In Spring 2018 we completed creation of and started touring the a/v performance The Mirror, which in Autumn 2018 was accompanied by the release of an OST of the same name. Now it’s time to start publishing three artist commissions we have made in relation to this. The first work is an a/v piece by Dina Kelberman. The title is “Reflects”.
Click on the Media Link to view the work and please enable pop-ups and turn your device sound on since they form an essential part of the piece.
The other two artists (Porest & Hearty White) new works will be revealed in the coming weeks.
Title: Reflects
Description: When I thought about the word “reflections” this is what my brain showed me. Something about reflects, reflex, reflection symmetry, shapes, walls, and now that i think about it it’s probably a lot to do with sitting in a tiny room full of corners all day every day. Also laptop symmetry. These might all just be portraits of my laptop.
Bio: Dina Kelberman is an interdisciplinary artist recently transplanted from Baltimore, MD to Los Angeles CA. Kelberman has created original web-based pieces for the New Museum and The Marina Abramovic Institute and has participated in numerous design and photography biennials. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Art21, NPR, Known and Strange Things (Cole, 2016) and most recently The Focal Press Companion to the Constructed Image in Contemporary Photography (Routledge, 2018) and Olia Liliana’s “An Infinite Seance 3”. In 2018 she was invited to speak at the UbuWeb conference in Athens and the Post-Photography Prototyping Biennial in London. She is currently ranked 5th in the world for Most Lines in Tetris for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
On Wednesday 21 November 2018 at 8-10 pm (California time) People Like Us guested on the radio with Irene Moon doing a 2-hour fill in slot on KCSB in Santa Barbara. Listen to mp3s of the two hour show here:
29 November/30 November 2018 midnight on Thursday going into 3am Friday morning, California time. In the UK that is 8am-11am Friday KPFA 94.1FM, online at https://kpfa.org/player?audio=live
We returned to the radio to guest with Jon Leidecker (Wobbly) on Negativland’s “Over The Edge” on KPFA Radio for the first time in 16 years, and this represents the 20 year mark of first appearing on Over The Edge.
Since 1981, Negativland’s live mix, audio collage radio show, “Over The Edge,” has aired weekly for 3 hours at midnight, each Thursday on KPFA 94.1FM in Berkeley, California. Mixed for 35 uninterrupted years by founder Don Joyce until his passing in 2015, the show continues on, now helmed by Wobbly (2nd & 4th Thursdays) and KROB (3rd Thursdays, as a frequently-broken rule). OTE’s themed mixes are made live and spontaneously on the air from a variety of formats and equipment. There is a plan and there is no plan. The mix consists of found sound of many kinds and from many sources put together on the run as the continuous audio collage progresses.
19.00-19.40: Live performance: The Mirror 19.45-20.15: Q&A with Rob Young, from The Wire 2015-2045: PAUSE 20.45-21.45: Documentary: Nothing Can Turn Into A Void- An Art Apart: People Like Us. By Carl Abrahamsson
London’s Horse Hospital are very happy to present a double bill of horror themed content from People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) – legendary figure the field of sampling / appropriation and regular host on the Horse Hospital’s beloved WFMU, alongside Gwilly Edmondez known widely as the many faceted godfather of Wild Pop, founding member of Radioactive Sparrow and one half of YEAH YOU.
Friday 26 October 2018, Doors 7pm Admission: £7.50 in advance / £10 on the door
The Mirror will screen in its theatrical form at Recombinant Festival, San Francisco on 30 November 2018 – you can buy tickets here. Please note this is NOT a live performance, but we will be present to introduce the movie screening.
To coincide with a few concerts that we’ve been doing lately, we’ve put some “Retrospective” mp3s up on bandcamp from the first 25 years of People Like Us. You can download it hereor click below.
This is a 100 track compilation, over 6 hours duration, representing some of our favourite tracks and collaborations over radio, on stage and in the studio from 1991, which was when we released our first album. Each track has a different flavour, from a different time, another place, and often associated with a different recording medium or varying groups of individuals who inspired or actually took part.
Thank you friends, listeners and collaborators for being around, and for all those who inspired and supported the journey so far. Making this available at a Nice Price considering the ridiculous volume of content, and as is the case for much of People Like Us, you can quite possibly find a lot of this in various forms elsewhere on the internet for free, either put there by us, or others. But if you’d like to support us, then we thank you and welcome that. It will help make more happen.
Bandcamp requires that we upload in lossless form, and we will be honest and say that a lot of this only exists as mp3, but really…. most of what we sampled was also initially in mp3 form.
PEOPLE LIKE US concert Event: Noche Blanca Date: Saturday, October 6th 2018 Venue: Teatro Filarmónica, Calle Mendizábal, 3, 33003 City: Oviedo, Spain url: www.nocheblanca.es facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nocheblancaovd/ instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nocheblancaovd/ This audiovisual concert commemorates the 25th (well, at least!!) year of People Like Us publishing work, featuring highlighted excerpts from the previous four a/v performances of People Like Us.
Interview with Marta Barbón from LA NUEVA ESPAÑA (OVIEDO)
Translation:
You were so young, only sixteen, when you got interested in “collage”. ¿What pushed you to get into that first experimentation?
I have always been inspired by music and moving image rather than non-time-based media. The only education that I completed was a pre-degree art and design foundation course and I immediately was most interested in photography rather than drawing or sculpture, etc. I was lucky enough to have a tutor there to lent me his books on performance art, conceptual art and photo collage, and through that I started working with footage and pictures as “found” objects rather than trying to capture something through a lens alone.
Are you aware that you get into cut&paste in a time and being part of a generation that wasn’t digital? In which ways could that circumstance have influenced your work?
What I do is folk art in the age of digital reproduction. When I started it was in the age of analogue reproduction. I couldn’t predict how fast things would develop around 2000 with the age of faster cheaper computing and broadband internet. When I started it was still possible to do quite a lot with a cassette four track, hifi-based electronics and a scalpel and glue. I couldn’t go back to that way of working now and I don’t romanticise it at all. I always had a vision of what I am doing now but had to wait, and in some ways I’m still waiting. For the past two years I’ve been making a 360 surround immerse audiovisual work called Gone, Gone Beyond. This is only possible to do with the fast computer that I now have, but I still am looking ahead and forward, or rather my visions of what I could do next are.
Do you think that for digital natives, collage, or the fragmentation of things, is something more natural, or there is no difference?
No, I think computers and also analogue copying (cassette, photocopier, printing press) are modelled around the human mind’s way of working. We learn and improve ourselves by copying and improvising, by cutting and pasting in our own lives. That is all that we have taught machines to do for us.
Another fact that is related to your job, is that digital media caused an over documentation. Nowadays everything is filmed, photographed and saved. What implies for an artist that works with found footage?
That is true, but most of what is documented is pretty trivial, and the analogue version of that might be taking photos and leaving them in the wallet that you were given them in when they came back from the photo developers. I think once again it’s to do with the way that we are, we like to document as a “witness” to us having been somewhere or done something. This is why people used to like to photograph a landmark, or themselves in a landmark, it isn’t necessarily because they are going to ever look at that again but they want to take the snap shot to some how validate that they were there, possibly with the intention that they would share it in the future with someone, or just with themselves. Although a lot of the time they never will.k
There are some authors that think that this over documentation cancel out, in some way, the “oblivion” and get us into “loop dynamics”, blocking progress or experimentation, especially in artistic languages. Do you agree with that? What do you think about it?
I agree that we all are in danger of repeating ourselves over and over again rather than being on a variable cycle of gradual/sudden change. Although the latter happens naturally if we try and do the same thing over and over anyway.
How much importance do you give to movements like Collaborative Art and DIY? Nowadays what role plays the authorship in contemporary art and what it means to be an artist?
I would rather that there were not “movements”, since they imply that something is in or out, or good and bad. I understand the need to categorise in order to communicate faster but at the same time it can trivialise the subject matter then toss it onto the scrapheap once it’s been summed up. DIY is very important, to learn through repetition is how we finally come up with something that makes sense to us, something that is more than the sum of the parts. Authorship is limited once something is published. You cannot put something out into the public and still have 100% control of it.
What could we see in Oviedo on this trip trough 25 years of “People Like Us”?
I’ve been publishing work since 1991 (so it’s more than 25 years now, in fact!) and decided to make an audiovisual concert compiled from a number of different works. So it’s a whirlwind rollercoaster ride!
Discrepant Sucata Tapes (CS72) SUC19 On Pre-Order. Shipping mid-October 2018
Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us returns to Sucata Tapes with another epic radio collage from the archives. You can buy the cassette (with a digital download included from us or Discrepant, and if you want just the digital download then get direct form Discrepant.
“The work of People Like Us rests gingerly between two dangerous positions: on the one hand, the risk of fashioning merely stylish pastiche out of borrowed finery for the sake of self-conscious kitschiness; on the other hand, the risk of making simplistic, heavy handedly “topical” audio-jokes at the expense of one’s raw material to a smug effect. If the lounge creeps uncritically snack on their sonic ingredients and coast on being “groovy”, the cads of pseudo-critique take cheap shots at straw men and call it subversion. Happily, Vicki Bennett has yet to fall down either precipice, but yodels down contentedly from her own Alpine audio-cottage. There, with loving care, she snips and tucks at the lycra jumpsuit until the fit is snug, places every plastic shrub on the Happy Valley Ranch just so, and throws another dance record on the bonfire. Undercutting her own utopian mirages with formal breakdowns and sneaky semantic pranks, Vicki Bennett is One Funny Lady, with a deadly sense of comic timing that puts her in my personal pantheon of edit intensive music makers: -Steinski and Mass Media, Hank Shocklee, Tod Dockstader, Teo Macero, the Hanatarash, John Oswald, Runzelstirn & Gurgelstock. Serving her birthday cake with a turd, her gags are always lined with a virulent creep factor. You get the feeling that the vacancy and pointlessness of empty speech is being lampooned and mourned in equal measure. In sticking to this balance of celebration and critique, People Like Us genuinely hates and loves People Like You. The least you can do is head up to the Happy Valley Ranch for a spell and have a listen.” – Drew Daniel
