November 12, 2020 - December 15, 2020
ATA Window Gallery presents Almost Public / Semi-Exposed 7 [Video Edition]
November 12 – December 15, 2020
Each November, Artists’ Television Access hosts Almost-Public/Semi-Exposed our annual showcase of public facing performance art installed in the ATA Window Gallery. For the past six years we have presented a wide spectrum of performances including durational dance, physical endurance art, Butoh, avant-garde burlesque, living sculpture, ritual performance, performative writing, experimental music, art games, and other performance forms to crowds that would gather around the window to take a break from their errands, shopping, and dates to take in an unexpected art experience.
Due to the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic we don’t feel comfortable risking performer and audience health by proceeding with our normal November of live performance. We’ve decided to split this year’s Almost-Public/Semi-Exposed into two sessions, a November session dedicated to performance video and a delayed Spring session marking the hopeful return of live performance to the ATA Window Gallery.
Presented with the generous support of The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation.
Schedule:
| Nov 11 – 13 Eliana Dianda IN HER OWN IMAGE Eliana Dianda is a writer and visual artist currently based in San Diego. Her most recent work, IN HER OWN IMAGE, is a three-part series of performances for camera. The work embodies her research on how contemporary female performance and musical artists appropriate Catholic symbols and rituals to create a more expansive female futurity. In these performances, she also explores the trauma from her Catholic faith and education backgrounds as a queer, mentally ill woman. |  |
| Nov 14 – 16 Alien Mac Kitty (AMK) Straight from outer-space to San Francisco! My name is A.M.K which stands for ALIEN MAC KITTY. I make vibes for beings like myself and unlike myself. I’m just here to shift and uplift. My goal is to connect beyond the physical with LOVE. Feel free to follow my IG- ALIENMACKITTY & catch these vibes. LOVE YOU. |  |
| Nov 17 – 19 Claire Bain, Evelyn Eeling, Alfred Hernández FS172020 “FS172020 COVID19 Edition” is the latest in a line of performative works developed by Claire Bain and Alfred Hernandez, a result of two decades of collaborating performance. FS17 in this case can best be described as Figure Streams. Guest artist Evelyn Eeling performs dance with us in cubicle spaces at Art Explosion studios, to echo the cube box form of ATA‘s window. Alfred Hernandez could not perform in person due to transportation issues caused by COVID-19, so he was present via Zoom. Metaphors galore, with a through-line of red. A silent, 13 minute condensed version of the original 45 minute performance. |  |
| Nov 20 – 23 Lisa Frankenstein Lisa Frankenstein for you Would you like a description of me or my number? |  |
| Nov 24 – 26 Selby Sohn & Sarah Borruso Watching You / Watching Me, 2020 Watching You/Watching Me (2020) is a performance piece by Sarah Borruso and Selby Sohn. Selby and Sarah have been thinking about Zoom in terms of the Double Recursion Model: the ‘I know, that you know, that I know, that you know.’ Zoom is a much shallower version: it is an ‘I am watching you, as you are watching me, watch myself.’ Sarah and Selby have been performing this to each other almost every weekend since the pandemic started. The following video documentation is a compilation of four of these performances. | |
| Nov 27 – 29 Lawrence Lindell | |
| Nov 30 – Dec 2 Jenell Del Cid Plastic Flower Plastic flower is a myth/fairy tale examining not only bigotry and hatred but also the escape into the fantasy plastic world of our own curated media environments. The sometimes therapeutic effects of our fantasy worlds but also the inrush of grim reality that finds us no matter how far we plunge into our social media comfort zones. |  |
| Dec 3 – 5 Squid Ink Under Siege | |
| Dec 6 – 8 Adrian Pijoan Visions of Homeworld Visions of Homeworld explores the Reptilian homeplanet as seen through the eyes of Terry, a shapeshifting Reptilian who has spent his entire life on Earth working a 9 to 5 office day job. This is the Reptilian homeworld as it appears to Terry in his dreams and childhood memories of its futuristic cities, majestic mountains, thermal vents, and twin suns. The Reptilians are frequently depicted as a purely evil extraterrestrial species in the world of UFO research, and they have featured heavily as the villains in rightwing conspiracy theories in recent years. Visions of Homeworld is one part of a larger body of work where I explore the Reptilians in a more empathetic light to reclaim these beings and offer a gentler vision of extraterrestrials. |  |
| Dec 9 – 11 Perel | |
| Dec 12 – 15 Mirabelle Jones What Happens Next Will Be Documented by Images and Text What Happens Next Will Be Documented by Images and Text is a series of performances composed by an artificial intelligence and performed by a human. In this twelve hour durational performance, Jones will live stream a series of impromptu performances written by GPT-3: the largest language model in existence. The performances were generated in response to the prompt “An idea for a performance art piece:”. OpenAI’s GPT-3 uses machine learning to produce texts which are difficult to distinguish from those by humans. The language model was trained on the largest dataset of any to-date including articles, books, blog entries, and other texts sourced from the internet. As a result, however, GPT-3’s text sometimes reflects the statements and ideas of the internet and its human authors including biases, prejudices, and sometimes hateful or toxic output. This has resulted in some controversy around GPT-3 adding to existing concerns about artificial intelligence’s increasing presence in our lives. This series of performances touches upon these issues as well as the relationship between technology and the body, authorship and identity, and AI creativity vs. reproduction ultimately asking: what makes performance art performance art? What works of performance art might an artificial intelligence generate? And what can those performances tell us about ourselves and the words we immortalize online? |