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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 25.2 (2003) 71-76



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Towards an Artbeat
New Media In Los Angeles

Erika Hernandez

[Figures]

TV or NOT TV: A Celebration of Experimental Media Arts, LA Freewaves, November 2002, Los Angeles.

Art in Los Angeles is not dead. It merely has an erratic pulse. Unlike New York, there is no single, cultural nucleus from which art emanates. Here, there, and everywhere, we Angelinos experience art when and where we can, and often have to drive through miles of advertisement-clad buses, air pollution-stained, anti-smoking billboards, and bumper-stickered Acuras in pursuit of its experience. I was awaiting the next screening of a short, experimental video (one of many installations that night) at LA Freewaves' Festival Finale—held at the Vermont Café, Karaoke and Billiards—when I wandered into the "non-festival" zone and found myself gazing at four men from outside a karaoke booth window. They were singing with and to each other. At once, they turned and sang to me. They twirled lyrically and counterclockwise from the spinning disco ball above them. The pink, reflected image of the video at hand bounced from the mirror to the window, and into my eyes. It was Britney Spears's "Hit Me Baby, One More Time." The performance drew to a close, they emerged, and we embraced. This quartet had inadvertently become the subject, and I the audience. Both parties caught in a wacky, guerrilla art exchange in the most unlikely of places. Granted, this rendering of Spears in her most classic phase was not a designated part of the festival, but its spirit was.

The night at the Vermont Café was the culmination of LA Freewaves' TV or NOT TV—a month long, pan-Los Angeles multimedia festival. In the event's thirteenth year, founder and executive director Anne Bray incorporated over 300 film, video, and new media works by 350 artists at 65 venues, including museums and universities as well as Internet cafés and, alas, karaoke bars. The festival was curated by over fifty multimedia artists, art/film historians, educators, writers, editors, and arts advocates, some of whom led the festival's public panel discussions on new media arts issues.

TV or NOT TV's installations sought to explore the "distances between daily life experience and televised reality, [and] present puzzling questions and dynamic [End Page 71] alternatives to corporate-filtered entertainment and alarmist, biased news reporting. 1 Consonant with Bray's larger mission of radically reshap[ing] the ways in which people experience art, 2 many of TV or NOT TV's pieces were shown through experimental means and at alternative venues. Inherent in this approach, the method in which the piece is experienced (i.e., on a video billboard, on the Internet, on television, in a pool hall) and its surrounding properties (and their exchanges) become vital, textual elements of the piece itself—on par with subject matter and form. The viewer is then forced to factor the "how" as well as the "what" into her/his final extraction of meaning.

This marriage of text and experience is aptly demonstrated in Ann Kaneko's borderline-interventionist Tokyo(Video Billboard) (2002). Tokyo is cut into six segments of street scenes entitled: "Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam," "Lima, Peru #1," "Lima, Peru #2," "Tokyo, Japan," "Lima, Peru #3," and "Lima, Peru #4." In each segment, bike riders, car drivers and/or pedestrians rush hurriedly in and out of frame amid whistling horns. The tape was broadcast intermittently on busy Sunset Boulevard, and the viewers (most of them stuck in traffic) unavoidably gazed into Kaneko's streetscape dichotomy: the image of other worlds and a mirror of their own condition. Where any of us are going to and coming from becomes secondary to what we do to get there. With no "American" images, Tokyo communicates that man's need to master time and space transcends even the human construct of "border" or "nation." Further, when Tokyo is experienced in its intended context, viewers realize that they have...

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