[BA-NEWMUS-EVENTS:6166] detritus.net night in the LSG New Music Series, 7/22/04, 8pm

Mon Jul 19 20:06:18 PDT 2004

Please join us, this promises to be a fascinating evening...

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mundane media & (not)quiet presents
detritus.net night in the LSG New Music Series @
LUGGAGE STORE GALLERY
1007 Market St. @ 6th St
San Francisco, California USA
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Synthesizer Summit I
featuring Amar Chaudhary, Will Grant,
Scot Gresham-Lancaster, Synthia Payne,
LX Rudis, and Jim Ryan on vintage hardware

&

Video Work by Sarah Lockhart

Thursday, July 22 8:00 PM
$6-10 sliding scale (no one turned away)

Set 1 - Synth 1
Set 2 - Videos
Set 3 - Synth 2

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Synthesis Summit I includes a variety of local experimental and/or
underground musicians on a selection of historical instruments
in celebration of the lost instrument and its place in our collective
sound consciousness.

Sarah Lockhart is a video artist and cultural activist whose video
work focuses on recontextualization of cultural images.  Sarah
is also well known in the Bay Area as a founder and
Programming Director of 21Grand in Oakland.

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Synth Summit Contributors:

Amar Chaudhary is a longtime composer and performer
specializing in contemporary and electronic music, as
well as a developer of advanced software for sound
synthesis and music composition. He is the principal
designer and developer of the Open Sound World
programming environment for real-time music and audio
applications. Amar has received several honors for his
musical work, including a 1992 premier of his clarinet
quartet at Weill Recital Hall in New York, and has since
had his music performed internationally. Amar remains
actively involved in local electronic and experimental
music in the San Francisco Bay Area. More information
about  Amar's music and research interests can be
found at www.amarchaudhary.com.

Will Grant (aka Grey Otter) has been doing more or less
performance in SF since 1971, when he was Dr. Icky Poo
with the Angels of Light. For a couple of years he played
a Casio keyboard in the streets with a boom box. Recently
he went to Mills and UCSC, and now he's academically
rigorous. Sort of.   http://www.greyotter.com

SCOT GRESHAM-LANCASTER (Oakland, CA) a composer,
performer, and instrument designer, has been active in
electronic and acoustic music for over thirty years. The
current state budget cuts at CSUHayward are threatening
to end his 17 years position as music technology educator there.

He has toured and recorded as a member of the HUB and
Room, Alvin Curran, ROVA saxophone quartet, The Club
Foot Orchestra , and the Dutch ambient group NYX.He has
performed the music of Alvin Curran, John Zorn, and John
Cage, under their direction, and worked as a technical
assistant to Lou Harrison, Iannis Xenakis, David Tudor,
and Pauline Oliveros among many others. His current
projects include his occasional performances as Scot
Gresham-Lancaster's Hot Flaming Skull, The Very
Important (Now) and with FuzzyBunny.

Synthia Payne is a sound artist who came to Santa Cruz
to work on video games, but when the company downsized
she returned to school and is now studying film and digital
media and electronic music at UCSC. Synthia also keeps
busy co-producing experimental music concerts around
Santa Cruz, including Abstract Sound Collage at the Santa
Cruz Museum of Art and History where a dozen sound
artists improvised simultaneously. Synthia also organized
more than 12 electronic music acts for a 2-day stint during
the annual Santa Cruz Digital Arts Festival in April. Her
website is located at http://www.tweakoz.com.

Lx Rudis is an interdisciplinary media artist based in San
Francisco.  He has been active in both commercial and
underground sectors in the San Francisco Bay Area since
the early 1980s. Early contact with groups such as
Tuxedomoon, The Units and SRL led to media work ranging
from radio shows on NPR with members of negativland to
commercial work for ABC affiliate KGO-TV and various
corporate entities.

Jim Ryan is a local icon with a long and interesting personal
history, but significantly to us, in 1993 when he moved to
Oakland and hooked up with the Bay Area Improv Scene. In
1997 he launched his own group "Forward Energy" which
has been performing regularly since then. Jim has also
participated in Marco Eneidi's "American Jungle Orchestra,"
and Eddie Gale's "Orchestra for World Peace."  Jim performs
in a variety of other settings and ensembles as well.

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Sarah Lockhart

Descriptions of Works:

Colonized Pleasure: Seratonin-based response to the
commodity-parasite and the evolution of consumer
society (2003, 11 min.)

"Colonized Pleasure" takes an unusual approach to its
subject--consumer culture. As citizens of a consumer
society, our desires are regularly for and fulfilled by
mass-produced objects embued with meanings not inherent
to them. We rely on these commodities for pleasure.
"Colonized Pleasure" makes the bold assertion that our
object-oriented desire is the result of an infection by a
powerful parasite that lives, feeds, and grows on consumerist
behavior. In fact, this parasite alters our brain chemistry so
that Ikea furniture, a Prada handbag or an ice cold Pepsi,
for example, will cause our brains to release the
pleasure-chemical, seratonin, that nourishes the parasite.
The parasite does not kill its consumer host, it merely makes it
want to go shopping.

Imagery appropriated from television commercials, Hollywood
cinema, and advertisements in other media illustrate the
piece's pseudo-authoritative narrative, which borrows language
and structure from scientific presentations.

"Colonized Pleasure" begins with the evolution of the
commodity-parasite and traces its development through
its intermediate host, the entrepeneur, in which the parasite
grows to maturity. The narrative follows the parasite through its
free-living stage during which it employs strategies such as the
anthropomorphizing act of branding to attact its primary host,
the consumer. It then illustrates the parasite's need to ensure
a genetic future for itself, accomplished through product
placement in Hollywood films, the perfect storage medium for
commodities, as the film is preserved and reproduced on video,
television, and other media for years to come. The narrative
concludes with an observational analysis of the
commodity-parasite's effect on the consumer host, in which
it spends the rest of its life and reproduces.

Suburban Guerrillas (1998, 24 min.) is a collage documentary,
a detournement of super-8 home movies, that examines the
exotic warlike tribe that inhabits America's tract homes. Drawing
from Situationist film practice, the source footage is subtitled
and overdubbed with a soundtrack combining pronouncements
of suburban ideology and signature sounds of their built environment:
jackhammers and alarm clocks. Densely layered to the point of
being brutally excessive, this video effectively deconstructs the stock
footage of suburban family life, through visual and textual metaphor
and crackpot theories.

Bio: Sarah Lockhart's media works are primarily video collage
essays that foray into mundane aspects of cultural anthropology,
appropriating footage from Hollywood movies, television
commercials, educational and industrial films, and other sources.
Her videos aim to deconstruct and demythologize popular culture
and common assumptions, through playing with narrative forms
and structures associated with authority. Her work has a strong
writerly element, and one of its greatest strengths is its
juxtaposition of images and words. Lockhart's work has shown
at ATA, The Lab, the SF Indiefest's Digital Underground Festival,
and various other local venues with brief life spans. She is a
founder and the Programming Director of 21 Grand in Oakland.

Sarah Lockhart studied video at Brown University, where she
received a BA in Modern Culture and Media, and has an MA
in Broadcasting from SFSU.

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For Gallery info tel: 415.255.5971
email: luggagestore509 at hotmail.com
For detritus.net nights booking or info
email Bob Boster: boster at pobox.com

for more info visit:
http://www.outsound.org/
http://www.luggagestoregallery.org/
http://www.bayimproviser.com/luggagestore
http://www.detritus.net/events/luggage_store/