I have been invited to teach a BRAND NEW class at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

It will take place in the Spring semester of 2012 in the Art & Technology Department.  Just look for ARTTECH 3045!

This is an exciting opportunity to teach people how to recognize and interface with the electronic/mechanical/material potential that exists in abundance in the designed world that surrounds us.  Stop being end-users and start being hackers!

The Art & Tech Department at SAIC is an ideal place to learn and practice technology-based art.

The Art & Tech Department has a long history of supporting Electronics and Kinetics in art making.  The Kinetics Lab includes donated electronic devices and parts for repurposing (a GREAT resource for hackers!), extensive parts bins and electronics tools, and a small-but-well-designed machining shop for fabricating custom parts. It is a wonderful place to be(come) a Maker!

The Following is a quick summary of some of my activities from the past year.  Please enjoy.

1st: Solo

In the Spring I exhibited a multi-channel installation titled “Asterism_001″ at Audible Gallery at ESS here in Chicago.  In the fall I went on tour with some of the artists of the close/far family and we helped each other present live material by our projects Coppice, Quarry House, Awn, and NNN Cook at art galleries, hacker spaces and rock bars throughout the Midwest.  I built a new instrument for my sister, vocalist Meg Kramer, which we may be calling “Sister”.  Please check back for more documentation on all of these things soon.

Look out in the new year for the inclusion of some of my work in the online journal, Requited.  There will be included a portion of my ongoing text/sound work “Antiviral Exercises (Incomplete Interventions)”.

Also, for students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, check out my course – Hacking the Object.  I have been invited to teach the new course offered by the department of Art and Technology in the Spring semester of 2012.  We will be voiding warranties…

2nd: Coppice

I want to, once again, direct anyone reading this over to the Coppice site if you haven’t been there recently.  The beautiful documentation offered by our friends and colleagues as well as the thorough archiving by Noé have developed into a wonderful source of information related to the last two+ years of the Coppice project.  The material there should help anyone coming to the project develop a thorough understanding of what we have done as we prepare for what I expect will be an even busier year for Coppice in 2012.

A few Coppice highlights for the early part of 2012:

• We will be exhibited in collaboration with Mark Booth as part of his installation, THE SEA IS REPRESENTED BY AN IRREGULAR SHAPE opening Saturday, December 11th 4 – 7pm at devening projects + editions in Chicago.  We will be present for a performance of God is Represented by the Sea on January 14th, 2012 with Mark Booth and guest vocalists.
• Coppice will be sponsored artist at High Concept Laboratories for their Spring season in Chicago.  We will be developing a new installation to be presented at the end of the Spring
• Our first 7″, “The Pleaseance & The Purchase” is being released by the wonderful Italian label Senufo Editions.
• …two full lenght albums are complete…

3rd: Quarry House

Quarry House is the song-based project of myself, Jonathan James and Meg Kramer.  Formerly a studio-only project, Quarry House was able to go on tour in 2011 with other acts from the close/far family.  We released our first EP,  “THOSE”, in October.  The EP is streaming online for free, available for purchase as a digital download, and is also available in physical form as a limited edition handmade artist book.  Watch for future EP releases in 2012.

I want to direct people to http://dissectingadam.com/  and http://www.futurevessel.com/coppice/news  for more information about this performance.  I have a lot of updating I need to do concerning what Coppice has been up to and what this Articular Facet project is all about and how Coppice is involved, but for today, I just want to encourage people to come to Transistor (a very cool place) to see the first episode of a serial work that includes a new piece of music by Coppice.

Transistor
5045 N. Clark St., Chicago
Friday, February 25, 8 PM

Coppice/Pik
closing reception for Almanza/Crawford
January 29th, 6-9 PM
(Performance from 7-9pm)

New Capital
3114 W. Carroll, Chicago

January 21st, 6-9PM
ThreeWalls
119 N Peoria St
# 2D
Chicago, IL
60607

Read more for the press release:

Doves & Crocodiles
“Subtitles” series 3rd Fridays at ThreeWalls

“Subtitles”, a series of projects inspired by the writings of Edgar Allen Poe, Doris Lessing and Roald Dahl, begins next Friday with “Doves and Crocodiles”. Participating artists, Robert Ladislas Derr, Jac Jemc, Ryan Dunn and Joseph Kramer, will present work influenced by Edgar Allen Poe’s body of work.

In “The Dreaded Miscellany,” Jac Jemc will try her hand at the Gothic – the genre for which Poe is perhaps most famous.  A miscellany is gifted the narrator by an intellectually curious uncle who has met an untimely end.  On a daily walk, the life of a stumbled-upon fruit bat slips away without explanation.  The book calls to the narrator, drawing him away from his own livelihood, and asking him to believe the content of its pages despite his most common sense.

“To Helen” by Robert Ladislas Derr is a psycho geographical walk (wearing four video cameras) through Providence, RI at midnight. Loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem To Helen. Beginning at the Athenaeum where Poe was known to write, Derr traced the footsteps that Poe might have taken while creating this poem written to his beloved Helen Whitman, resident of Providence. Dressed in white, reminiscent of Poe’s remembrance of Helen “clad in white upon a violet bank”, Derr moves through the dark night on historic Benefit Street toward the First Baptist Meeting House, then down Meeting Street to Waterplace Park. Continuing on the Riverwalk, and back to Benefit Street. Upon the John Brown and Nightingale Brown houses, Derr looked for the roses that Poe says “grew in an enchanted garden”. From there, he continues on Benefit Street until the Point Street Bridge, where he meets in Poe’s words “the mossy banks and the meandering paths”.

Ryan Dunn and Joseph Kramer will take on Poe the trickster in this fake news broadcast. In 1844′s “The Balloon Hoax”, Poe created an entirely fictitious story of a balloon crossing the Atlantic in three days, and published it in the New York Sun, ostensibly as fact.  Here, Dunn and Kramer subvert traditional notions of fact and fiction through obscured language and varying levels of intelligibility, while simultaneously questioning that which should be viewed as an authoritative broadcaster of information.

In early February, Coppice will be performing a weeklong composition entitled Vinculum (Coincidence) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.  It is a large procedural work for 2 accordions, 4 speakers, art and its audience.  We will be performing daily for periods of time during the early hours of the afternoon in the main exhibition space.  I encourage you to come watch it unfold, Feb. 8-13, 2011.

Check back for documentation-possibly including sound.

Coppice is currently preparing several releases to be announced early in the new year.  If that is not soon enough, VINCULUM has become available and can be purchased over at the Coppice web site.  Each order includes a homemade pouch, hand emboidered by Miss V from Favors.  The pouch contains several (3 or 4) single track CDs.  Currently ranging from around 15 seconds in length to 20 minutes, the discs in the VINCULUM project are meant to be played together, or in sequence, on repeat, etc.  The project is ongoing and new sonic artifacts will be cataloged and made available as part of the album in the future.  The album is both ongoing and always complete.

VINCULUM