and English, each of the five audio segments can be downloaded from the Soundwalk website and played individually if you’re only interested in a particular museum or played together as the full tour.
The tour begins at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with American writer and art historian Teju Cole and then the French novelist and poet Olivier Cadiot. With experimental sounds laying the backdrop to these intriguing stories, the listener becomes entranced with the tales, never knowing if they’re real or dreamed up. The tour continues at the the Neue Gallerie’s Cafe Sabarsky with writer and professor Phillippe Claudel, before moving on with writer Camille Laurens, who guides you through the Guggenheim. Finally, poet and performance artist John Giorno ends the tour with a collection of poems as you join him just inside Central Park at the reservoir.
Running through 16 October 2011, a full list of events for the fall festival is available from FIAF. The audio tour is available for download or to listen online at the Soundwalk site.
Crowd-sourced film festival exhibits work from new cinematic talent
I recently stopped by the 2nd annual Kickstarter Film Festival to do some sleuthing on up-and-coming film makers. The festival screens a collection of curated Kickstarter projects, including documentaries, animation and products. It was a perfect evening to enjoy some video outdoors and Kickstarter’s partnership with Rooftop Films facilitated an impressive set up in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn, NY. All 16 of the films shown are definitely worth a look, but the four below are standouts.
“The Twelve O’ Clock Boyz,” a documentary by director Lofty Nathan, follows three different Baltimore City residents, all deeply involved in the illegal dirt-bike riding scene.
This practice of rallying, racing and showboating in city streets has become deeply ingrained in the urban culture of The City That Reads, but the illegal and dangerous nature has made it a contentious issue between the communities involved. Born from a rising tension between social and economic classes within the city, the dirt bike culture has come to epitomize rebellion, release and expression for marginalized communities. Nathan explores these relationships and the deeper issues that gave birth to this subculture in what promises to be a fascinating look inside the contemporary existence of urban communities.
Most of us are familiar with Richard Nixon, as well as Watergate and the infamous tape recordings which emerged from it. Our Nixon takes advantage of another set of recordings from this era —previously unreleased Super-8 footage recorded within and around the Nixon White House by some of his closest associates.
In all, 204 reels of “home movies” were confiscated by the FBI as part of the Watergate investigation. This never before seen material offers an interesting look at the everyday goings-on surrounding one of the more scandalous administrations in American history.
Shot by Chief of Staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Chief Domestic Advisor John Ehrlichman and Special Assistant to the President Dwight Chapin, the three took to documenting all kinds of seemingly trivial occurrences. Truly believing they were part of a revolutionary turning point in American history, even Easter egg collection on the Front Lawn was deemed worthy of historical import. Delusions aside, the film—which makes use of the footage by way of a campy trajectory and hilarious montages, combined with selected clips from Nixon’s recorded phone calls—effectively offers insight into the unseen aspects of the Executive Office. You can support documentarians Penny Lane and Brian Frye by pre-ordering a DVD from their site as the film is still in production.
Extremely touching, The Elders (subtitled “Everyone is a story”) explores of life lessons told through the experience of a series of senior citizens. Director Nathaniel Hansen spoke with people all over the country and from a wide variety of backgrounds, from coal miners to engineers. In each portrait, the characters talk about their experiences, and as their stories unravel we get a distinct window on how certain things change with age but many, like love and loss, remain constant through generations. Check out the official trailer above and head to the webpage for upcoming screenings and news.
One of the most visually impressive pieces of the festival, The Beast Pageant, follows Abe on his adventurous escape from his mundane crushing existence. Abe lives in a city where he resides alone, only accompanied by a giant machine that spits out his essentials for survival. A mysterious series of events, culminating in a tiny singing cowboy bursting from his stomach, sets Abe off on an adventure of a lifetime. With an impressive cast of characters and the bizarre world Abe finds himself in, the film is enchanting, engulfing the viewer into a trance-like state of mystery and intrigue.
Shot on a 16mm Bolex that writers and directors Albert Birney and Jon Moses claim they found in a dumpster, the film combines great storytelling with fantastic costumes, animations and set design serving as an exceptional example of what a group of determined people can accomplish with little-to-no cash. The film is available on DVD or for download at Indiepix. Check out the site for more info on how this piece came together in a one-room studio in a Rochester, NY factory.
The Kickstarter Film Festival is an excellent reminder of the importance crowd-sourced funding can play in the creation and encouragement of new media and artistic expression. Be sure to keep up with these emerging filmmakers and explore other creative projects that need help getting off the ground—all these films prove that a little support can go a long way.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
