FPCoA. » Oversight

Interview With You Are Not Dead Director Danielle Marleau:

danreetz — Mon, 31 May 2010 20:44:59 +0000

See you in Vancouver on June 5th…

The Author is Dead.

danreetz — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:37:34 +0000

Meg and I founded a press — “The Author is Dead“. Well, it was mostly Meg who did the heavy lifting. You can buy a copy of the Canadian Edition of YAND there (we’re using Amazon’s CreateSpace).

You Are Not Dead is on stage now. Please help promote it.

danreetz — Sun, 30 May 2010 15:21:33 +0000

Black Pants Productions with The Fakeproject Corporation of America presents:

YOU ARE NOT DEAD: A Guide to Modern Living

(Photos by Gabriel Collins!)

“Your dreams and dangerous notions, our cutting-edge advice”

VANCOUVER, BC: You are invited to view and review Black Pants Productions’ presentation of You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living, the theatrical wellness seminar.

You Are Not Dead is a site-specific, seminar-style performance inspired by civic duty propaganda, self-help manuals and popular theories on life management. Actors Adam Bergquist and Jessica Harvey will lead you through an efficient eleven steps that encourage you to embrace cognitive dissonance and be Not Dead. Topics covered include:

* Breaking the Five-Year Fail
* Assessing Your Mediacation
* Recognizing Your Debit to Society
* Stopping Identity Theft Before You Happen

…and much more.

Based on an e-book of the same name by writer/librarian Meg Holle and musician/hacker Daniel Reetz, the dynamic theatrical adaptation of You Are Not Dead offers incisive and humorous social commentary on pop-psychology and superficial empowerment. Produced and directed by UBC graduate and Yvonne Firkins Award-winner Danielle Marleau (Black Pants). Adapted for theatre by Meg Holle and Danielle Marleau with dramaturgical contributions by Rachel Peake (Solo Collective). Original audio-visual presentation by Daniel Reetz, and PowerPoint AI programming by Brandon Marback.

The show runs May 27 – June 5, 2010. All shows at 7:30 p.m. except May 30 at 2:00 p.m.
Tickets $18/20 in advance at Tickets Tonight or $25 at the door.

www.youarenotdead.ca

Sorry for the radio silence, if you emailed or called and I haven’t gotten back:

danreetz — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:07:59 +0000

I’ve been busy.

You Are Not Dead is Making Its Stage Debut THIS WEEK.

danreetz — Sat, 22 May 2010 16:06:50 +0000

This should have been posted weeks ago, but I’ve been busy moving and now busy helping some friends. Better late than never.

THIS week You Are Not Dead: A Guide to Modern Living hits the lecture hall stage as a live-action seminar/evil-genius play in Vancouver. The original project—a music, image and text collaboration I did with Meg Holle—was conceived and executed primarily in 2005, but my adventures in Russia put it on hiatus until its online release in 2008. Soon after it caught the attention of Black Pants, a theater company in Vancouver. Not to mention Metafilter, stumbleupon, and lots of other sites.

Over the past several months, we have worked furiously on adapting the project for live performance. The guide—a self-help manual meets social control propaganda—lends itself beautifully to an immersive, seminar-style experience of superficial empowerment and underhanded hilarity. Fakeproject Corporation representatives lead the audience through eleven steps of self assessment, attitude maladjustment, questionable life improvement and cognitive dissonance.

Check out the clickers I lasered for the faux personal response system:

Illusory audience input is “collected” throughout the seminar by the HAL-like character PowerPoint, for which I created dozens of slides. Brandon Marback programmed the artificial intelligence for PowerPoint in Flash. These images and others are also incorporated into a printed version of the guide—fully expanded, deadly sharp and on sale.

(this is PowerPoint)

(this is the book)

I went to Vancouver a couple weeks ago to tighten the screws on the technical bits at a test run of the show. Actors Adam Bergquist and Jessica Harvey are phenomenal. You don’t want to miss this.

The show runs May 27 – June 4. Learn more. Hope to see you there — I’ll be attending June 5th.

See Ben Varadi’s DIY Book Scanner in NOLA (Crosspost from DIYBookScanner.org).

danreetz — Fri, 07 May 2010 19:52:06 +0000

I’ve demonstrated the DIY Book Scanner all over the US and even in Canada. The most important thing I’ve learned is: to see is to understand. Every single person who has seen the scanner in person immediately thinks of at least one book they’d like to scan and share. So I highly, highly recommend checking out the DIY Book Scanner that Ben Varadi has constructed for the Tulane CIPLC. It’s on display now:

Although it may not be immediately obvious, the screen on the top of the scanner, showing pages of scanned books, is a watershed moment for DIY Book Scanners. Though it hasn’t been shared publicly yet, it’s the first instance of a fully integrated scanner using a computer to control the cameras. It’s ten steps in the right direction — one of our technological dreams is to create a Linux LiveCD containing everything you need to scan books from end to end.

However, the scanner is far from the most important thing there. Ben has not only been the main proponent of a 100% Free Software workflow — with extensive documentation — as well as producing some of the most complete and extensive hardware documentation on the forum to date — but he also works on the Durationator, which, in the fullness of time, will allow us all to check the copyright status of a given work. In other words, what Ben is working on not only uses DIY Book Scanner technology, it enables us all to make better use of scanning technology.

If I were anywhere near New Orleans, I would be checking out this meeting if only for the opportunity to meet Ben. Here are the details:

A news article about the event.

Automata Sculpture Show
Clattering Collection of Kinetic Art in the 9th Ward

The Candle Factory,
4537 N. Robertson St. (at Japonica Street),
504.908.4741

As always: the proof is in the pictures. If you attend, please capture more:

Young book scanners at work!

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING

danreetz — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:09:39 +0000

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “DESTROY, REBUILD, DESTROY”.

(PHOTOS BY POODUS!!)

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “BOLT CUTTERS, CABLE CUTTERS, CORNER CUTTERS”.

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “WE CAN UNPROVE THIS”.

REETZ-JENSEN ENGINEERING. “TODAY. TOMORROW. TERROR”.

Late Notice: Contemporary Art Design and Theory Talk this afternoon.

danreetz — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 17:36:31 +0000

I’ll be speaking at MSUM in Bridges 265 from 1:45-3:00PM today. I’ll be going over my artwork and the DIY Book Scanner project, framing up the whole in terms of the broader implications of modern camera technology.

Hope to see you there. Thanks for the invite, Dr. Cantieri.

Subway Bombing in Moscow.

danreetz — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:35:22 +0000

There’s been a dual suicide bombing in the center of the Moscow subway system.

Having been right outisde a market bombing in Moscow, I know how intense and deeply unsettling these things can be. Here’s hoping you are safe, here’s hoping you are well.

Late Notice: The Why in DIY Book Scanning

danreetz — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 00:10:25 +0000

Guest: Daniel Reetz, founder and steward of the DIY Book Scanner community
Where: MIT Media Lab E14-240
When: Wednesday March 24, 2010 14:00-15:30

Hope to see you there. Special thanks: Mako.