After a string of monumental episodes lighting up facades, city blocks, parking lots, corners filled with detritus and puddles filled with water, I’m thinking of going small. The idea comes from a refrigerator I opened at Art Rattan, a mid-90’s live-work space in the Fruitvale that would give itself over to complex, multi-layered performance. In the back of the middle shelf, there was a boom box playing a John Cage piece on cassette. Simple.
I opened and closed that fridge a dozen times.
I think everyone in that particular space was eventually thrown out for being too real.
So (and by that I do mean, As a result), I’m refurbishing a mailbox so it can be experienced as a miniature movie theater when opened. Modified with an embedded projection and audio system in the back, The Mailbox Cinema will be installed in public as kind of a sculpture, yet also, really an installation, while perhaps in my enteric nervous system I will continue to conceive of it as a musical instrument that appears, disappears, and reappears with small stories of place: the Key Route, the Bonanza, the Hacienda, Calvin Simmons and The Calvin Simmons, and things with the name Chabot on them from the water to the hills.
Front Burnering
I proposed The Mailbox Cinema to to the next Oakland Stock, the delicious artist micro-funding event that’s part of the Sunday Soup network, supporting artists’ projects one bowl of soup at a time. Diners pay a dinner fee of $10, feast on a gourmet meal, and listen to artists propose new projects that need funding. The diners vote on their favorite project to support and the winning artist takes the money to use for her/his work. In my case it’d go directly to my coursework fees over at TechShop San Francisco for all that badass Arduino foo that I’m sure is at the heart of every successful mailbox cinema.
Lexa Walsh just let me know The Mailbox Cinema will be in the mix at the next Oakland Stock on Sunday, January 26, 6pm at Ratto’s. RSVP to attend (that event posting in fB may not be sufficient) and let’s see how it stacks up against Oakland’s creative genius.