Performance Works NorthWest presents…
Alembic #10:  Redshift
Communications, love, and existing in an era.

April 30 & May 1, 2010 @8 pm

After-party celebrating the completion of the 2009-10 Alembic Series immediately after the May 1 show!

WHAT:
Performance Works NorthWest presents an evening curated by Mack McFarland for the last in the 2009-2010 Alembic Series, Blending together 21st century literature and multimedia performance, Erik Bader, Future Death Toll, & Weird-Fiction present an ear, eye and mind-popping event full of language, lights, and legato.

Conundrums of communication emerge across towns, time and space. From cave-dwelling Quakers, grunge lovers in New Jersey to galactic beings in an ever expanding Universe, the prospect of exchange is obstructed by distances real and imagined.

Cross-wiring chasms from the cinematic, literary and theatrical, messages will be mixed, and echoes mistaken half-knowingly as correspondence from afar.

WHO:
Eric Bader (writer)
Weird Fiction (multimedia performance and video)
FUTURE DEATH TOLL (audio/video)
curated by Mack McFarland

WHEN: April 30 & May 1, Friday & Saturday, at 8pm

WHERE:     Performance Works NorthWest

4625 SE 67th Ave, Portland, OR

HOW:    Tickets: $10 – $15 sliding scale
Reserve at 503-777-1907 or at hulahub

ALEMBIC is an ongoing series of performative events at Performance Works North West curated by guest artists from the worlds of dance, theater, visual and media arts. This program is supported in part by a grant from the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition/Oregon Cultural Trust.

BIOS:

Erik Bader‘s writing has appeared in Willamette Week, Philadelphia Weekly, Philadelphia Independent, and Vice Magazine, and he is the author of two unpublished novels, The Pilot and the Panda and True Jersey: Volume One.  He finds artist bios that are clearly written by the artist in the third person to be cloying and insincere, but forgivable if the artist gives the name of his or her cat.  His musings of the moment can be found at http://dailymiltonian.wordpress.com/, and his cat is named Streaky.

Weird Fiction is an interdisciplinary arts group operating on the innards of the technocultural imagination.  Based in Portland, OR, regionally and nationally, Weird Fiction has produced speculative fiction blogs, multimedia performance, videos, interactive installations and book works since their inception in early 2009. Exploring the possibility spaces between fact and fiction, hype and horror, residual media and networked technologies; Weird Fiction explore the outer regions and ramifications of today’s pervasive information environments.
Visit their ficto-quizzical milieu at weird-fiction.net

Mysterious, ubiquitous, and eminently destructive; The agentz of blaze orange known as FUTURE DEATH TOLL utilize vintage electronicz such as rotary pwnz, synthesizerz, and drum padz to perform back alley open-heart surgery on their most enthusiastic patientz. The process of rearranging, patching, and modifying audio and video induces intestinal oscillations that could easily jump-start Dr. Frankenstein’s creature.

FUTURE DEATH TOLL is a throbbing mess of noise that eats technology and shits performance art.

Mack McFarland is an interdisciplinary artist and curator who makes his home in Portland, Oregon.  He works in many mediums, with a particular focus on video and drawing.  Characterized by humor, mysticism, chance, repetition, and the multi-sensory, his projects invite the viewer to experience the intersection of the aesthetic and the cognitive. McFarland has been exhibited nationally and internationally; screening videos at Pixelodeon Festival at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, the La Enana Marron Film and Video Festival in Madrid, and at Cine Fantom in Moscow.  McFarland has also created works for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts’ Time-Based Art Festival, and a three-month-long project for the Tacoma Art Museum, which Sheila Farr of the Seattle Times called “startling, nutty, and technologically relevant.”