From sewer-dwelling alligators to underground shantytowns and smuggling tunnels; man-eating rats to illegal warehouse parties; New York City's “underground”—mythical and actual—pulses just below the City's radar. On Saturday, November 8, Eyebeam—the upstart of unconventional creativity and boundary-defying art and tech experimentation—will present the latest iteration of its quarterly live performance party: MIXER Underground, which will feature a 5000−foot maze and 30 performers.
Eyebeam has a roach problem.. from anfw on Vimeo.
Six Walls from JooYoun Paek on Vimeo.
Video Womb for Mixer from christina kral on Vimeo.
Judi Chicago from David Jimison on Vimeo.
Underground from David Jimison on Vimeo.
Musical Acts
Roxy Cottontail
A longtime NYC-based DJ, promoter, booker, “general tastemaker” and a “dynamo”, Cottontail spins a mix of punk, rap and disco-house, and has worked with DJs Diplo, Spankrock, and Devin the Dude. A party girl of the first order.
Judi Chicago
Atlanta-based band Judi Chicago was recently awarded both the critics' and readers' picks for “Best Electronic Act” by the city's Creative Loafing paper. Since 2006 the duo of multi-instrumentalists Travis Thatcher and British-born Benjamin Coleman have concocted a surreal blend of acid house, futurist disco, art-punk, psychedelic rock with the rhythm and grind of ragga, jungle and UK garage. In their own words: “dada-illogic and non-sequitur poetics […] come together under the guise of explosive party music.”
+ Special Guest: DJ N-Ron
Art Installations
Benton-C Bainbridge
Benton-C Bainbridge's 3-channel video installation Goodbye, New York, is inspired by the artist's experience of the historic demolition and concealment of the radical artistic and activist movements of the East Village in the late 1990s. For this piece, the artist will recreate a claustrophobic squat and screen his original documentary footage from the forced eviction, police occupation, and eventual razing of two buildings, including an empty lot that was a garden for the squat. Shot from inside Bainbridge's windows, the film documents the arrest of protestors and what he calls “the destruction of the freedom formerly enjoyed in New York City at the hands of the government and the wealthy.”
Drayton Hiers, Christina Kral, and Dan Ribaudo
Drayton Hiers, Christina Kral, and Dan Ribaudo's VIDEO WOMB is an intimate maze and immersive audio-visual experience. A carpeted room will provide a comfortable respite from the party, where the audience can watch a video cycle on the ceilings and walls of the “womb”, which will include extracts from Kral's video diary of daily life in New York, together with live video captured from the maze. Telephone handsets and headphones dangling from the walls of the space will play a soundtrack of slogans, quotes, random thoughts, and the noise of the party itself to create produce the effect of audio intoxication.
BoozBot
BoozBot will provide liquid refreshment amidst the buzz of the party. This barkeep robot resurrects the stereotype of the friendly local bartender of the lush by listening to his/her complaints while mixing generous portions of comforting elixirs. The endearing robot-who can turn prickly when crossed-references the charming, malfunctioning androids popularized in sci-fi culture. BoozBot has been prototyped at three parties, and is undoubtedly the sympathetic life of the crowd.
Jeff Feddersen, Tetsu Kondo and Brian Whiton
Nearby, Jeff Feddersen, Tetsu Kondo and Brian Whiton will fill the labyrinth with an evolving soundscape of underground sounds using an array of custom instruments, including the impressive, 10-foot long, two-person Double Harmonics Guitar.
JooYoun Paek
In JooYoun Paek's Six Walls, performers synchronously move within a space of six-foot walls, creating between them a “living room” that reacts both to the people that inhabit it, and to the music of the event. Fed up by being a wallflower at parties, Paek said she created a wearable structure that transforms the human body into a wall as a party costume, and choreographed movements of six wall performers to engage with the party crowd in an absurd way.
Chris Kaczmarek
Whether it is the rush and cacophony of the passing subway, or the flashing lights, moving bodies and deep thudding beat of a late night dance club, the New York underground experience is marked by a blending of extremely high levels of aural and visual stimulation. Chris Kaczmarek's De Mengeling van New York will highlight this experience not by replicating it, but by dissecting the visual from the audio; allowing the viewer to both examine one aspect of overload by the marked absence of the other, and to perhaps find a state of peace within the excess.
Rob O'Neill
Rob O'Neill's video Cryptid Memoir explores the hidden nature of creatures studied by pseudo-scientific cryptozoologists. By deconstructing popular video and photographic imagery of underground species like Bigfoot and The Loch Ness Monster, their existence is both doubted and validated. The work is part of a software program O'Neill is developing to track alleged and hidden creatures.
Jon Cohrs
To complete the audio-visual sensory experience, Jon Cohrs will release scuttling, robotic cockroaches within the space. Built from scrap metal and powered by rechargeable batteries, one type of roach will invite the partygoers to squash it; the other variety will produce a series of pulse waves controlled by the artist's step sequencer to mimic various insects.
