Tonight!

Six Donuts

What: Six Donuts
When: February 21st [Sat]
Where: Raum D, Museumsquartier Wien
Time: 8PM
Cost: FREE

DOUBLE VISION will present an evening of video, dance, and music in a rare Viennese appearance. Members of the San Francisco based intermedia group have been living in Austria for the past two months and will be showing both new and old performances in celebration of their stay. Included will be the live animation performance Big Timber, Chop! Chop!, Resonances for dance and sound, and Etwas Früher und Jetzt die einfachen Leute for video. Enjoy the warm atmosphere of Raum D with Sean Clute, Pauline Jennings, Dorsey Dunn, and Caitlyn Carradine before they head back to the United States.

The Six Donuts program will include:

1) Devil and Angel (live video puppetry)
On one shoulder sits a Devil and on the other an Angel. The power of persuasion and the struggle for dominance in the solitude of a Carinthian forest.

2) Resonances (dance and sound)

3) Music Set 1 (live sound)

4) Big Timber, Chop! Chop! (live action animation)
A live video, animation, sound and performance in which Conuton Valve and Coon Dog meet at The Monopole in Plattsburgh, New York to find themselves traveling in a Mercury Sable to California in the quest for gold and the Plasma Cloud.

5) Pet My Monkey (dance and sound)

6) Etwas Früher und Jetzt die einfachen Leute (work in progress):
Influenced by Sean's research in Vienna, this is a work in progress that finds both old and new characters (Altenberg, Berg, Trotsky, Freud, and Sean's grandparents) enjoying apfel strudel at Café Central, racing down the Hahnekamm, and escaping ancient blood from beneath the Stephensdom.

Photo from performance in Prague

Thanks to Geoffrey :)

RaumD Rehearsal

Below is a 15 minute improv by Caitlyn, Dorsey and I, in preparation for our show Saturday night. The piece is called Pet My Monkey and we're wearing snow suits.... anyway... hope you enjoy! It was our second time working together and, just a bit of trivia.. we both ripped holes (accidentally) in our suits - you may be able to see mine in the video :P

Obviously, we'll post video from the real performance next week. On Saturday we'll be doing:

Devil and Angel; video puppetry by Sean
Resonances; dance duet + sound (P, C and D)
Sound Set; Sean and Dorsey
Big Timber, Chop! Chop! ; live action video and animation by Sean
Pet My Monkey
The unveiling of Sean's new animation: etwas Fuher und Jetz

Oh, and the video's rather long (15 min), so let it load for a bit before starting it.. unless you have nice highspeed, which we don't...

Photos from the past few days

View outside Sean's Cube.. prior to the Opera.

















Giselle at the Wiener Staatsoper.






































Caitlyn and her brother Henry



































































Poster for our lecture in Zurich.























Views from the train ride back to Wien

More from the road

It is currently 20:15 here... somewhere between Salzburg and Wien. Dorsey, Sean and I just had a lovely dinner (sorta) onboard the train from Zurich. It's dark now, but the ride through the alps today was tremendous. There's a few photos, which I'll post soon, along with the others from the past few days.

Last night we had a very traditional and fun dinner with Germán. We ate the traditional dish of Zurich, Rösti, which basically was fried potatoes with smelly (but very good) cheese. The boys had meat on theirs and I had egg. Very good for a day of hard work or skiing.... neither of which we could claim. We then walked the cobbelstone streets, past the infamous Cabaret Voltaire, home of the dada movement, and finally winded up somewhere for a late night tea.

Hugo Ball at Cabaret Voltaire
























This morning, Marcus Maeder, a curator at ICST and sound artist, picked us up at the hotel to escort us to a fantastic sound art exhibit: Milieux Sonores. www.walcheturm.ch.

The exhibit featured diverse sound art works and was completely built from scratch... meaning, that they built their own rooms and hallways within a gallery space. This created a very effective and immersive environment.

Here's info about one of the pieces that I particularly liked:

Rob van Rijswijk, Jeroen Strijbos- Soundspots

Images from: http://www.catalystarts.org.uk/index.php?mact=Calendar,cntnt01,default,0&cntnt01event_id=50&cntnt01display=event&cntnt01lang=en_GB&cntnt01detailpage=73&cntnt01return_id=51&cntnt01returnid=73































The listener must position himself underneath one of the Soundspots. On this spot he hears music coming from the traditional speakers. These sounds mingle with the music coming from the Soundspots, consequently resulting in a polyphonic texture of timbres. The listener can influence this polyphonic result by moving through the spatial environment or by positioning himself underneath one of the other Soundspots.

Here's photos of this piece.. not how we experienced it though. For the space in Zurich, the artist created an almost completely pitch-black room. There were tiny dimly-lit bulbs hanging above each of the 6 semi-domes to illuminate them and partially illuminate the red carpet spots beneath them. The effect was wonderful - both visually and sonically. Moving around in ths dark space between the various spots was also tons of fun.. essentially mixing your own track of music, as Marcus put it.

More photos from our camera coming soon...

Day 1 in Zurich

Okay, for the purpose of explaining our life more fully, here's Day 1 in Zurich at ICST (http://www.icst.net/), in detail:

4:30am: Wake-up

5:10am: Catch train #1, the U3

5:30am: Walk for what seemed forever, in the snow/rain, following a green line to the CAT

5:50am: Catch the CAT to the airport

6:10am: Arrive at the Wien airport, hear that our flight is already boarding; try to print our boarding passes, but they won't print. Wait in line for a real person. We finally get to the front and they say "I'm closed." good. Get in another line... finally get the tix.

6:something am: Take another train to our terminal

6: something something: Take a bus to the plane for outdoor boarding.

7 something: Finally take off

8:30: Land in zurich

8:45: Take train to Main Station

9:30 or so: Give up on finding the bus and take a cab to hotel

11:30am: Take a bus to someplace in zurich where we've been told to exit the bus and follow the red arrow.

12:00pm: We're still looking for the red arrow. We finally find something that could pass as a red arrow and follow it. It has nothing to do with what we're looking for, but it works.

12:30pm: Tour of part of the computer music facilities and the dance academy.

1:00pm: Lunch!

1:45pm: Coffee #1 = MAJOR shakes and jitters... this stuff was strong.

2:00pm: Lecture. This went really really well (despite the fact that my voice was shaking and screeching from the caffeine) and we got interesting questions from the researchers and faculty.

4:00pm: More of a tour through crazy hallways and awesome film, dance and music studios

5:00pm: Coffee #2.. this time served with cocoa in it and chocolates. More jitters but great conversation.

6:30pm: Bus back to hotel

7:30pm: Bus to train station where we'll likely bus more to the restaurant where we're Germán Toro-Pérez, the Director of ICST (http://www.icst.net/index.php?show=37), for dinner. He's been so wonderful and is a really talented artist.

Okay, now that we've gone through all of that, let me just say that the day's still young and it's been fantastic meeting all the folks at ICST. They're so kind, open, curious, welcoming and ready to share their stories and hear ours. They also have a fantastic archive of books, cds and dvds they're building and digitizing for online streaming. Really really rare items. Here's the link: http://www.icst.net/index.php?show=152

Tomorrow morning we're being escorted to a sound art exhibit, before boarding the train at 1.30pm for the 9 hr ride back to Wien through the mountains :)

Anyway, more to write later.. plus a few photos.

Giselle at the Staat Oper

This will be a brief post, and I'll have to add the photos later... our camera ran out of battery at Giselle last night and we're trying to take a few photos here in zurich (next post)... anyway,

Giselle was just beautiful.

Dorsey, Sean, Caitlyn, Henry and I all went and got the cheapo tix which basically meant that you couldn't see much, but still... It was my first ballet and I have to admit that i loved it. It was so silly and just lovely, how could I not? Pure spectacle. The soloist, Giselle, was also so enchanting --- we couldn't see much but we were in teh 2nd box from the front so what we could see was up close and personal.

At any rate, it was good to go and a true Wien experience.

Day 4: Back to Vienna

Our final day in Prague was spent hanging out with Dorsey's old pals in their Prague apartment, which was just lovely. They're pictured below and are the most welcoming, friendly people. They also treated us to a fabulous, four-hour breakfast full of homemade curry hummus, eggs, toast, coffee, tea, soup.... etc. Geoffrey's from Georgia, US but has lived in Prague now for 16 years as a writer; Katarina, his wife, is from Slovenia and is a wonderful painter and visual artist; Giordano is from NYC, but has been living in Italy as a sculptor. So, with that, here's a few last photos from Prague and week one of our mini-tour...

We're off to Zurich on Tuesday! and then have one more show in Vienna on Saturday :)

S & Geoffrey looking through the old volumes of Traffica, the publication that he and Dorsey used to work on in Prague.

















S & C enjoying the sun (it's rare)


















Me and C.. i'm "enjoying" a small glass of homemade Kefir. It's milk that is made thick by a living mushroom soaked in it...very interesting and healthy.


















Here's the mushroom. Each day you have to feed it more milk....eventually it gets too big for the pots and must be replaced.


















Group photo


















Views from the roof




























































































































Now, off to Vienna again...



































































Vineyards of Austria

















And finally, for those of you wondering if we were tired at all after our trip... here's Caitlyn and I laughing stupidly at a vacuum attacking a car at the gas pump. We watched this hysterically for a good long time until a person finally emerged :)

Day 2 & 3: Bratislava and Prague

Day 2 was spent driving the long haul to Prague. We stopped in Bratislava, Slovakia for lunch... then finally checked-in to our hotel in Prague where we had a few hours to sight-see (get lost). Oh, I should also mention, since I'm sure the trend of us getting lost now is really evident, that we were going to rent a TomTom navigation system for the car, but they don't work in Hungary, etc. Oh well. Lost, lost, lost.

Day 3, we had about 2 hours to do load-in and tech and then we did two lectures (DV + Dorsey), followed by three performances including Video Action, a dance and sound piece and then a sound piece. The students were incredibly quiet....seems that's also a pattern. There's a real challenge creating intermedia programs, we're told.. not too surprising. There's new media, digital media, but no intermedia. The lack of a common language or way of communicating between the various arts seems to be the largest problem.

A highlight was that we were able to find giant bottles of water! I'm not sure if I've commented on this yet, but no one drinks water here. Anywhere. You get made fun of and stick out like an American if you do. Water costs way more than coffee, beer, wine. Anyway, we found water and boy did we enjoy it! We then went out basically all night with three of Dorsey's old friends from his days in Prague. I think it was the best dinner I've had since being in Europe. More about his friends later... they totally rocked.


Somewhere between Pecs and Bratislava

































This is rather random, but there's a puzzle called a Snake. Earlier in the week, Caitlyn's brother had solved it a zillion times and now, finally, on the drive to Bratislava, Caitlyn got it... now my turn... I've been trying for months now.


















Along the road...


















Oh, this is at the mall in Bratislava.. the entrance doors.






















Border to Slovakia. I got questioned by the police you see here. I tried taking a photo but wasn't paying attention to him waving no to me. So then he had to come over and said "Espanol?", to which i said "un poco" thinking he wondered for some reason if I spoke Spanish. Anyway.. I then spoke German to him. which was odd on my part.. then he checked my passport and went to make a phonecall. The boys were in buying the pass for the autobahn during all this and were escorted back to the car by the police who wanted to question me further about various national affiliations, which was in itself interesting (certain countries are on a no-no list that suprised me)... once we agreed that I was really just from the U.S. he was happy and allowed me to take a photo of him and his car.


















Finally in Bratislava























The national dish... dough covered in lots and lots of sheep cheese. On the way out of the restaurant, Sean got stopped by a couple from Manchester... they thought he was a US comedian they had seen on TV. Any thoughts on which one? They didn't know the name.


















More of Bratislava



















Prague. Prague is by far one of the MOST BEAUTIFUL places I have ever been. To say it's magical is an understatement. Sadly, photos can only say so much.































































































Oh... this photo. This is actually now Day 3. After our talk. The building we were in was CRAZY. The only way out was to go down into this dungeon where there were gas masks, etc..... keep going, going, going.. and eventually there was a door from which you could exit. So strange. Anyway, so it was the end of the day and this idiot was just blocking the only car exit out of the institue. We waited for about 10 min and then Dorsey got out to move the car himself, which had been left unlocked... the owner came and wasn't too pleased. Oh well. We were of course at this point about an hour late for our dinner appointment.. and then got lost trying to get to it :P