On Sunday May 18th at 8pm, Klaus Weber will give a talk about his work. Past works by Mr. Weber include sidewalk-destroying mushrooms, choral crickets, a car crashed into a functional fire hydrant (turned fountain) and LSD. He is currently working on a massively oversized Satanic wind chime.

Then next Friday May 23rd, Trevor Paglen is coming to talk about how state secrets, covert military bases, and people that don’t exist are related to iron-on patches.

All FREE!

an earbee.

Please join us for the latest in our semi-regular series of poets paired with sound artists. This installment features poet, critic and novelist Aaron Kunin with artist Sara Roberts. Sara Roberts (and you!) will be presenting/performing/experiencing audience-based sound experiments with earbees. Aaron will be reading from his new novel The Mandarin.

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What’s an earbee? It’s a simple hand-held sound recorder and playback unit. Earbees come in a set of thirteen. They record and playback up to a minute of looped, reasonably high-quality sound, and anyone, kid or adult, can figure out how to use them in a matter of minutes.

What do people do with them? They think of things to do with them. The earbees were invented as devices for playing sound and word games, and they’ve been used in sound compositions, plays, dances, installations, and more. They’re really good with a group of people. After a few warm-up exercises to make everyone aware of the pleasures of a loop, the sound, word, phrasing, and rhythmic possibilies inherent in thirteen different sound sources … there are sure to be some ideas.

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What’s an Aaron Kunin? Aaron Kunin is a poet, critic, and novelist. He is the author of acollection of small poems about shame, Folding Ruler Star (Fence Books, 2005); a chapbook, Secret Architecture (Braincase, 2006); and a novel, The Mandarin (Fence, 2008). He lives in California and is assistant professor of negative anthropology at Pomona College. He has a slogan. Here is his slogan:

BUILDING COMPLICATED MACHINES TO CONFIRM YOUR PREJUDICES.

Here’s a short excerpt from The Mandarin:

“Look at this book,” said Mercy. “Someone has underlined in it with a thick black line. Rather messily too. It seems that the purpose of the line is to obliterate the words and not to emphasize them.”

“Look at this book,” I said. “It doesn’t open. Someone has driven a nail through it and nailed it to another book–what other book I can’t say, because its cover is entirely obscured by the first one.”

“Look at this book,” said Mercy. “It’s glowing. The words are on fire, but not the paper.”

“I can’t look at this book,” said Hallamore. “It glares at me. It’s terrifying.”

“This book burned my hand when I picked it up,” I said. “I dropped it, and the sound it made hitting the floor gave me a sharp pain behind my eyes and in my forehead. It was like a new understanding of how the head is put together, and how much wasted space there is in there, because there were quite large pockets of emptiness where the pain seemed to end.”

“Don’t look at this book,” said Mercy. “I’ve hardly glanced at it, and my eyes are on fire–even now, they are brimming with these useless tears.”

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Friday, May 23rd
8pm

Geographer and artist Trevor Paglen explores the network of hidden budgets, state secrets, covert military bases, and disappeared people that military
and intelligence insiders call the “black world.” Over the course of his talk, Paglen will lead us from “non-existent” Air Force and CIA
installations in the Nevada desert to secret prisons in Afghanistan and to a collection of even more obscure “black sites” startlingly close to home.
Using hundreds of images he has produced and collected over the course of his work, Paglen shows how the black world’s internal contradictions give
rise to a peculiar visual, aesthetic, and epistemological grammar with which to think about the contemporary moment.

They’ve also given rise to an incredible catalog of black-ops iron-on membership patches that have to be seen to be believed. The visual language of patches and symbols from black projects recalls other symbolic systems that have surprisingly long traditions. For millennia, artists and mystics have pondered the question of how to represent that, which by definition, cannot or must not be represented. Sometimes the answer is in repurposed religious symbology; sometimes it’s taking a cue from the Insane Clown Posse.

FREE!

Day Two: Office Hours, Show-n-tell + Tea Party
Sunday June 8th, 12pm - 2pm

$50 Non-members

$40 Members

Here at Machine Project we’re interested in the intersections between Art, Technology, and — oh man did you see that puppy?!

Because we are endlessly distractable by anything absurdly cute, we found it hard to say no when Cheryl Cambras offered to teach a workshop on amigurumi — the Japanese art of knitting or crocheting small stuffed animals and anthropomorphic creatures.

Sign up for our weekend amigurumi class and learn to make the very scary bat below.

Please join us for an artist talk by Klaus Weber on Sunday May 18th at 8pm. Past works by Mr. Weber include sidewalk-destroying mushrooms, choral crickets, a car crashed into a functional fire hydrant and a fountain of potentialized LSD. He is currently working on a massively oversized Satanic wind chime.

FREE!

FREE!

“A slug’s life: sex, color, and new species in the sea” by Patrick Krug
and!
A concert by Fol Chen

Far from your garden-variety, sea slugs are vividly colorful animals that display stunning adaptations to life in the ocean. While snails cower inside cumbersome shells, evolution has freed the slugs to cruise the sea in safety, sporting spectacular warning colors to signal they are not to be trifled with.

Some feed with impunity on poisonous animals, concentrating toxins or stingers from their food into their own bodies for defense. Others are the ultimate vegetarians, incorporating living parts of seaweed cells into their bodies, allowing them to live directly off of sunlight.

Peter Krug studies them as a way to understand how new species form in the sea, and how global warming causes range shifts among coastal organisms — but mainly, he’s drawn to their dramatic sex lives. Peter’s talk will explore the world of frustrated virgins, slug swingers, and inappropriate sex between species, illustrated with videos and slides sure to shock the more prudish of terrestrial vertebrates.

Any terrestrial vertebrates who remain unfazed by the sex lives of slugs will be rewarded with a concert by Fol Chen after the lecture.

monome is brian crabtree and kelli cain, a small company creating adaptable, open-source hardware interfaces used by musicians, artists, and tinkerers world-wide. they will discuss their progression from art practice to sustainable business, emphasizing minimalist design, transparency, and local, responsible production methods. their philosophy on sharing information has both fostered an enthusiastic user community and inspired similar endeavors by like-minded designers. more information on small is beautiful: an approach to design and business

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strings + electrons
8pm Sunday May 11, 2008
FREE

pieces of pretty music by ezra buchla (viola, electrons), amy radunskaya (cello), brian crabtree (magic boxes)

join us for an evening of moving sounds small and large.

more information on strings +electrons

monome is brian crabtree and kelli cain, a small company creating adaptable, open-source hardware interfaces used by musicians, artists, and tinkerers world-wide. they will discuss their progression from art practice to sustainable business, emphasizing minimalist design, transparency, and local, responsible production methods. their philosophy on sharing information has both fostered an enthusiastic user community and inspired similar endeavors by like-minded designers.

pieces of pretty music by ezra buchla (viola, electrons), amy radunskaya (cello), brian crabtree (magic boxes)

join us for an evening of moving sounds small and large.