Artists' Television Access

Friday, November 25, 2005, 8:00 pm

On the day after Thanksgiving! Participation is cancelled in the biggest shopping day of the year. Come and celebrate International Buy Nothing Day at Artists’ Television Access. Do yourself a favor and avoid the idiocy and lemming like behavior of all the lobotomized consumer zombies that clog city malls and streets in gas guzzling monstrosities.

Program:

Colonized Pleasure by Sarah Lockhart (2003) (12 min.)
Colonized Pleasure makes the bold assertion that our consumerist desires are the result of an infection by a powerful parasite that lives, feeds, and grows on consumerist behavior. In fact, this parasite alters our brain chemistry so that Ikea furniture, a Prada handbag or an ice cold Pepsi,for example, will cause our brains to release the pleasure-chemical, seratonin, that nourishes the parasite. The parasite
does not kill it consumer host, it merely makes it want to go shopping. Imagery appropriated from television commercials, Hollywood cinema, and advertisements in other media illustrate the piece’s pseudo-authoritative, narrative, borrowing language and structure from scientific presentations to trace the evolution and life cycle of the commodity-parasite. The video’s split-screen format illustrates this syndrome from the parasite’s and host’s points of view.
      Sarah Lockhart’s aim is to deconstruct and demythologize popular culture and common assumptions through appropriating narrative forms and structures associated with authority. Predominantly a media artist, Lockhart’s works (primarily video collage essays) foray into mundane aspects of cultural anthropology, appropriating footage from Hollywood movies, television commercials, educational and industrial films, and
other sources. Lockhart has screened or performed works at The Lab, Southern Exposure, The Luggage Store, and ATA, among others. Sarah Lockhart has a MA in Radio and Television from SFSU and a BA in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University.

EXCHANGE POLICY (Gordon Winiemko and Julie Wyman, video, 15 mins)
A wild eyed spending spree  encompassing even the camera used to make the
movie  gives way to an investigation of the spectacular cultural construction that is “Christmas,” along with its corollary, the ritual of obligatory exchange called “shopping.”
http://enjoythesign.com/exchange/
“The best of the bunch Š a mini-documentary that deserves to be super-sized
into a full feature film.”  BBC Film Reviews
http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2005/04/19/pure_product_2005_review.shtml
“Funny, insightful, and thought-provoking … a scary yet truthful look into
consumerism”  Seattle Tablet
http://www.tabletnewspaper.com/arts/archive/40_artstruck.html

The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination’s Experiments in Hope
the vacuum cleaners ‘cleaning up after capitalism – works from 2003’ (UK)

Whirl-Mart 2:04 min
Take Back Action 2:17 min
Prayers to products 3:39 min
Re-Tag 4:26

The vacuum cleaner is a collective of one, we are artists and activists, interventionist and anarchists, resisters and creators, haters and lovers. we make performances, interventions, actions, insurrections, installations, videos, websites, presentations, educations and such like. we often find it hard to define what we do, as it often defines us. we dream, we hope, we love and we desire. we create and sadly  sometimes we feel the need to destroy. we mean you no harm, we try to love all. it’s just that we can’t accept the way things are. we have decided to try and make this place better, we use our creativity to try and achieve this. we work on our own or we work with friends like the lab of ii, C.I.R.C.A, my dads strip club, the space hijackers, breathing planet, reverend billy and more..we don’t have answers, we have questions and we hope these can create other beautiful things. the vacuum cleaner was formed in early 2003, a project, an attempt, an experiment, a desire, a longing, a feeling in our bellys, a sense in our hearts.
The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (lab of ii) is a new network of socially engaged artists and activists whose work falls in between resistance and creativity, culture and politics, art and life. The Lab of ii was launched in London during the European Social Forum, in October 2004, with 4 days of presentations, trainings, performances and actions. Several hundred people from across Europe took part in the events.

ADBUSTERS “UNCOMERCIAL” TV SPOTS

FINNISH BND video advert 2005 by Jussi Koski and Äläostamitään produced and written by Tuomas Ketola and animated by Jarkko Järvinen, Finland, 2003.