I was very excited when Jason Rohrer agreed to conduct and interview with me within his newest game Sleep is Death. The game typically allows a host player and a guest player 30 seconds each to collaboratively navigate an interactive story. In the video above, you’ll be getting my side of our conversation, as you watch me type, move, and interact with the environment Jason provided for our discussion.

During the course of our adventure we talk about games as a creative medium, Jason’s decision to opt for 8-bit graphics, and how his games have changed over the course of the past decade. I soon find out that making certain decisions within the game lead to great, unforeseen, incidents of chaos and pleasure.

Near the end of our conversation, Jason discusses how games are intrinsically about meditating on time. Many of Jason’s games involve cooperation with other characters or entities, which – depending on your willingness or investment – can greatly influence the direction and development of your experience. With Jason’s games, once is not enough, and many times I find myself wanting to replay his games not out of any vain desire of completion (which happens to me frequently with big-name video games), but instead as a way of investigating how I play.

I suggest that games like Passage offer a challenging alternative to typical “choice” driven blockbuster games (like “morality engine” games developed by Bethesda Softworks). In Passage, you navigate an complex labyrinth to earn points; however, as you advance further into the maze you grow older and can travel less quickly. You also have a chance to picking up a partner to join you in your quest, and although doing so can prevent you from accessing certain areas, you gain more points the further you travel with your companion.

Jason’s passion for his work, and their powerful impact upon traditional gamers and non-gamers alike provide unmistakable evidence that games art art. I believe Sleep is Death and Passage are emblematic of a distinct shift within the gaming and art world; a movement away from gloss and sheen, and a revisitation to affect and process.

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Before Stephen Lapthisophon moved to Dallas in 2008, he worked and taught in Chicago for over 25 years. He’s represented in Dallas by The Conduit Gallery, has shown work recently in San Antonio at Unit B, will be doing an installation soon for The Henderson Art Project and currently teaches art and art history at The University of Texas at Arlington. I spoke with him over a few weeks last summer about his installation practice.

Through this, I’ve been interested in how his installations, paintings, and text/image essays effectively erased old conceptions of relationships between objects and their histories. As you’ll see, we spend a bunch of time trying to nail down exactly what he’s getting at. Lapthisophon says its an attempt to rethink our surroundings. I’m not sure we ever answered the question.

In Graham Harman’s recent book on the French sociologist of science Bruno Latour (Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics), Harman describes Latour’s philosophy as “play[ing] out amidst microbes, tape recorders, windmills, apples, and any real or unreal actors that one might imagine.” Moreover, Harman continues, “Latour has no real interest in the pathos of depth: though his actors can always surprise us, these surprises always emerge at the surface of the world, not from some veiled underworld ruled by the shades of [philosophers, theologians, or poets.]” Against Harman’s description of Latour, Lapthisophon welcomes the irrational and poetic in our own responses to his work–Lapthosophon’s work with disjunctive elements reinforces Latour’s image of actors (be they objects, ideas, pictures, or personas) and their surprising emergence at the surface of a world of shifting relations.

The first thing I wanted to talk about was arrangement. You have an intuitive installation technique: you start with a small number of found objects/photocopies and build out into more materials–finding resonances through addition.

I think this is the result of an interest in limits and boundaries between art and everyday life experiences. I enjoy testing the tolerance level of a situation to see how much or how little can be added or changed while still living in the world of art. It is very much process oriented and, I hope, an open process–embracing flux and change: an open process reliant on intuition and chance operations. However, the method of working additively is neither sequential nor additive itself. I am guided by willful irrationality, chance, accident and mistake. I want to challenge accepted ideas concerning causality and intention.

Can you talk a bit about your idea of a “tolerance level of a situation” and how it manifests in your installations?

What comes to mind first is an unorthodox use of materials: although there is certainly a historical precedent (Arte Povera for example), I think my recent use of food in the art work–potatoes and apples in installations; salt, coffee, cocoa, saffron and bacon fat mixed with dry pigment in the drawings–challenge notions of permanence, effort, craft and process. Use of unorthodox materials asks the viewer to examine their notions of how art should be made as opposed to how it can be made. The commodity status of a work of art is questioned by works which threaten to disintegrate. Materials that are so obviously humble and everyday contrast with high tech impulses of much current art making. I am asking the audience to see how little can be used to create a work of art to wear away at a defense mechanism that resists what one sees all the time. For example, a drawing with my name written/ drawn /printed in saffron ink is a simple slight gesture but one with the poetic potential in its linguistic force the viewer’s internal enunciation of: “a signature in saffron.”

I know that sounds horribly banal but rethinking can be powerful. And any real appreciation of the everyday can also be unsettling. But I also want to imply a bit of a quotation method by asking someone to rethink through another work of art or cultural moment.

Speaking of quotation, can you talk a bit about your use of music in your work?

Music functions in a number of ways in my work. There are moments when I am hoping to stretch my ideas to the places where other artists/ musicians or composers have gone and given me a kind of permission to challenge myself. Anthony Braxton’s irrational logic, Elliot Carter’s elegant stubbornness, Chaka Khan’s willingness to balance ugliness and beauty, Kanye West’s audacity, all that pretty Sonic Youth noise, etc. Music also serves as a point of departure to mark a cultural moment as shared history and intersection–pop songs in particular. In Amanuensis (I Hear a Symphony) I used the Supremes song “I Hear a Symphony” to enact the play of presence and absence that was the subject of the installation. I broke up and distorted the song into its constituent parts focusing on the lyrics repeated “whenever you’re near…” In My Tradition, My Heritage My Voice Ornette Coleman’s “Free Jazz” played as part of the installation to tie the work of Dan Flavin and his quotation portraits of Russian Constructivist art with my own improvisatory impulses. The insertion of musical events acts as collage but a temporal pasting of an extra-contextual element.

Music seems so often used as backdrop-or, if not backdrop, as you said “extra-contextual”–how does one push beyond this? How do you see others pushing beyond this?

I think of the use of music as an element similar to a collage element–integral to the whole piece. It is overlaid or pieced into or pasted over. I hope it acts not as atmosphere but within the environment, which can be partially avoided by choosing something disjunctive–something that fights against its surroundings rather than “blends” in…this is different from welcoming noise and distinguishing music from sound and the use of sound pieces in installations. If disjunctive elements are orchestrated with care, one element is not necessarily made into the primary focus with everything else as background. Just because the individual elements are intended to be integrated with friction does not mean that a foreground/ background situation is established. One can still work against hierarchy…

That’s sort of what I mean–with everything “at the same level,” wouldn’t it all become either ambiance or full aggression?

Well, I think what I am having problems with/resisting is the idea of “things at the same level” because I think intrinsically some elements will carry a different weight or purpose. Already the combination of texts (and different types of texts) and other varieties of materials creates a difficult space of operation. For me, it is really a question of textures–actual and implied. It is not so much that sound and/or music provides a background as much it provides a different set of associations and textures. To a certain extent, installation as a form of activity already acts in a disjunctive manner displacing one world from another: where does the “real” world end and the art experience begin? In a recent installation (without sound) I combined cardboard, a crutch, long functional and useless highly colored electrical cords, clamp lights, white and colored bulbs, salt, apples, paper, signs, text, a walker, a crutch, a bright green ramp, hangers, tape and canned pineapples. All of these disparate materials were placed in a display window setting in a public urban space. I don’t think that it would be easily thought that these things presented themselves all at the same level. Their manifestation in a public setting also charged the appearance with discomfort by being so purposeless while containing so many purposeful things.

I think I operate somewhat pragmatically in some ways: I assume that salt, or and apple, or a piece of cardboard or a walker or an electrical cord will carry a different set of associations–different weights–and that once the process of interpretation or resistance to interpretation is initiated, then a certain kind of self-questioning might take place–a questioning of questioning. I think that when types of elements carry certain heterogeneities and varying textures that their status as stable carriers of meaning begins to wobble a bit–maybe a new meaning producing process (welcoming the irrational or poetic) takes place?

It seems to me that that phrase turns on “Maybe” in “Maybe a new meaning…takes place.”  Your installations and objects are the first step to asking new questions, but what do those questions become? Maybe a way to ask the question differently: coming upon your signature signed in saffron, what question do you ask yourself when you see it outside of your gesture?

I appreciate your struggle and the work to get to the place where the question begins. It all seems to be a question of paths to other paths. Regarding the general question of questions I think there is an impulse to want to get a reader/ viewer to a place where the conclusion is simply–like the Gershwin-”It ain’t necessarily so…” More specifically regarding the saffron signature I have to start with the notion that a neutral viewer does not even know that the letters spell my name. And, so–the first step is a reading of a drawing–already a treacherous path as one first expects to “look at” a drawing and not read it. And then it designates not much. A name perhaps but not necessarily so….

So then the opposite would be true regarding your insertion of photos into your texts? One assumes the reader would not be as familiar with the photo as the easier-to-follow text?

I see what you are thinking but as usual) I try to have that relationship be a bit unstable–by that I mean combining images or photographs that might be more familiar with texts that seem to be unlikely combinations …or, texts that are difficult in some way. Or photos that are not easily recognized with more plain, uninflected texts or borrowed texts. I want–and this is difficult–to avoid the caption/image apparatus if possible. It is an engagement with the play of the supplement …

You seem hesitant not only to reduce your work to one single idea or object, but also hesitant to reduce your work to a relationship (or new relationship?) between ideas, except that, “these ideas and their relationships must be unstable.” If I may pull the old schoolboy logic out of the hat–wouldn’t this instability also apply to apply to the idea of “instability”? I don’t ask this as a “gotcha” but only because I sense something in your work that, while not transcendent in any way, at least attempts a critical response or a push past its own methods.

I understand and do not take it as a tricky question. But I don’t think there is a solution to that one– Yes, to a certain extent the unstable needs to be made either stable or not. And then is it unstable? I guess I am just trying to keep the relationship between the relationships and their intersecting ways of operating as varied and not predictable. Or at least I hope to be critical with respect to the ways that audiences might expect to see one element as privileged over another. There is no perfect audience or assumptions I can make with certainty but, for me, part of being an artist is reading the world into which my work arrives and to be aware of how current audience expectations and context is constructed. If I have some rudimentary reading of the situation then I can better see how to begin to introduce an instability. There is not perfect reading but it is all a process and the initiation of the dialogue is part of the process…

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Aspen Mays has been a busy woman with both a  12×12 show at the MCA (February 6-28) and an installation at the Hyde Park Art Center (January 24-April 25). She was kind  enough to take some time out of her busy schedule  to answer some of my questions about both exhibitions, her process, and her plans for her Fulbright Grant to Chile.

Recently you spoke at threewallsSALON in a discussion called The Doctoral Artist: Research & Practice. What role does research play in your practice? How do you typically begin a series/piece?

Research is often the catalyst for my work. I studied Anthropology as an Undergraduate student- that’s what my degree is in, and I think that sort of academic training has found its way into my practice mostly because I enjoy it so much. I’ve always been a really curious person, and I try to channel that as an artist.  I love spending time in the library chasing down ideas, and I also try to get out and do a lot of hands-on research.  Perhaps its my background in another field, but I read a lot of books about science and astronomy, and as an artist, I love speaking to folks in different research areas. A lot of projects start by tracking down experts in different fields that I’m interested in. I enjoy that interaction and these sort of “field trips” can be a great source of inspiration and potential collaboration. The video piece Larry, for example, was made with the help of the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. I contacted them after I’d been looking into weather ballooning, and I just started visiting the planetarium speaking to several of the astronomers that launch research balloons as part of the Astro Science Workshop each summer for high school students. I started attending the Workshop – for pleasure really because I thought it was all so interesting….one thing lead to another and I struck up a friendship with Mark Hammergren (an Astronomer there) and the video piece I ended up making sort of evolved out of all of that. That process is a pretty good example of my practice- I love seeking out that interaction. It makes making art feel a lot less solitary to me.

For your 12×12 show at the MCA you will be showing a site-specific installation entitled Every Leaf on a Tree. The show will consist of two works, Every Leaf on a Tree and Every Book. Could you describe these two pieces and how they relate to each other.

Every book began almost as a humorous dare to myself.  Spending a lot of time in scientist’s offices, I had this mental image of some imaginary scientist or researcher or concerned citizen that only read books about Einstein. Einstein is such a loaded figure- I think we, as a culture, pin a lot of ideas about genius on him. He’s the solitary genius, the mad scientist, the truly original thinker, someone that had deeper insight into the mysteries of the world than the rest of us.  So I decided to see how many books my library (the John Flaxman library at the School of the Art Institute) had about Einstein…there were quite a few for an art school, but the library also belongs to a consortium of all the libraries of all the colleges and universities in Illinois, so I could access essentially all of the books about Einstein in the whole state. So I just started ordering them, little by little. With the help of the wonderful library staff at the Flaxman and with the help of a friend at Depaul University, I began the process of ordering all 1500+ books about Einstein. I ordered them in all the languages that came up- Russian, Arabic, etc- I wanted to create this fantasy of being so curious and industrious and thorough that someone (me) would stop at no lengths to consume all of this information about Einstein.

I made a bookshelf in the shape of an arc so that I could organize the spines of the books along a color spectrum or a rainbow as they came in. It felt like a fitting tribute to Einstein somehow- to use the shape of the books to evoke gravity and an investigation of light the way an artist is trained through color theory- breaking it down into the visible spectrum (as opposed to how someone like Einstein might think of or describe light’s invisible properties). One of the most iconographic photographic portraits of all time is the one of Einstein with his wild hair and tongue sticking out. I wanted to think of the books as making up a different sort of photographic portrait of the man- without using those incredibly iconic images of him. It also felt apropos of a age when knowledge and access to information feel like they are becoming blurred and confused. I wanted to to question what could be gained from this sort of cataloging and photographic documentation.

That’s where Every leaf comes in. I had a residency at Ox-Bow this past summer (2009), and I brought along Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I had already started Every book, and in just thinking about the title of Leaves of Grass, I loved the linguistic connection between a leaf in a book and a leaf on a tree. What would you know about a tree even if you knew what every leaf looked like? Would you be able to guess or infer that books were made from trees?  So I looked outside of my studio window at this modestly sized (ok, I thought small) sassafras tree and decided to photograph every single leaf on the tree. I thought it would be a simple exercise but it spanned all of the available sunlight of one day- it took nearly 9 hours on a ladder, to photograph the 900 individual leaves on the tree. The two projects just seemed so instantly connected in my mind.

So for the 12×12, I printed all 900 individual images roughly to scale and hung them in 2 matching grids on the North and South walls of the room. They are printed on matte paper and hung simply with two nails on the top corners so that the physical nature of the photograph (paper made from trees) is emphasized like a sculptural element- the paper curls and reacts to the room- appearing to almost flutter. And on the West wall is a grid of the 21 Einstein Rainbows representing the nearly 1500 books that I ordered and photographed over the last several months.

You also have an installation, From the Office of Scientists, which recently opened at the Hyde Park Art Center. According to their press release this is the first time you have worked with sculpture and photography together. Could you talk about this piece and the transition you made to working with both mediums?
Just to keep tying things together,  I was spending a lot of time in these astronomers’ offices (see the first question & answer), and I loved just seeing what was in there, how these incredibly inquisitive, smart people populated their work spaces. A lot of it was totally normal office stuff, but there were some real gems in there as well.  “Collecting” those surprising moments or objects (and by “collecting” I mean making notes of them whether with a sketch pad or a camera) grew into the show at the Hyde Park Art Center From the Offices of Scientists.  I would document these objects  as I would see them and then re-create and re-make them in my studio. At first, perhaps as a knee-jerk way of working, I would photograph the recreations, but for this show, I decided to work with them as sculptural objects instead. I have always constructed for the camera and feel comfortable and quite enjoy working in three dimensions.  So that is nothing new for me- I suppose this is the first time I decided to show the sculptures rather than photograph them. This work just felt the most satisfying with a physical presence so the show is mostly sculptures.

There is one original photograph in the show but I printed it on poster paper and folded and ripped the paper to hang in the office cubicle, so I think of that photograph really as a sculptural element as well. I wanted the mystery of the objects to speak for themselves and even though I’m displaying these banal objects from basically any office anywhere- I wanted them to point to something more extraordinary. For example, there is a stack of regular white document boxes in the show, but each box is labeled with name of planet (the Sun also gets a box and so does Pluto). The boxes are sealed shut, so you’re left to wonder what’s on file for Jupiter or what’s being stored about Saturn.

The center piece of the show is an gray office desk in a gray cubicle that’s broken in half by a huge rock. The desk is smashed into two pieces and the boulder rests on the floor amidst the destruction. Hanging on the wall beside the desk is a plastic sign inside a cabinet that says “If you think you’ve found a meteorite, you can bring it here and we will check it to be sure.” Is that rock an actual rock from space?

Later in the month you will be leaving for Santiago Chile to embark on a Fulbright grant. What will you be working on?

That’s a great question, and I’m really not exactly sure. I wrote the grant to work with several astronomers in Chile (to bring it full circle, they are friends and colleagues of my friends at the Adler Planetarium). There are a number of huge telescopes in Chile’s northern deserts because the conditions are so ideal for observation. I’m not sure what sort of artworks or projects will materialize from this time, but I’m really looking forward to observing the observers and seeing what happens.

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via Lumpen:

“Mike Bonanno and Laurel Whitney discuss the roots and future of the prolific corpo-political hoax-sters The Yes Men. On hand are Lumpen cholos Edmar, James and Christo to hammer home the tough questions. Production by Christo and Nick Bahr. Enlightening…and fun. Check out more of The Yes Men at theyesmen.org”

LUMPEN TLVSN (interview) – The Yes Men at Co-Prosperity Sphere from lumpen on Vimeo.

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Video still from Libber

Last month I wrote a post about Wynne Greenwood’s latest performance Sister Taking Nap.  Wynne is best known for her performance as the three member band Tracy + the Plastics. Last year she had a solo show at Susanne Vielmetter which consisted of new sculptures and videos. In 2008 Wynne was the recipient of a Genius Award from Seattle’s the Stranger . Wynne was nice enough to answer some of my questions and fill me in on some of her projects.

1) After Tracy + the Plastics were over I had heard that you were doing a new musical venture called libber. I remember hearing that it was like the plastics plus marching bands. What happened to that project? I was seriously stoked when I heard about it.

I did make a short (4 min) performance w/ video and music called LIBBER in summer 2004.  I made and performed this for the LTTR Explosion at Art in General, NYC.  LIBBER was literally a “breakthrough” moment for me.  It was the first, and to date only, time I physically performed through the projection surface.  I cut a hole in the sheet and stood behind the sheet, the video was projected from the front onto the front of the sheet that I was standing behind.  I put my arm through the hole in the sheet to be the arm of the abstracted girl figure.  My real arm became her arm.  And it (my real arm) played a real drum.

The story was that this girl has a drum and she’s walking around the city with her drum.  The drum lets her know that she can never be nostalgic because the drum is always wanting her to hit it again.  And she’s wondering what to do with her life when a marching band walks by and she joins in with them.

At the time I thought I would make this into a band somehow. Not with any video, but with the idea of the abstracted figure, and the idea of an ever-changing make-up of a band, like a marching band.  You graduate, and you’re not in the band anymore, but there’s a new person there who brings new and different or maybe similar things to the instrument/role.  I also wanted to have the music and performance be very drum-based.  But I got weary of using the word “Libber” to be a title for something that was very specific to me and my experience/created experience.  And so I changed my music-making “name” to my name, wynne greenwood.  And that’s where I’m at now.

Video still from Big Candy

2) Big Candy is probably one of my favorite pieces of yours. Was it a precursor to Sister Taking Nap? From the photos that I saw visually they seemed to be linked.

Yeah, I do think Big Candy and Sister Taking Nap are like memories or ideas from the same body.  Sister Taking Nap was a smooshing together of two different projects I’d been thinking about for a couple years – one was a performance and the other was a series of sculptures.  After I made the Big Candy video, I started thinking about the possibilities of interacting with a sculpture using words and dialogue.  For me, the form of “music video” is like a really relaxed (to the point sometimes of negligent) babysitter.  There’s no consequences, in a way, maybe because there’s no rules.  And I say that while I believe that there are always consequences, though that word is more complicated than its surface.

3) Will there be an audio component released for Sister Taking Nap?
It’s really funny you ask this, because in the middle of performing Sister Taking Nap I thought “oh wow I could have made the audio into a record.”  But I’m not going to do that.

4) I noticed that you often have discussed the notion of reality. What type of realities are you interested in creating with your work?

I’m interested in creating realities that are feminist and queer and self-aware.  That are interdependent in their structure.  Realities that have integrated surfaces and structures.

5) I read an interview for the Stranger that you are a twin.  I was wondering if T+P might be a reaction to or at least influenced by having a close sibling?

All of my work has been influenced by this.

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Art21′s blog has posted an interview with former BAS guest Kerry James Marshall. They sat down with Marshall while he was installing his show ” Black Romantic” at Jack Shainman Gallery. The video on their website is worth checking out.

Below is an excerpt from the interview.

ART21: What’s the relationship between your series of Vignettes (2003-07) and what’s commonly referred to as post-black art.

MARSHALL: The work of African-American artists has for a long time been seen more as a kind of social phenomena instead of aesthetic phenomena. The social implications of the work — be it identity politics and things like that — seem to be privileged in terms of the way the work is received, as opposed to any kind of aesthetic project or intervention the work might be organized around. And so if you read any of the critique that was made around the Freestyle (2001) show at The Studio Museum in Harlem, you’ll find an undertone that seems to suggest that the mainstream critical world and art aficionados were tired of this whole identity politics and multiculturalism moment.

If you examine the subjectivity that a lot of African-American artists address, it often has a kind of cultural, social, political, or historical angle to it. So for the mainstream to suggest that it was sort of tired of having to address those kinds of issues, then, what’s really left for these artists to do if that’s something that’s meaningful to them? On some level, I thought maybe the only thing that was left to do was to make paintings about love. And to take a cynical approach to the concept of love, to the concept of the Vignettes (2003-07), so that they don’t seem to directly address the social and political issues that had been relevant to me and maybe to a lot of other artists who want to make work.

I began by looking at a lot of 18th Century French painting — Rococo work — like Boucher, Fragonard, Bouguereau, and other artists who themselves are also critiqued but critiqued for a lack of political depth in their work, for the frivolity of the work and for the work being kind of saccharine and sentimental and overly puffy and flowery. I started to take those two things and see if I could put them together — to preserve a certain element of the social, political, and historical narratives that are still important to me, but also to deal with the sentimentality, frivolity, and excesses that are embedded in Rococo painting.

ART21: Why are they painted predominantly in black-and-white?

MARSHALL: One of the reasons I use the grisaille technique in those paintings was to deny a bit of the Rococo. If you take a genre of painting that’s recognized for being pretty or flowery, but you want to start to do some other things, then you have to strip away some of those characteristics. One of the first characteristics is the over-investment in color that those pictures would have. So I stripped away the color, which reduces a certain amount of sweetness in the pictures. Black and white always tends towards a level of seriousness, and you can use it to avoid sentimentality when you’re dealing with highly keyed chromatic kind of relationships. The only color note in there is the cartoony pink in the hearts. The pink is a way of refusing to deliver on all of the points of which grisaille is supposed to deliver. And I chose to paint the hearts pink specifically to emphasize the disconnection between the overtly romantic imagery in the foreground and the historical or political imagery in the background.

ART21: What advice would you give to younger artists?

MARSHALL: The drive to be relevant — not just for yourself and the people who like your work — has moved a lot of artists throughout time to do the kinds of things they do. If you look how artists became artists in the past, there were smaller numbers of people vying for positions in the royal courts and churches and atelier system. They didn’t have five thousand people coming through the system back then. But now we have these graduate programs at universities that are putting out thousands of credentialed artists every year. And so what are these artists trying to do? They are all trying to get a gallery show. They’re trying to get the grants. They’re trying to get written about in the newspaper. They’re trying to get their work collected. They’re trying to do all of those things so they can keep on making their work.

Now the only way you can do that really is to distinguish yourself from what everybody else in the field is doing. And so if you were taught while you were in school that being a part of the club — being one of many amongst other artists — that that’s somehow worthwhile, then how do you sustain your development and your productivity? What do you aim for?

Whatever it is you’re aiming for has to be judged by somebody outside yourself as having a kind of value. But if you just leave that to people who are out there, who somehow supposed to know more about what you’re doing than you do, then I think you are in a world of trouble. If you don’t have any mechanism to determine to some degree what your chances might be of achieving the kind of success as an artist you want to achieve, then you’re in deep trouble. And I think there is a lot that can be done. I think you can decide. And the way you decide is to know what it is artists are trying to do and what is meaningful to the discipline above and beyond what you think is meaningful to you as a person trying to express yourself.

This is why I say it’s not about self-expression. If it were really just about self-expression, then that would require a receiver who is so sensitively attuned to your sensibility that they are capable of recognizing an intrinsic value — not in what it is you’re doing, but who it is you are.

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In conjunction with “Open for Business”, Brian and Patrica will interview René de Guzman live in public at Triple Base Gallery on Thursday, July 10th at 5:00 PM. The raw interview will then be posted to the site as that week’s show.

René de Guzman is the senior curator of art at the Oakland Museum of California. Previously, he was the director of visual arts at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA).

UPDATE: The interview will be held at 5:00 PM, not 6:00 PM as previously listed.

See you there!

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Outside the Loop Radio which reportedly broadcasts from it’s (for our benefit) 100-watt artsy-fartsy radio station took time to interview Richard and DMac and ask about the birth and direction of Bad at Sports. If you want to listen to the entire episode click here for the direct link.

Duncan & Richard appear at 6 min 20 seconds into the show. Richard geeks out over audio tech, Duncan tells the back story with eloquence. They both have a jaw drop moment when the hosts ask how you could get hate mail doing a art audio program.

Check it out.

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