On Wednesday April 9th, I was fortunate to be invited by curator Karla Jasso to a small presentation by a group of Mexican artists at el Laboratrio Arte Alameda, the beautiful colonial church converted into a new media center in the Historic Center of Mexico City.

I had met a few of the people present at the meeting during my stay in Mexico City for Transitio_MX02 last fall, but I had only seen one or two works by the artist presenting that afternoon. I came away from the meeting impressed and excited by the work that I had seen. Some of the work reminded me of projects I saw coming out of Carnegie Mellon University in the 90s, but entirely re-contextualized by the environment and culture of Mexico.

For example Gilberto Esparza’s robotic urban parasite series recalled the work of Simon Penny, particularly projects such as Petit Mal or Sympathetic Sentience. As Simon puts it: “robotic artwork which is truly autonomous; which is nimble and has ‘charm’; that senses and explores architectural space and that pursues and reacts to people…” However Gilberto Esparza’s creations are the rougher, tougher, streetwise cousins of Penny’s works.

Inspired by the street vendors (ambulantes) of Mexico City, who set up a sidewalk shop and will take electricity from a near by electrical post to establish a cozy store with light, television and radio, Esparaza’s “Parasitos Urbanos” (Urban Parasites) use the electric cables for power and as a means of movement. Pictured below are mrñ (maraña), dblt (diablito - little devil), “clgd” (colgado - hanging). Each of these creatures feeds from the electric cables that they use as a mode of transportation, they emit sound and through a series of sensors react to their surroundings. Watch the linked videos to see them in action. As much as I like the hanging species, I think that my creatures exist with the trash - ppndr-s (pepenadores) live near the gutters amongst the trash, playing, moving objects about.

Ivan Puig also presented his work. I was most intrigued by a current collaborative project in which he is creating a vehicle that will drive along abandoned railroads throughout Mexico. The vehicle will document these regions that were once vital economic hubs, but have been left abandoned as the railroads are no longer in use. People will be able to virtually ride along these abandoned tracks in real time by login to the site that will present live streams from the vehicle. Ivan also presented a large scale sound installation that recycles old technology to create a series of instruments that people may interact with.

Also amongst the presenters was Laboratorio Curatorial 060, a curatorial collaborative group that addresses various social issues by programming thematic exhibitions that commission new works from artists.

Artist Ivan Abreu presented his poetic combination of conceptual and new media art. Amongst my favorite of Ivan’s recent works is a sound performance using a record made from ice with Mexico’s National Anthem pressed onto it. He plays the anthem on a record player, but as it plays the ice begins to crack and melt, the record breaks and the artist struggles to keep it together so that it will continue to play.

In the midst of globalization, real-time communication networks, and the structuring of artistic production into a market-based system from education to the museums and galleries, it’s difficult to find artistic production that isn’t influenced by 20th century Western avant garde movements. What I find striking and exciting are the regional nuances that contemporary art production incorporates or that the most creative element by the artist is the manner that ideas and production are transformed according to the reality at hand.

We live in a cultural collage, that is to say, that the world is an assemblage of histories, people, products that traverse the globe. Through the sharing of information and knowledge, once distinct lineages of production are no longer distinct to a particular time or place, so it’s interesting to see how this information is hybridized in different locales. I’m not saying that this is anything new, it’s just fun to see it in the new media landscape and to pay witness to it (perhaps it just means that I’m getting old).

Following my opening at Vox Populi on Friday, one person commented that sequences of my animation reminded her of the animations of Harry Smith. Not being familiar with Harry Smith, I searched for his work and discovered the animation above on YouTube, where several others are available.

Although technically I appreciate Smith’s strictly geometric abstractions, I’m much more drawn to this particular animation that presents figurative characters set against the geometric lights and shapes. It seems that his interest in anthropology presented Smith with a wide array of characters to draw from such as Buddhist deities. Considering the animation tools of the period, Smith’s films are inspiring in so far as the work of one man who was also a folk music archavist, sound artist and mystic.

My installation “On Transmitting Ideology” opened this past Friday at the artist run, Philadelphia gallery Vox Populi. The installation presents eleven wooden guns outfitted with radios broadcasting declarations on freedom and transformation in our society.

As I was listening to famous historical speeches concerning U.S. politics, I primarily became interested in the rhetoric that has established “Conservative” vs. “Liberal” ideology in the United States. Unfortunately due to the quality of sound of early 20th century speeches such as an excellent speech by Calvin Coolidge declaring the need for an imperial reach by the United States in the name of liberty, I narrowed the selection to speeches since the second half of the 20th century.

The broadcast is 18 minutes long and begins with the famous declaration by Barry Goldwater “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice and let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” The broadcast includes an excerpt from a debate between Buckley and Chomsky, and excerpts from speeches by Reagan, Martin Luther King, and Obama. For the most part I left the excerpts intact; it is only with King’s speech in opposition to the Vietnam War that I withdrew “Vietnam”, because his arguments against our intervention in Vietnam parallel all to well the current war in Iraq.

Pictured above, in the upper right corner of the gallery on a shelf sit a CD player connected to a miniFM transmitter. On each table are five hand-crafted wooden AK47s and Uzis (one is also mounted on the wall), each gun has an exposed pocket radio tuned to the transmitter.

The exhibition also features two recent video commissions that question the outcome of popular notions of freedom, liberty and the power of capital. “Arbol que nace torcido, nunca su rama enderece” (”Tree that is born twisted will never straighten”) is an animation created for the public commission “Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21″ (2007) that tells a tale of immigration, aging and cultural and familial loss. Two aging television super heroes, Ultraman and El Chapulin Colorado take the voices of my parents as they look back upon their lives and consider the price of immigration. The video “El Rito Apasionado” (2007) (commissioned for 50,000 Beds) takes place in a hotel room where three Guevarrian Neo-Marxist Latino Terror Revolutionaries from Cuba, Nicaragua and Mexico gather to prepare an act against the history of U.S. intervention.

“On Transmitting Ideology” will be open to the public Wednesday through Sunday noon – 6pm. For more information please contact Vox Populi: 215 238 1236

After a week of tearing up radios, building small noise circuits and preparing wooden guns for the insurgency act of Moving Forest, it finally came together on Friday and it was great fun. View documentation of the Radio Gun Revolt.

Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse organized the Moving Forest, a 12 hour sonic performance for transmediale that ocurred Friday from 11am to 11pm. Moving Forest is a reinterpretation of the final 12 minutes of Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood”, a film based on Macbeth - a premise for a sound performance that is all too fitting for the 2008 transmediale as the theme this year is CONSPIRACY

Previously I had been working on a project involving an electronic circuit and wooden guns, Martin liked the guns very much and asked me if I’d bring them to transmediale. However, the only sound on the circuits is a beep, so for Moving Forest, I replaced the original circuit with radios and other circuits that merely make noise and with 20 volunteers we marched from Siegessauele, Berlin’s Victory Column to transmediale, meeting up other armies of insurgency along the way and we stormed the castle - Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Culture). Each group was transmitting its own broadcast (I was transmitting from my backpack to the immediate area), but upon gathering before the stairs of HKW we all switched to the same transition for one noisy insurgency. Here are a few still from a video documentation of the insurgency:

Arcangel Constantini has modified an old Mexican urban sport - “el toque” or touch - a late night practice of electrocution in order to continue drinking on festive nights. In some neighborhoods of Mexico City on Friday or Saturday nights, men walk around with a device that will give a customer an electric shock for 5 pesos. Arcangel has created his own device that beyond the means for electrocution also carries a video camera that captures the image of the participant while receiving electroshock as well as a speaker and a series of dials that allow Arcangel to modulate the level of electrocution and the sounds generated by the electricity. The touch is presented in a beautifully crafted box with very popular and traditional motifs.

TRANSITIO commissioned a new work from me, so I proposed “Carreta Nagua, siglo XXI.” Prior to arriving in Mexico City, I created a 9 minute animation in which two television super heroes originally created in the mid to late 60 and widely seen in Latin America discuss the effects of globalization, immigration and personal loss due to cultural transitions. The two characters are Chapulin Colorado, the comic super hero of the long running TV show Chespirito and Ultraman, the Japanese intergalactic alien super hero. The narrative is based on my parent’s move back to Nicaragua after 45 years of living in San Francisco, CA. As a passenger takes a ride in the rickshaw through the colonial park, Alameda Central in Mexico City’s historical center they watch the animation. The title Carreta Nagua is co-opted from the Nicaraguan folk tale in which a haunted cart is pulled by two skeletal oxen and driven by death. If the cart arrives at your home someone is to die. The tale was established by the indigenous people of Nicaragua who during the colonial period they were taken by the Spaniards on cart to work the mines. These people died in the mines and only reappeared as corpses carried on these same carts. The cart became a symbol of death to the indigenous people.

Kaffe Matthews famous for her sonic beds has constructed a sonic bench with an 8 channel sound system that travels through the bodies of those sitting upon the bench. From the bench eminates an excellent electronic composition that is relaxing while one’s body is massaged via the pulses of the speakers within the bench. Kaffe views the bench as an instrument that she invites others to compose pieces for the sonic bench.

Gustavo Romano brought his “Pieza con globos Nro 2 y Nro3″ to Mexico City in which large red balloons are released into the sky with a single channel video camera that captures the image of the city as the balloons fly away. The action was performed in the historic center next to a bar which screened the real-time image of the camera has it floated away. The piece is quite poetic as the people, streets, buildings and city grow smaller and smaller and yet more expansive.

Floating Lab Collective set up video booths around town to record requests for protests as part of their “Protest on Demand” initiative. The protests collected in Mexico City were then enacted in Washington DC by participants and volunteers.

Fran Ilich set up an autonomous zone - “SubComandancia” in a trailer that was broadcasting via FM frequency and online as lectures, theater, discussions and panels were held within the space.

Graffiti Research Lab did a workshop for the Free Synthesis curatorial project in which they painted and decorated and old school bus, made LED throwies and then in the evening beamed laser graffiti onto the side of an abandoned building across Alameda Central.

Mario de Vega presents a machine that drops coins equivalent to the minimum wage of the various states of Mexico.

As a conceptual premise, TRANSITIO seeks to question what is community, how is it constructed as a social concept and as physical reality. The museum Laboratorio Arte Alameda houses two curatorial projects Im_polis…(Place of Relation) curated by Ale de la Puente, Rogelio Sosa, Ivan Abreu and Karla Jasso and (dis)COOMmunities curated by Laboratorio 060 both are part of TRANSITIO. One other curatorial grouping Free Synthesis is primarily located at the Center of the Image. The three curatorial endeavors began nearly a year ago as Jose Luis Barrios lead a seminar that reconsidered the modes of art exhibition. As the seminar proceeded the participants formed curatorial groupings with varying perspectives and TRANSITIO began to take shape.

“Bright Future Ahead” (2006) by Jan Verbeek is a four-channel video installation in a white cube. The videos have been shot in Japan and present sequences that toggle between nature and saturated urban spaces.

The phrase “El Trabajo Embellece” (Labor Beautifies) by Jose Marti is superimposed upon the floor of the museum and a sander activated by museum visitors erases the phrase from the floor over time.  This is a work by the Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza.

“Moving” (2007) Raquel Kogan is a black cube video installation. The video projected onto one wall follows an open air moving truck, filled with home goods - mattresses, a television, other furniture and at the very rear of the truck a mirror. The truck drives through the streets of Sao Paolo. A few feet before the mirror is a spot light intended for the viewer to step into and when one does, the viewer’s image appears on the mirror.

Jaime Ruiz Otis has created a Zen Garden in a traditional manner, but with non-traditional materials. He built a rake to lay down the design on to shredded silicon that composes the ground of the zen garden. amongst the gray ground of silicon are partly burried televisions. The zen garden presents a reflection of the waste generated by today’s popular technologies.

Australian sound artist and sculptor Nigel Helyer (a.k.a. Dr Sonique) has created a visually stricking installation in which a series of structures holding crickets are located between two projections, one that shows a pixelated video of a professor lecturing on crickets and the second a visualization of the audio as 200 crickets listen to the lecture.  The installation is titled “Host” (2002).

Toni Mestrovic has created a hypnotizing video loop with surround sound. The video consists of three superimposed sequences of a man’s hands forming a stone that will be part of his home. The three video sequences have a slight time difference to create a layered effect, but for a moment, all three sequences converge to create one single video image. The hands belong to Toni’s father who is currently reconstructing his childhood home. It is a stone home built in an ancient manner, without mortar or cement. Each stone is shaped by his hands to be placed as part of the structure. The sound is not clearly defined, but it suggests the sound of the hands against the rock as it moves throughout the side naive’s interior.

The designer and architect Jorge Perez designed an inflatable structure to serve as a hub for the various curated projects of (dis)COMmunities, since many of the projects are occurring on the street or between locations. The hub is also serving as a temporary meeting place for various organizations.

Other works include a beautifully shot video of a businessman with a briefcase riding a bull and eventually loosing all his documents as the briefcase flies open by Gonzalo Lebrija.  A sound installation titled “The Sound of Mercado Libre” by Ubermorgen.com.  A gorgeous video that only presents information - adds, billboards, icons, street signals in the streets of a European city, all else is black.  The work is titled “Kapitaal” by Studio Smack.

Friday October 12th was the big kick off for TRANSITIO_MX02, International Festival of Electronic Arts and Video taking place throughout Mexico City. Comprised of three curatorial projects - Free Synthesis, (dis)COMmunities and IM-POLIS, an open call competition, electronic music concerts, artist workshops and a conference, the festival is taking place at three locations: the National Center for the Arts (CENART), Laboratorio Arte-Alameda and Centro de la Imagen.

The initial opening and concert was at CENART which is housing the exhibition of finalists from the open call for the TRANSITIO prize. Many of the finalists were represented by video documentation such as Usman Haque’s “Open Burble.” There was a beautifully shot three panel video projection by Erik Olofsen titled “Drives”. Below are a few projects installed in the Art Center’s gallery.

My favorite project which is visually striking, conceptually intriguing and offers free packaged Mexican dirt is “Tierra y Libertad” (Earth and Liberty) (2007) by Ivan Puig based in Mexico. Puig has constructed a machine that deposits dirt taken from the base of CENARTS into red plastic cups that are then deposited into plastic bags that are sealed and stamped for the visitors to take.

SARoskop (2007) by Karin Lingnau and Martin Hesselmeier based in Cologne visualizes the electromagnetic waves in the immediate area. If one uses their cell phone near the grid-like installation SARoskop, the objects come alive, moving horizontally on a rail that each component is mounted on and displaying the frequency of the call.

A second physical computing project installed at the exhibition is VEHICLE (2007) by Gerardo García de la Garza, a robotic arm that duplicates Joseph Beuys signature triggered by visitors who approach the work. Visitors are free to take a signed sheet.

Separate from the finalists’ exhibition, in its own gallery at CENART is installed Ken Rinaldo’s “Augmented Fish Reality”, a well travelled installation in which Siamese Fighting fish drive the robotic pedestals that the bowls sit on.

TRANSITIO continues through October 20th, over the next week I’ll continue to document other pieces of this giant festival, including the keynote presentation by Gunalan Nadarajan, the curated exhibitions and as many of the panels that I can attend while executing my own commission in the park Alameda Central.

El Parque Alameda Central is filled with people on Sundays.  Musicians, merchants, families, tourists and this Sunday was a beautiful clear day, perfect for a nice tour through the park on a rickshaw.  Most people questioned the fact that the ride would be free, but once a few people were convinced many more waited to be taken for a ride and watch the animation.  People seemed to enjoy the animated narrative that featured El Chapulin Colorado and Ultraman discussing personal changes due to migration.

The cart is finalized with rooftop, panel for the display, painted and ready to take people on tours of the park.

Putting the final pieces of the frame work of the cart, before painting and adding all the details.