The Mission - Art happenings.

...When you live in San Francisco - any city in fact - it's sometimes easy to get wrapped up in your own little world - in my case a world of podiums, disco dancing and musty second-hand record shops. You have to make an effort to break outside of it once in a while, step back and get a grasp of the bigger picture. Which is the reason I found myself at The Lab (http://www.thelab.org), an artsy multimedia hangout in the deepest Mission...

...The Mission is Frisco's Mexican quarter, a slightly seedy but nevertheless happening part of town - lots of tequila bars, buritto cafes, street hookers, and dodgy crack sellers - a sort of Latin Brixton in other words. The Lab is in a converted warehouse space, all tall ceilings and bare floors - perfect for art "happenings" (think of my old place in the Borough and you're halfway there)...

...There were a couple of good things going on the night I visited. The first was a video installation by local filmmaker Nix Perry called "Transport" which featured lots of footage of subways, BART (Bay Area Regional Transport - a subway style system), the Muni (SF's trams) and the London Underground, deftly cut to jarring electronic sounds. It's apparently an examination of speed, motion, public transport, surveillance, authority and control and has already been snapped up for a showing in Hanover, Germany. It was rather unsettling at first hearing a booming voice going "Next stop Lancaster Gate" but actually seeing some gun-weilding US cop stalking the platform...

...Then there was a a great performance piece by Piki Chappell called "Circusonics". Basically he had two 25-foot steel cables strung across the room, wired up to an amplified sound system - and he proceeded to "play" them with a gargantuan home-made violin bow, about six-foot long. He even tightroped/walked across the cables, flicking them with his trainers and producing these droning, ambient soundscapes, sort of Aphex Twin meets Pink Floyd. And when he hit the cables he got these weird electronic stcatto beats. So at times it sounded like you were trapped inside a submarine and all you could hear were these deep-sea echoes. And then at other times it sounded like drum & bass as played by the inmates of the Bide-A-Wee Resthome For The Terminally Insane. Fantastic...

...The sound waves were then picked up by an oscilloscope and projected onto a massive screen at the back of the room - like a hospital heart-beat monitor in Enormo-Vision. Every time he caressed the cables or produced a weird sound, the waves on the screen would bounce up and down like skipping ropes. It was all part of Chappell's ongoing project, "Syneasthetica", which explores the phenomena of sound and light excited through (kinetic) motion. Artsy maybe, but still totally mesmerising.

...And finally, if, like me, you grew up in the fantastical lands of Middle Earth, there are some great previews of the forthcoming Lord Of The Rings films (first one due Xmas 2001) which are in production now in New Zealand. You'll probably need a pretty speedy connection to view these and a powerful computer but check it if you can: http://www.lordoftherings.net/previews/index.html

Namaste,

Kieran

He was born with a gift of laughter
and a sense that the world was mad.

Rafael Sabatini