Exchange/Alteration was a total success during its 3 days in Boulder. The sewing intervention set up on CU, the Boulder Farmer’s Market and the Civic Park during Earth Day weekend. E/A invited participants to surrender their clothing to be altered on the spot from the bits-and-pieces of other participants’ clothes and from fabrics collected beforehand. The catch was that the E/A seamstress/artist could alter a participant’s clothing however they wanted – with some interesting results. At first, people came up to us making alterations requests, but once we explain how E/A was an art intevention and not a sewing service, people immediately got it and gave us their clothes eagerly. It was lo-tech arts activism at its finest- reappropriating traditional crafts as tools for social interaction, upcycling and breathing new life to old clothes. I can’t wait to bring E/A co-creators, Mélanie Badalato and Camilo Ontiveros, back to Boulder soon for another fun sew-off. Special thanks to them and Lola Griffin, Mark Gosbee, Rachel Murray, Meghan and H.dot for braving the hot sun all day with good humor.
Immersive. Botanical. Meditative. Aleatoric. Awe-inspiring. I keep effusing these odd combination of terms in describing SKOLTZ_KOLGEN, the endearing and impressive collective-of-two from Montreal, Canada. They performed ASKAA for a marathon 5 hours at the CMKY festival, described as an interactive ecosystem inspired by vegetation. JPGs of course, don’t to the experience justice – the visuals hovered, danced and grew throughout my time there, but not in the artificial, randomly animated way some sonified graphics are done. And not being content to just press play on some video loops and walk away, SKOLTZ_KOLGEN actually performs a live soundtrack to accompany the A/V installation. Inside of CU ATLAS’s state of the art Black Box, ASKAA was powered by 3 10,000 lumens projectors, multiple laptops running MAYA rendered video and topped off with contact mic’ed bells, crystals, and wooden boxes routed through NI Reaktor. But technology aside, the space they created allowed one to reflect on the silences in between breaths of a truly living installation. Pillows were scattered around the floor, inviting people to lay back and drift off into the piece. I felt like I was floating underwater and in inner-galactic space simultaneously.
More photos of ASKAA here.
