What a wild, wild week.

First the really big news – Grand Theft Bicycle has been accepted for a show at the Stride Gallery in Calgary. We don’t know when it will happen yet but I’d guess it will probably be within the next 6 months.

Then this morning I got an email telling me that this is box/this is machine has been accepted into the Bearded Child Film Festival (Minneapolis/Grand Rapids) and will play not just once but twice – how sweet is that?

And last but not least, Love&Olson are playing a semi-private gig next Tuesday Thursday evening at Discovery Coffee with our old friends i send data live. You can watch a blip from my preparations below or on Vimeo.

QC test from robotoverlord on Vimeo.

EPI has been confirmed for Interactive Futures in November here in Victoria, I’ll repost when a date is confirmed.

WE ARE EXPLODING
Exploding, Plastic & Inevitable redux
date and location TBA

Featuring robot_mixeur, aka Stefan Müller Arisona (Zurich,
Switzerland), babel, aka Chris Joseph (London, UK, Montreal) Jackson
2Bears (Victoria), Love&Olson (Victoria), Adam Tindale (Calgary), Randy
Adams (Nanaimo), Steve Gibson (Victoria)

An indulgent explosion of electronic music, visual phantasma and free improvisation comes to Interactive Futures 07. Featuring multiple screens of optical hysteria mastered by the sublime talents of Love&Olson, babel and Randy Adams. These pleasures will be equally mashed with the adulterated beats of robot_mixteur, the deep drum and bass of Jackson
2Bears, the laboratory approved electronica of Adam Tindale and the furious techno of Steve Gibson. A digital aberration on the scale of it’s 1960s namesake, this circus of light and sound presents itself for your explicit enjoyment for one night only.

Steve Gibson has uploaded a bunch of new photos and video to the EPI site from our gig in Zurich at Digital Art Weeks, you can check them out at http://www.telebody.ws/Exploding/

Above image copyright 2007 Ruedi Kuchen

 

5 screens, originally uploaded by robot.overlord.

The people of Zurich were visually manhandled by Scheinwerfer and Love&Olson, to the awesome sounds of Steve Gibson, robot_mixeur and Jackson 2bears.

Pedal till you drop, originally uploaded by robot.overlord.

Shot from the opening of Grand Theft Bicycle, June 2 at Open Space

 

GTB Steve Gibson, originally uploaded by robot.overlord.

This June you to can live out the fantasy of mowing down world leaders riding a bicyle across a war-torn landscape. Show will be announced soon at www.openspace.ca.

Things continue to develop.
We are nearing completion of Grand Theft Bicycle and an opening date has been confirmed for the beginning of June. Saddam looks the best out of the new models, hopefully I will get around to posting some of the images soon. I’m helping out Erin Robinsong with a perfomance piece at the end of the month at the Metro Studio, please plan to attend if you like lightening or clever things.
A few weekends ago I had the pleasure of using some gear from MediaNet and have decided to become a member as soon as humanly possible. If you’re into media stuff it is a great investment and a very humane way of meeting people with similar interests.
After a short email exchange with Russ Reilander I have decried that the upcoming edition of Etherbot will be primarily blog-ficiton. Email me immediately if you don’t know what blog-fiction is and then google it, you won’t be sorry.
Over the weekend I am going to mostly be working on Grand Theft Bicycle and (hopefully) on some video work for Portable Stories.

Today is our second day of shooting for Portable Stories. We’re doing the office scenes and maybe some street level stuff if things go smoothly. I’ve also been hard at work on one of the sub-projects of PS, the Fort Street Project which will eventually find another home at the new openspace.ca website I’ll be building in the new year. I’m basically building a 3d version of the end of Fort Street that we’ll use in some special effects shots. Crazy.

In other news I signed up for a nifty Flickr Pro account so that I may be more like my friends and people I admire. My latest shot is entitled “but Drew had never seen a camera before.” and it is awesome.

Tomorrow night T Clark has an opening at Deluge (636 Yates St) of photographic works and it promises to be quite a smashing time. Chaindlk.com has a little bit of text about it here. Smashing.

In other news, we’ve started shooting Portable Stories and I’ve started on the animations as well. The first shoot was on November 30th at the Bibli Ophelia with Russ and Erin.

My next video project Portable Stories is well underway and if all goes according to plan we’ll start shooting next month. I’ve been lucky enough to sign up some really talented people to help out on the production end, and soon will start casting and shooting. The script has been developing nicely so I hope to find some actors to do it justice.

An excerpt from Portable Stories:

You can take your story anywhere these days.
You can colour it RED, BLACK or BROWN.
Practically any colour you want.
You can make your life an episode in some one else’s…
Talk, be talked about and discuss
These are talkative times.*

*Please note that I have blatently stolen the words “talkative times” from Dylan Robinson. I swear I’ll give them back some day.

On a slightly unrelated note,

Once upon a time, but not that long ago, I had a radio show on a local college fm station. It was a funk/soul show. And I know what you’re thinking, I don’t seem the type that would listen to that sort of music. But that’s where you’re wrong. Even though I took over the show from another guy, I love the sweet, sweet sounds of funk. In particular, artists like James Brown, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings and… (forgotten until recently), Lee Fields. Lee is a complicated man. He hasn’t enjoyed the commercial success of the number one soul brother, James B., but by god Lee has soul. My favourite album of his is called Problems and you’ll be doing yourself a favour if you take a few moments and give it a listen. In particular, Rapping with Lee is a killer tune.