Call to Action: An Intervention on Water

Daniel Eatock

Artist and Graphic Designer

London-based artist Daniel Eatock (born 1975) has a practice shaped by discovery, invention, and an alert sensitivity to coincidence and contradiction. Projects such as a set of dances to accompany car alarms, an open call for snapshots depicting camera straps that resemble photo accidents, and a wiki that invites participants to add the lengths of their favorite vertical structures to a mile-long website scroll, all employ wry humor and reductive, serial logic to reorient our methods for making sense of the world.

A graduate of London’s Royal College of Art, Eatock served on the design staff of the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, Minnesota) before returning to England to work with clients that include Channel Four Television and the Serpentine Gallery. His early regard for conceptual art has consistently biased his solutions toward the objective, the essential, and the critical without sacrificing the wit that characterizes some of the best examples within this tradition.

Andrew Fenchel

Director Lampo

Andrew Fenchel, director of Lampo, started presenting concerts under that name in 1997 and incorporated as a nonprofit the following year. Early productions were mostly free jazz and improv, but by 2000 he’d moved into a slightly different niche, where he’s since proved invaluable to local fans of avant-garde and experimental music. Fenchel has booked many revered veterans, like iconoclastic multi-instrumentalist and tinkerer Rick Potts, who helped found the Los Angeles Free Music Society in the early 70s; Japanese electronic musician Yasunao Tone, who has roots in the Fluxus movement of the 60s; and the late composer Maryanne Amacher, whose sound installations often used overtones induced inside the listener’s ear. He keeps track of current developments too, and hosts prominent younger noise artists like Robert Beatty of Hair Police, C. Spencer Yeh of Burning Star Core, and Jessica Rylan of Can’t. In 2002 he presented the Chicago debut of the great French electronic-music composer Eliane Radigue, and in 2004 he was the first to book extraordinary Norwegian singer Maja Ratkje in the States (as part of Fe-mail, her duo with Hild Sofie Tafjord).

From 1999 till 2007 Lampo concerts took place at 6Odum, but sharing the space with Semaphore Recording began to create logistical problems, so Fenchel found a dedicated venue in River West for his 2008 and 2009 seasons. He lost that venue late last summer, though—the landlord, who’d been donating it to Lampo in exchange for build-out and electrical work, needed to start charging rent—and after another scramble the organization returned this spring with itinerant concerts at Columbia College, the Gene Siskel Film Center, and the Graham Foundation.

Audiences for this kind of fringe music are never large, but the Lampo crowd is devoted, and Fenchel has managed to keep ticket prices down—generally less than $15—through dedicated grant writing. It’s amazing that he can make ends meet, given that he brings in artists from around the globe, usually for one-off concerts, and Lampo has no other source of revenue (like, say, selling drinks at shows) to offset the associated expenses. Perhaps more amazing, Fenchel maintains a casual, inviting atmosphere at Lampo concerts, even though he’s presenting difficult music that demands rapt attention.

Lincoln Schatz

Artist

Lincoln Schatz’s work engages chance as a means of breaking habitual modes of thought. In 2000, he made the transition from sculptural objects to generative video work; his recent series of generative portraits selectively records and displays images culled from specific environments, amassing slices of video over time. Using this means, Schatz creates works that convey distinct memories of a person or environment, outside of the artist’s control, thus challenging the historical notion of portraiture as a static image. He has realized portraits of domestic, corporate, and museum settings; high-rise tower construction; helicopter flights over Chicago; and large-scale public interaction. His Cube, a 10’ x 10’ translucent architectural portrait space embedded with 24 video cameras, was commissioned to create “Esquire’s Portrait of the 21st Century” in celebration of the magazine’s 75th anniversary, and includes generative portraits of George Clooney, Marc Jacobs, Samantha Power, Jeff Bezos, LeBron James and dozens from every discipline who are laying the foundations of the 21st century. Among his other recent commissions are The Billingsley Company, Dallas: Two large-scale video walls each retain a separate memory of the same place over time; Qualcomm, San Diego: Generative portrait on four plasma displays of the activity outside the CEO’s office and boardroom. 600 Fairbanks, Chicago: A portrait of the Helmut Jahn high-rise under construction; Blackstone Hotel, Chicago: a panoramic landscape on two plasma screens situated behind the check-in desk. Generative portraits have also been featured in a variety of exhibitions and festivals including TEDActive, New Frontiers at the Sundance Film Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Pop!Tech, and the Spertus Museum.

Lincoln is Founder of Cure Violence, a 21st century global platform that empowers local communities to aggregate and amplify their messages through digital networks to openly discuss the causes of violence and explore solutions. www.cureviolence.com

Christopher Baker

Artist

Christopher Baker is an artist whose work engages the rich collection of social, technological and ideological networks present in the urban landscape. He creates artifacts and situations that reveal and generate relationships within and between these networks.

Christopher’s work has been presented in festivals, galleries and museums internationally. Christopher’s print work was recently published in ID Magazine and the book Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design.

Baker recently completed his MFA in Experimental and Media Arts at the University of Minnesota. He is now the senior artist-in-residence at the Kitchen Budapest, an experimental media arts lab in Hungary. In his previous life as a scientist, Christopher worked to develop brain-computer interfaces at the University of Minnesota and UCLA.

John Bielenberg

Founder, Project M

Since 1991, John has produced an ongoing series of projects under the pseudonym Virtual Telemetrix, Inc. that address issues related to the practice of graphic design and Corporate America. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has acquired 6 of the VT projects and staged a Virtual Telemetrix exhibition and mock IPO (Initial Public Offering) in 2000. In addition, John was recently nominated for 2 National Design Awards from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, served on the AIGA National Board of Directors, taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and has written articles on design for Communication Arts Magazine, Critique Magazine, “Looking Closer 2-Critical Writings on Graphic Design,” and “Design Issues- How Graphic Design Informs Society.”