Scrapertown from California is a place. on Vimeo.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Monday, August 23, 2010
Julia has a new website!!!
Frequent OPS collaborator and designer extraordinaire Julia Perry has a new website! See it all here
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Post Internet
Post Internet is a great blog about contemporary art. Check out the recent posts titled Performance 1, 2 and 3.
Monday, August 9, 2010
On Land Fest
Root Strata's On Land Festival September 2-5th in SF. Our Portland friends Grouper, Operative, White Rainbow are on the bill so is OPSer Matt Carlson's duo Golden Retriever.
Image Node LED
Jennifer Knipling aka SUPER DUCK turned us onto her LED source: Image Node
they have diy led kits for as low as $60 available!
they have diy led kits for as low as $60 available!
Sunday, August 8, 2010
blast theory
Blast Theory is a seven member UK collective that started in the early 90's.
http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/type_games.html
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Dream Theory in Malaya
Dream Theory in Malaya
I've been really inspired by Jon Hassell's music lately, and found this article on his website by anthropologist Kilton Stewart. It's about the practice of dream interpretation amongst the Senoi people on the Malayan peninsula and its importance to their way of life and society. Pretty fascinating.
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Thursday, July 22, 2010
OPS at the Tate
Here's the Tate's video about the event No Soul for Sale, that OPS was a part of
this year. We're in the latter half of the video.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Saturday, July 17, 2010
Friday, July 16, 2010
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Monday, July 12, 2010
Nam June Psyche / Valerie George
OPS is gonna record with valerie in portland tonight, we're excited about it!
http://namjunepsyche.com/home.html
http://namjunepsyche.com/home.html
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Review of Cruizn' by DJ Glendening
OPS/FuturePast by Daniel J Glendening
Last Thursday evening I attended a performance by the Oregon Painting Society at Appendix space in Portland. I’ve seen a few of OPS’ projects in the past; they are usually intriguing, but also a little confusing. There are elements that can be dissected, but somehow when placed in conjunction things feel confused.
The performance on Thursday consisted of several young men and women of the group making noises with their constructed art-objects/instruments. There was a woman with a spinning wheel, a man with an object that resembled in shape a bed, the top surface covered with wood paneling laminate and several light switches/dimmers he was manipulating to make sounds, a man with what may have been some sort of Theremin, though I’m not sure, and in the rear at one side of the group a woman with black gloves wired up to something, and across the room a man with two black rods that looked something like microphones and something like aircraft controllers light-up rods. There were other objects as well, filling out the set. Several of the members were dressed in all black, with thick black sunglasses, like an 80’s future-techno band, or the robot kid from Wet Hot American Summer. Some of the members were dressed in regular street clothes.
Like I said earlier, there are elements that can be sifted out. There is what seems to be a noise band, not terribly different than many other noise bands, who use circuit bending to make machines to make noises and perform without much of a structure but a reveling in the manipulation of technology and the bodily sensations of sound/noise. There are the references to futurism, to a future that never occurred. There are also references to representations of the past, in the wood paneling and the spinning wheel, to the idealized bohemian era of the late 60s/early 70s.
What these all mean when mashed up together, though, I’m not sure.
I was born in the early 80s. I grew up in a small town in northern California. I didn’t really listen to the radio much, but I remember my dad’s record collection, and “Fire on the Mountain” and “Across the Great Divide” playing on the radio in his black Ford pickup. We had a small black-and-white television for a good chunk of my childhood; we got a color television with turning knob channel selectors when I was maybe nine, inheriting it from my great aunt who passed away. We still only received about five channels, though.
I remember getting our first computer, a gift from my uncle. It was large and bulky, and its screen was black with green text. I only remember playing a game on it, which was a largely text-based dungeons and dragons-esque adventure. We upgraded the computer when I was in eighth grade, I think. It was in color! We could get the Internet!
Cable television is unavailable at the house I grew up in, because of its location, but my parents installed one of those miniature satellites shortly after I left for college. My brother is seven years younger than I, and was, thus, roughly 11 when I left for college. More so than I (but probably less so than some of his peers) he grew up with the Internet, cable television, and the rest. There is, I think, a fundamental difference in the ways in which I and those my brother’s age approach the internet, social networking, cell phones, etc. There seems to be a freedom and fluidity in the ways in which some approach social networking sites like facebook or MySpace, in which the walls between private and public lives dissolve and disappear. This is the generation of the mash-up, the re-mix, and the diary confessional as public discourse. This is what has borne the work of artists like Ryan Trecartin, who filters queer/punk identity through the aesthetic sensibility of the Internet and MTV.
All that aside, however, there is something exciting happening in the work of Oregon Painting Society. They seem to exist in an amorphous state, both a band and an art collective, but at the same time neither. There is a sense of revisiting the past in order to imagine the future, or conversely, visiting the future in order to reimagine the past. In many ways, we’re a culture that is stuck waiting for a future that never arrived, or is late to arrive, and we’re just hoping to avoid devastation long enough to bear witness to the manifestation of the promises which were made decades ago of a cooperative world in which everyone zips around in flying cars and goes on dates with robots and women with three breasts.
Make some noise; it’s still night in America.
Last Thursday evening I attended a performance by the Oregon Painting Society at Appendix space in Portland. I’ve seen a few of OPS’ projects in the past; they are usually intriguing, but also a little confusing. There are elements that can be dissected, but somehow when placed in conjunction things feel confused.
The performance on Thursday consisted of several young men and women of the group making noises with their constructed art-objects/instruments. There was a woman with a spinning wheel, a man with an object that resembled in shape a bed, the top surface covered with wood paneling laminate and several light switches/dimmers he was manipulating to make sounds, a man with what may have been some sort of Theremin, though I’m not sure, and in the rear at one side of the group a woman with black gloves wired up to something, and across the room a man with two black rods that looked something like microphones and something like aircraft controllers light-up rods. There were other objects as well, filling out the set. Several of the members were dressed in all black, with thick black sunglasses, like an 80’s future-techno band, or the robot kid from Wet Hot American Summer. Some of the members were dressed in regular street clothes.
Like I said earlier, there are elements that can be sifted out. There is what seems to be a noise band, not terribly different than many other noise bands, who use circuit bending to make machines to make noises and perform without much of a structure but a reveling in the manipulation of technology and the bodily sensations of sound/noise. There are the references to futurism, to a future that never occurred. There are also references to representations of the past, in the wood paneling and the spinning wheel, to the idealized bohemian era of the late 60s/early 70s.
What these all mean when mashed up together, though, I’m not sure.
I was born in the early 80s. I grew up in a small town in northern California. I didn’t really listen to the radio much, but I remember my dad’s record collection, and “Fire on the Mountain” and “Across the Great Divide” playing on the radio in his black Ford pickup. We had a small black-and-white television for a good chunk of my childhood; we got a color television with turning knob channel selectors when I was maybe nine, inheriting it from my great aunt who passed away. We still only received about five channels, though.
I remember getting our first computer, a gift from my uncle. It was large and bulky, and its screen was black with green text. I only remember playing a game on it, which was a largely text-based dungeons and dragons-esque adventure. We upgraded the computer when I was in eighth grade, I think. It was in color! We could get the Internet!
Cable television is unavailable at the house I grew up in, because of its location, but my parents installed one of those miniature satellites shortly after I left for college. My brother is seven years younger than I, and was, thus, roughly 11 when I left for college. More so than I (but probably less so than some of his peers) he grew up with the Internet, cable television, and the rest. There is, I think, a fundamental difference in the ways in which I and those my brother’s age approach the internet, social networking, cell phones, etc. There seems to be a freedom and fluidity in the ways in which some approach social networking sites like facebook or MySpace, in which the walls between private and public lives dissolve and disappear. This is the generation of the mash-up, the re-mix, and the diary confessional as public discourse. This is what has borne the work of artists like Ryan Trecartin, who filters queer/punk identity through the aesthetic sensibility of the Internet and MTV.
All that aside, however, there is something exciting happening in the work of Oregon Painting Society. They seem to exist in an amorphous state, both a band and an art collective, but at the same time neither. There is a sense of revisiting the past in order to imagine the future, or conversely, visiting the future in order to reimagine the past. In many ways, we’re a culture that is stuck waiting for a future that never arrived, or is late to arrive, and we’re just hoping to avoid devastation long enough to bear witness to the manifestation of the promises which were made decades ago of a cooperative world in which everyone zips around in flying cars and goes on dates with robots and women with three breasts.
Make some noise; it’s still night in America.
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