Category Archives: LoVid

We in the City, We on the Web

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Former First Person Plural participants and multi-media art duo LoVid are currently producing/facilitating URQR, a project that we think speaks to the First Person Plural theme and the kinds of questions we’ve been posing through the FPP readings and website.  LoVid became interested in QR codes as part of the flow of near ubiquitous and invisible data around us; as they say, “Our networked, online activities dominate and shape our daily lives.  Do U begin where the flow of data ends?”.  The main feature of URQR was an interactive public project in which participants had a small segment of a large QR code painted across their faces.  A compilation of photographs of the participants’ painted faces will produce a QR code that will take the user to a website featuring, among other conversations, the original participants’ answers to questions such as the following:

What do you bring with you?

Where do you hold information?

How do you remember?

Face to Face with another, Where do your eyes wonder?

What do you notice first in a place?

What can you see through a lens that you don’t see otherwise?

In URQR, faces become part of a larger code for information, but they also submit to the very intimate act of having their face delicately worked on by a painter, a painter who asks questions and who can’t, in the end, eliminate contours, facial features– all the ways people resist becoming 2-dimensional.  LoVid says of the final compilation, of the QR code made up of many: “The machine will recognize the pattern.  The viewers will look for traces of personhood.  The lens will attempt to smooth the skeletal contour.  Viewers will identify the residue of expressions.”

Through our daily transactions, machines and virtual space become our minds, they hold our memory, they collectivize and abstract our identities.  But we are also eccentric cul de sacs, each of us.  To join the conversation about technology and selfhood, you can go, without irony, to U R QR on Facebook and @URQR_URQR on Twitter.

FPP Harlem: Season Premiere!

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FPP Harlem’s second season got off to a provocative start.  Paul La Farge began the night with a story that takes on, among other things, the dangers of self-delusion.  Lynne Tillman opened with a formidable “We,” reading the first lines of the Constitution. She then dug into her own American Genius: A Comedy reading passages that question the usefulness of history and its bearing on the present.  Wrapping up the night, LoVid performed two sound pieces, both very much in the first person plural—the first an intense improvisation between partners Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus, the second a piece incorporating their unborn child through a fetal heart-rate monitor.  Thanks to our readers/performers, and thanks to our game, enthusiastic audience!  Our next reading will be on November 12th at Shrine—check back for our exciting lineup!

Critics’ Pick: The First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series!

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We’re very happy to be a TimeOutNY “Critics’ Pick” for this Monday’s reading.  Join us at Shrine this September 10, 7pm to hear Paul La Farge, Lynne Tillman, and art duo LoVid read and perform new work.  If you’re not already familiar with their innovative work, you might want to browse the following links.  You can find Paul La Farge’s Luminous Airplanes here.  It’s a rich, funny, and searching hypertext (and print book!) about the disconnect between human knowledge and human action, and it’s a pleasure to explore online.   Lynne Tillman’s work is being published and reprinted by the exciting new press Red Lemonade.  You can view her catalogue and a fabulous cache of her short prose here.  LoVid recently led a walking tour in Harlem involving dancers, local history, video, and iPhones; you can see more of that project here and the extraordinary breadth of their work here.

The FPP Interview: LoVid on the Art of Collaboration

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LoVid is an interdisciplinary artist duo comprised of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus who have been collaborating for over twelve years and married nearly as long.  LoVid’s range is wide: they perform using hand-made electronics and interactive choreographies, they create sculpture, video, prints, and large scale installations.  Their work combines materials both “hard” (electronic and wireless technologies, scientific data) and “soft” (fabric, paper, human bodies).  For more on LoVid, go here.

We’re Back! FPP Harlem Opens the Season with Paul La Farge, LoVid and Lynne Tillman on September 10 at Shrine

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It’s been a hot summer, but it’s going to be an even hotter fall with the First Person Plural Harlem Reading Series!  We kick off our second season with a line up of writers and performance artists who are sure to delight us with their original voices. Prepare to be inspired by the work of Paul La Farge, LoVid and Lynne Tillman.  Join us Monday, September 10 at 7pm Shrine for another singular event!

Paul La Farge is the author of three novels: The Artist of the Missing (FSG, 1999) and Haussmann, or the Distinction (FSG, 2001), and Luminous Airplanes (FSG, 2011); and a book of imaginary dreams, The Facts of Winter (McSweeney’s Books, 2005). He is the grateful recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.  http://paullafarge.com/

LoVid is the art duo of Tali Hinkis and Kyle Lapidus. LoVid explores translation and decay of natural, electrical, and biological systems. Working together since 2001, LoVid
produces works that combine hand-made and machine produced craft, DIY electro-engineering, textile, video, and noise. LoVid has performed and exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, Raleigh (NC), Museum of Moving Image (NY), International Film Festival Rotterdam, MoMA, PS1, The Kitchen, Netherlands Media Art Institute, The Jewish Museum (NY), The Neuberger Museum, and The New Museum among many others. LoVid has received grants and awards from: Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Eyebeam, Rhizome, Franklin Furnace Fund, NY Foundation for the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, NY State Council on the Arts, and Greenwall Foundation.  http://www.lovid.org/

Lynne Tillman is a novelist, short story writer, and critic. Her most recent book, and fourth collection of stories, Someday This Will Be Funny, was published in April 2011 by Red Lemonade Press. Her most recent novel, American Genius, A Comedy, was published by Soft Skull Press in 2006, and was cited as one of the best books of the Millennium (so far) by The Millions. Her other novels are Haunted Houses, Motion Sickness, Cast in Doubt, and No Lease on Life, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in fiction and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has published three nonfiction books, including The Velvet Years: Warhol’s Factory 1965- 67, based on photographs by Stephen Shore. Her other story collections include This is Not It, stories and novellas written in response to the work of 22 contemporary artists. Her work has appeared in journals, such as Tin House, McSweeney’s, Black Clock, Bomb, Aperture, and Conjunctions; her criticism in Artforum, Frieze, Aperture, Nest, The Guardian, and The New York Times Book Review. In 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and, in the same year, her papers were acquired by New York University’s Fales Library. She was the fiction editor of Fence magazine for 15 issues, and is a contributing editor to Bomb magazine, and on the boards of Housing Works, Triple Canopy, and a Trustee of PEN American Center. Tillman is Professor/Writer-in-Residence at The University at Albany; teaches in the Riggio Program, Writing and Democracy, at The New School, and at School of Visual Art’s MFA in art criticism program. http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/tillman_lynne.html

Venue:

Shrine World Music Venue
(in Black United Fun Plaza)
September 10, 2012 @ 7pm
2271 Adam Clayton Powell Blvd.
http://www.shrinenyc.com/