When I sent the show announcement to the citizens, I mentioned I’d be in town for a few days and available to grab a beer if anyone was interested. We got what I thought were a surprising amount replies, and I managed to see several people, including Boruk, pictured above. I guess an Ambassador’s work is never done.

I can hardly do it justice here, but I took some pictures of the Group Group Show installation with my hand-held camera. I’ll post the images below the cut.

pictured: The Kingpins
Chicks On Speed showed a video, lots of nekkid ladies rockin out in a lush green jungle (?).

Damp’s family tree- each member of the group worked with another member to try and draw the child they would have were they to have progeny. I believe there was flipping of coins to determine sex. See the original portraits above, and the final two children at the bottom.

Selected Originals from the Archives for the Recollection of Collections

There are obviously more groups – my connection is poor right now and each image is taking 3 minutes to load, so I’ll get more up later!

Another thing I did in while I was away was go to a night of the Melbourne International Biennial of Exploratory Music. One of my favorite pieces was by Lukas Simonis from Rotterdam, pictured below.


Trying to write about this kind of music makes me feel illiterate, however I will say that he had an impressive understanding of silence. That, and he was adept at using a flourescent green toothbrush with a guitar.

Other musicians playing during the night I attended were:
– Jérôme Noetinger, who theatrically made amazing sounds come from a reel to reel tape player,
– A band called POST, or maybe a person playing with a band who is known in solo as POST, who switched back and forth between sound pieces and country music
–David Chesworth & Sonia Leber, who filled the room with sounds of a group of 5 women making sighing sounds at intermittant intervals built up and overlapped over time
and
–DJ Downpat. An interesting turn in events lead me to meet Pat at a friend’s birthday party. When he found out I was from Portland, he asked me to hand-deliver a letter to Mississippi Records. The letter is kind of like a fan letter mixed with a request to be able to distribute their music out of an artist run space in Melbourne. Not only that, but Pat was generous to give both me and Mississippi a free CD. Yay! I am enjoying the intrigue of being a carrier pigeon of sorts, and will update the blog once I know what happens with the whole transaction.

Here’s a link to a PDF of unMagazine, with an article including The M.O.S.T. titled, “Conflict, Hierarchy, and Hard Work.” (pg. 22)

Labels: collaboration, MOST, publications

Last night I went to an opening for DAMP, the art group that put together the Group Group show, at the Heidi Museum. There were probably 500 people in attendance, speeches by the Premier and Board Chair of Connex (the people who run the tram system), and then everyone queued to go inside for the show.

DAMP made one of those stand-up scenes, a picture of their group re-enacting the nativity scene, where audience members were invited to go stand behind the image and stick their faces through. The museum volunteers took pictures of people doing it, and posted them on the wall throughout the night.

As an added detail, the museum made t-shirts with DAMP written like the Gary Indiana “love” postage stamp, and all of the waiters (there were at least 20) and volunteers were wearing them. Lucky me, I get to take one home. Won’t The M.O.S.T. be jealous?

Yesterday, I visited with two students, Taree Mackenzie and Simon McGlinn to talk about their current projects at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA).

Both students were curious to know about Portland, and the Social Practice program and we probably spent half the meeting talking about how The M.O.S.T. makes collaboration work for us.

Simon showed me some video documentation of various electrical sculptures he’s made in collaboration with some other students. Taree and I talked about how she’s built moving projectors for her projects but that she wants to try something different, and is researching the Situationists for inspiration.

I ended up sending both of them an email afterwards containing links to the current Brainwaves show at Exit Art, dorkbot pdx, the PSU websites and a variety of other things.

I had a great time doing this, and was thankful to my hostess, Lisa, for setting up the opportunity for me to meet with them.