The city of Ecatepec, Mexico, the most populated and industrialized city in Latin America, recently celebrated its first mass celebration of art + culture in the region, Festival International de los Nuevos Vientos (International Festival of New Winds).  The festival’s mission includes developing Ecatepec as a center of creative expression that celebrates both local and international diversity in the arts.  Through a partnership between the local community and government the project is part of a larger initiative to stimulate the intellectual and artistic develop of individuals, collectives and the community.  Dance, theater, activities for children and a music festival, including Instituto Mexicano del Sonido, Cafe Tacuba, Bebel Gilberto, and a host of other acts all represented in support of the cause.  On the visual art tip, Bay Area\NYC artist Cece Carpio, participated as part of an artist/activist delegation that was sponsored by the Secretary of Culture to plaster the town of Ecatepec with Art and Culture.  In her words, “The result was a ten day manifestation of cultural mobilization in galleries, museums, community centers, and the street…we plastered and painted wherever we could.  Watch this…you’ll see what I mean…” THE VIDEO!

If you’re out there trying to cultivate your chi in the world, TED.com will motivate, captivate and invigorate your third eye with its video archive of some of the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers of the 21st century.

TED’s clearinghouse of 18 minutes talks offers free knowledge and inspiration on some of the world’s most pressing issues, creative ideas and obscure topics.

Including:

Eve Ensler on security and insecurity
Vik Muniz makes art with wire, sugar and chocolate
Jonathan Haidt on the moral roots of liberals and conservatives
Stew says “Black Men Ski”

Enjoy.

(Image: Wrapping Diary, video still, Anna Campbell, 2007.)

Anna Campbell has a fascination with romanticizing failure and idolizing drive for its own sake. But, as we all know, romanticization has a shadow side. For Anna, that shadow rests in the space of marginalized people for whom failure is not a luxury. In an effort to challenge her fascination, Anna has used boxing as a metaphor for an ongoing series of mixed media/installation work entitled Making Contact.   To this end, she trained for one month at the all-female (trans-friendly) Toronto Newsgirls boxing gym where she created video work on-site.  The project highlights Anna’s own internal emotional/mental dialogue while simultaneously creating a third-eye perspective (critical distance). The artist’s exploration of boxing, failure and drive speaks from the vantage point of a politicization of gender and power. However, when considered from the perspective of consciousness expansion, the works potential lies in its multifaceted reflection on the use of mind (a conscious substratum or factor in the universe) - mental chatter vs. meditation, critical understanding vs. unitive understanding.  Considering this, Anna’s videos Chase, Wrapping Diary and Slow, speak to a time/space continuum that includes the dialogical nature (with self and other) of boxing as well as the meditative quality of training.   Watch video…

Anna Campbell’s installation, Getting Strong Now, from the Making Contact project, will be on view at the Second Bedroom Project Space in Chicago, from November 1st - 30th, 2008.  Anna Currently lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Design at Grand Valley State University.

Worldwide street artist Blu’s latest short film, MUTO, silences words.  Other than faint echoes of Scorpionic astrological symbolism - the cycle of death and re-birth - and perhaps remote references to the lurking presence of culture vultures amongst us, Blu’s creativity stretches habitual cognition and leaves viewers amazed, and perhaps with a “?”. Watch the video…

“Welcome to the Terrordome”, Media Commentator Chuck D brought it to consciousness in the hip hop zeitgeist of 1990, and artist Amir H. Fallah looped it again in his public art piece Terradome (bottom left image) at Art Dubai 2008.  The piece calls into question the manufacturing of middle-east-phobia by western mass media and, perhaps, functions as a metaphor for the construction and de-construction of perception — the Terradome was built at Art Dubai and was only up for about 5 days. 

(Left to Right: Amir H. Fallah, Terradome, 2008, found materials, 8′x8′x14′. Amir H. Fallah, Ben Jackel (Fort Series) 2007, found materials, 20″x20″, archival c-print.)

The interior design of Terradome, laced with local plants, pottery, wood veneer walls with Middle Eastern patterns and a domed mosque-like ceiling, reflects a sense of home and spirit that suggests the individual’s complicity in shaping what is cultivated on one’s interior. This work and Amir’s other photographed fort installations (above right image) also call into question the relationship between the construction of terror (or not) in private homes, the media and the public mind. 

WATCH Amir at work in Dubai building the Terradome…

Amir is also Founder/Creative Director of Beautiful/Decay Magazine.

What constitutes a classic? Who gets to decide? Why not me? So, as a lover of the b-boy uprock danced to a classic b-boy cut, I declare Sanford Biggers’, Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II video work, made in 2000, a classic.  What are the parameters for this particular classic, the supreme weaving of the spiritual nature of breakdancing (exquisitely explored in the current film Planet B-Boy), with the Mandala, a diagram that serves as a collection point for universal forces.  (Watch the video!)

(Sanford Biggers, Mandala of the B-Bodhisattva II (2000), video still, 16ftx 16ft hand-carved colored rubber tiles, Formica backing. Battle of the Boroughs breakdance competition.)

The sacred circle where the community gets down and individuals merge with divine oneness and the eternal moment, once again found itself in the dance ciphers of early hip-hop culture, and subsequently became a global phenomenon known as breakdancing. What Biggers so eloquently puts down here, in video form, is a contemporary cultural manifestation of a centuries old global tradition. Not only is this video work a sublimely layered riff on perspective and transculturalism, it highlights the symbiotic relationship between the individual, the group and the cosmos. While the volume is loud the message is clear, one love, one aim, one destiny - union with the ultimate - whether you’re a b-boy, b-girl, Buddhist or otherwise.

(Sanford Biggers, Creation/Dissipation (2002), colored sand poured unfixed to floor and realtime projection of the performance shot from an overhead camera and projected on an adjacent wall.)

As a group, there are a handful of Biggers’ video works that suggest a fascination with the dance between the cosmic or metaphysical and the day to day movements of human beings. Creation/Dissipation (2002), Hip Hop Ni Sasagu (In Fond Memory of Hip Hop) (2004) and Cosmic Conundrum (2006) all show an appreciation for what could be described as movement between the polarities of energy and matter. Spatial relationships between music and dance, silence and sound, the individual and the group, light and dark, the intimate and the infinite, converge into moments of contemplation filled with the residue of the familiar and the possibility of the unknown.

(Sanford Biggers, Lotus (2007), 7ft diameter, hand etched glass, steel and LEDs. The image etched onto the glass is based on drawings of the cargo hold of an 18th century slave vessel.)

Many of Biggers’ video pieces are accompanied by installations, objects and performances that also speak to his transcultural/transcosmic inquiries.  Keep an eye out for Biggers’ participation in the following shows in 2008:  US Biennial: Prospect 1. (curated by Dan Cameron) New Orleans, LA; Neo HooDoo: Art For A Forgotten Faith. (curated by Franklin Sirmans and traveling to PS1, New York) The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; and, (Yet Untitled). Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York.  Also on tap in 2009, The Cartographer’s Conundrum (funded by Creative Capital), an installation, film and website inspired by artist, scholar and Afro-futurist John Biggers. A cousin of his subject, Sanford Biggers’s goal is to both study and expand the emerging genre of Afro-futurism, which engages science-fiction, cosmology and technology to create a new folklore of the African Diaspora.

Artist Tracy Snelling’s recent sculpture-video-mixed media- building-neighborhood corner- miniature replicas, last on view at PULSE NYC, are powerhouses in their own right.  Immediately captivating, the work brings out the nosy busy-body in all of us. Tracey’s mash-up of miniature replicas of actual buildings, infused with clues that suggest an imagined storyline surrounding the buildings inhabitants, encourages the fantastical in viewers who happen upon her work.  Most compelling are the mini video pieces launched in the windows of the buildings.  The viewer gets to become the voyeur of both Tracey’s mind and building occupants, living out lives full of romance, partying, conversation, or sheer mystery.  

(Paris Bayan Kuaforu, Istanbul, 2008, 21″ high x 27″ wide x 23″ deep, wood, paint, lights, digital images, lcd screens, media players, speakers, transformer)

To view more of this refreshingly original and organic new media work click here.

South African born artist, Thomas Mulcaire’s 2007 video piece, Study for Solaris, is a sublime visual voyage across planet earth’s southern most continent overlying the South Pole, Antartica. The piece was filmed between Dec 2006 - Feb 2007 onboard the South African research ship SA Agulhas en route from Cape Town to Neumayer Bukta and RSA Bukta, and on surface and air transport in Dronning Maud Land within 200km of SANAE and TROLL bases.  Study for Solaris is stunning in it’s composition and movement and offers a deep meditation on sound, silence, water, land and sky - a stark contrast to the human drama of city life.

Study for Solaris debuted at the Govett-Brewster Museum in Taranaki, New Zealand, in an exhibition called New Nature curated by Rhana Devenport. It’s next screenings will be during the inaugural Johannesburg Art Fair from March 13-16, 2008 and as part of the Arts Unlimited show, which will take place during the Basel Art Fair in Switzerland, June 2008. Watch the video!

Study for Solaris is an ITASC production for the International Polar Year.  Email Thomas.

MASIZAKHE: Building Each Other, a feature length documentary, explores the role that a new generation of activists are playing in shaping the future of South African society.  Filmed in South Africa’s Port Elizabeth area and surrounding townships, the film weaves the stories of emerging young activists with freedom fighters of the previous generation whose work led to the end of apartheid.  In an interesting evolution, the newer 21st century freedom fighters are increasingly using popular culture as their tool of choice in South Africa’s push for true democracy.  As a result, art, music, hip-hop and spoken word are at the forefront of yet another, global movement for change. 

The film was screened at New York University on 1/28/08 as the kick off to a US tour that stops in LA County and ends in the Bay Area on 2/9/08 at the Museum of the African Diaspora  ……..Watch the trailer! 

To bring this documentary to you click here.

Those of us who have followed the artistry (and sometimes not) of hip hop music and culture know that the Law of the Jungle is often times a fundamental philosophical and economic precept.  A thought process and moral stance adapted from the perceived character of American capitalist culture and a Darwinian relationship to nature. This point is illustrated magnificently in a You Tube remix video accompanied by the brilliant wordplay of the hip hop artist GZA on his song Animal Planet (watch the video).  But, what if the Darwinian mantra echoed in the streets - including Wall Street, “survival of the fittest”, was wrong?  Flex your mind on this: “Charles Darwin went on to describe ’survival of the fittest’ in large part as the competition for scarce resources, [and] as the basis for the evolution of the species.  Contrary to those models of Nature as innately, intensely, and almost exclusively competitive, more recent scientific study has illuminated the powerful role of mutuality, synergy, coexistence, and cooperation in the natural world and the more accurate picture of life that presents.” 

Case in point: The pollination of crops by honeybees is crucial to the production of 1/3 of all the foods we eat (watch a video clip)… “Nature fosters collaboration and reciprocity. Competition in Nature exists…but it has limits, and the true law of survival is ultimately cooperation.”  (All quotes are from, The Soul of Money by Lynne Twist)

Photographer Ernie P., one of those enduring icons of hip hop culture that is a little bit below the radar while at the same time being above the radar, has finally been captured for the big screen. The Documentary, The Other Side of Hip Hop, covering his life in hip hop since its beginnings, won Best Documentary 2007 at the Big Apple Film Festival this past November.  Anyone who has worked in the industry of hip hop knows Ernie - they also know that underneath his effervescent over the top persona lies a heart of gold. Representing for the indigenous people of North America, Ernie’s Native American roots continue to create a fertile foundation from which he has documented a once ignored cultural phenomenon - hip hop - for over 30 years. In that same time frame he has stayed true to hip-hop’s core values - peace, unity and having fun - which have gotten lost in the fray at times, by lecturing at colleges and universities across the country, and on panels for Rap Sessions.  Visually his work has been on view all over the country and in print in his latest book Who Shot Ya?.  Who, What, Where: Latifah, B.I.G., The Source, Vibe, VH-1, MTV, Tupac, Jimmy Carter, Andy Warhol, The Dalai Lama, The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, The Brooklyn Museum, Public Enemy, The Rock Steady Crew, The New York Times…and the list goes on…

(Afrika Bambaataa & Ernie P. circa 1989 photo by Ernie P.) 

There will be a free screening of The Other Side of Hip Hop during the first week of March, 2008 at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. Watch the Trailer!

Straight outta Hawai’i, working in the genre of short film (so far), filmmaker Darieus Legg’s use of music, cinematography and art direction is sublimely consuming.  Legg’s former life as a surfer and Videographer/Editor for the Hawaiin television show Board Stories proved to be ample training ground for cultivating a fluid style that often times knocks you over unexpectedly like a crashing wave.  Legg plans to submit his forthcoming short film Jasmine to the Tribeca Film Festival in spring 2008.  Set in the surreal world of Honolulu, the story is based on a Chinese myth about a white snake that protects a wise man on his journey to another kingdom.  However, Legg’s Jasmine is about jasmine tea, an innocent tea master, and afroswordswoman and a corrupt cop - a short riff on the symbiotic relationship between the master of a tea ceremony and his tea.    

For a taste of Legg’s current work, watch Black Panther or Ka La Hawai’i - both cinematically beautiful, yet full of disturbing content.  The juxtaposition of artistic beauty through filmaking with the crass content standards of mainstream American aesthetics - drugs, flesh and violence - leave the viewer to question the state of American aesthetic values.  On top of that, throw in a few unfinished riffs on western imperialism in relation to Black America and the indigenous population of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, and you have a young filmmaker clearly on the path to self mastery, yet still in search of the perfect brew. Contact Darieus.

Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 opened on 9/14/07 at The Spelman College Museum of Fine Art in Atlanta, Georgia.  The show runs through 12/8/07….Museum Director Andrea Barnwell told Cultureserve, “Early responses to “Cinema Remixed and Reloaded” have simply been incredible. This original exhibition represents the first survey of video works by black women artists. It features works by established artists including Camille Billops, Howardena Pindell, Adrian Piper, Kara Walker and Carrie Mae Weems as well as works by emerging and mid-career artists such as Jessica Ann Peavy, Tracey Rose, Berni Searle, Pamela Sunstrum and Lauren Woods. This exhibition exemplifies the Museum’s mission to focus on works by and about women of the African Diaspora. Part II, which opens on January 24, 2008, will also engage an array of challenging issues and promises to be just as compelling.”  Below: Kara Walker, “8 Possible Beginnings: or the Creation of African-America, a Moving Picture by Kara E. Walker” (2005), Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.  

One area featured in the exhibition is experimental cinema, “Whereas mainstream cinema has always intended to entertain, experimental cinema, in contrast, has always sought to usurp the norm.  The goal is often to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to works created in film and video…” (exhibition notes)  Click here to: VIEW VIDEO

Dissident Display Multimedia Studio and Gallery is hosting the next leg of WILDSTYLE: The Exhibition - an exclusive showing of photos by Charlie Ahearn. Based in Washington DC, The Dissident Display Gallery show will feature an exclusive Dissident Display video, Wildstyle: Backstage at Summerstage, featuring interviews with legendary Hip Hop culture aficionados: Ahearn, Busy Bee, ‘Lil’ Markey C, Prince Whipper Whip and, Sara Rosen of Miss Rosen Editions/Powerhouse Books (publisher of the book Wildstyle: The Sampler).  In the video Ahearn discusses the use of photographs in shaping scenes in the film Wildstyle and, how Hip Hop became an alternative to joining the military for young men in the late 70’s. The show  was on view in July at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn. Opening Night in DC is September 14th, 7pm - midnight…if you’re in town stop by the party….if you’re not, click here to WATCH THE VIDEO! 

If you missed Rosie Perez’¡YO SOY BORICUA, PA’QUE TU LO SEPAS! (I’m Boricua Just So You Know) on IFC or at various film festivals, do your best to catch it somewhere! Word is out that it may be screened at the Fort Greene Fest the weekend of September 7th & 8th. Bobbito Garcia was kind enough to send us the trailer and let us know: “‘Yo Soy Boricua’ was not a movie experience - it was a monument to life, struggle, love, and the pursuit of identity. Anyone, Puerto Rican or not, would be touched by the story line. I’m bananas proud to be a part of Rosie Perez’ directorial debut (and I hope it’s not her last - she rocked it)!” (click below the video screen to watch the trailer)