Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project presents: I N F O B A H N ://curating the world wide web
New program series to provide public platform for “internet jockeying” as artists + creatives present personal selections of web-based information
Series kicks off with INFOBAHN EPISODE I: “SECRET” Featuring selections by Dirk Cowan, Lisa Marie Evans, Ari Fish, Miguel Rivera, Paul Shortt and DeAnna Skedel
+ special screening of WHILE WE WERE WORKING: A YouTube Curatorial Endeavor Curated by Eric Fleischauer & Robert Snowden
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 7:30-10PM (screening of While We Were Working at 7:30; Infobahn presentations begin at 8:30) LA ESQUINA, 1000 WEST 25TH STREET KC MO 64108 816-221-5115
INFOBAHN: CURATING THE WORLD WIDE WEB is a new event series organized by Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project that will provide a public platform for the creative mediation of virtual information. At each event, invited presenters will share approximately 15-minutes worth of selections culled from the vast field of web-based information in response to a given theme. INFOBAHN is about information, inspiration, and personal interest; the process of searching, navigating, discovering, making choices; and the unique structure and ever expanding virtual terrain that is the internet.
Free and open to the public, INFOBAHN launches with “Episode I” on Friday, September 4 at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street. The theme for the presentations is “SECRET.” Presenters will include artist/fashion designer Ari Fish; artist/Kansas City Art Institute Printmaking Chair Miguel Rivera; artist/filmmaker Lisa Marie Evans; writer/Honeywell International employee Dirk Cowan; artist/blogger Paul Shortt, and artist/teacher Deanna Skedel.
The “Secret” theme may inspire the presenters’ choices in terms of process, style, tone, subject, source, etc. Selections may include YouTube videos, webcasts, podcasts, Flickr slideshows, blogposts, etc…anything is fair game, as long as it is content found on the web, not generated/uploaded by the presenters themselves. Content will be projected, with audio if applicable, with optional brief introductions by the presenters. Following the event, it is expected that the selections of each presenter will live on as live links on Charlotte Street Foundation’s website, www.charlottestreet.org.
The evening also features a screening of While We Were Working, a one-hour program of YouTube selections curated by artists Eric Fleischauer (Chicago) and Robert Snowden (New York). “Digging in deep, past the recognizable, recommended, and promoted selections, we have compiled a range of videos that provoke and articulate YouTube’s role as an artist resource, venue, and medium,” the curators write. “As a result, definitions of ownership and authorship are elasticized and altered by this constant meddling and re-arranging, and the line between viral video, Art Art, and the everyday becomes happily smudged. Physically loading these video into the realm of cinema and projecting them in all their pixilated glory allows time for serious and critical consideration to be given to videos that might have otherwise been passed over or skipped through.” Their program folds together video featuring such cultural icons as Barack Obama, David Lee Roth, John Cage, Charlie Rose, Nicholas Cage, A-ha, and Picasso’s Guernica; cultural phenomenon such as Japanese train loading, wave pools, and QVC television; and a range of highly idiosyncratic performances, experiments and activities that emblematize the wildly eclectic, populist nature of YouTube.
An initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit CSF’s NEW website at www.charlottestreet.org.
