What is What

ABOVE: an excerpt from Traffic: Chicago. "my left foot" means for the bus to speed up..

This text about Traffic I have cut and pasted from a grant proposal and modified slightly -after the jump-

THISISWHATIS "Traffic"

ABOVE: A graphic I created for a project that I never realized .. a project about personal space in the digital era.. the title was "mywirelessistouchingyou" I think the graphic is pretty cool, not stellar or anything just funny and provocative.

I keep dancing to stay sane, to stay grounded. I touch the ground. I have little else to hold forth against the tide of misery besetting the world at the hands of gangsters protecting scientist with fancy titles and technical arguments.These nuclear scientist are stone cold. Playing We-can-make-it-state-of-the-art.

Fukushima HORROR OF HORRORS.. WHAT DARK DEATH HAS BESET OUR MOTHER. GE YOU BRING GOOD THINGS TO DARKNESS.

Hubris. They can play GOD. But, when it comes to nuclear power, there is no art in the balance of failures to innovations only human tragedies hidden under layers of loud blanketing lies and obfuscations.

ABOVE: THE LOGIC BEING HUMANS HAVE ACCIDENTS BUT NUCLEAR SCIENTIST DONT

 

ABOVE: Working on some new stuff in a studio before taking it to the world..here is a still. The grey tubes are super light weight foam recycled from thrown out materials in Brooklyn. I like the antlike relativity of scale that the large bundle places my body in. Taking it out of the street context to share it in this studio theater backdrop isolates the design of the character. Variations after the jump.

Photos: Brian Cummings 2011

ABOVE: A video of The Sweeper-Spin (starts at :09) edited to show progression from Standard Sweeper. ( see Introduction to Shannon Technique for context )  The move reflects technical progression by way of physical limitation. For more writing about this lopsided progression of my dance Clik " read more" below.

ABOVE: I know I have posted several versions of this video work however I am preparing a new shoot and am editing it in different ways to try and figure out the best strategy for the live shoot. Some lighting issues and the slight jiggle of the rig are two problems that will be solved in the next version of this series ( as opposed to the next edit of the existing series) Hang on to the end for some extras and B-Roll stuff.

I recently Performed in Torino Italy. I was performing primarily for pedestrians, tourists and local people who happened to pass me by. My Italian language skills being next to nothing forced me to stick to entirely non-verbal means.

ABOVE: With the right angle and framing a George Romero horror narrative emerges from a lighthearted moment of creative improvisation with the environment and random people. Chance is my guide and light my primary subject. It always has been. Photo by Andrea Macchia

 

 

 

ABOVE: This is a still of me communing with a canine audience member in Pittsburgh a few years back. Posting this up because I am looking forward to my European street performances coming up this spring 2011.

ABOVE: BENCH Alternate Edit

ABOVE: i have been dumpster diving a sign store now for years now and I am completely out of space to store anymore. I have enough letters now to write out a new message in three foot high letters of varied fonts. The truth is I love making multi-channel surround and multi-channel composite video works but lately I have fallen back into a place where the physical handmade object is reborn in the spirit of my imagination. - cont.-  I truly hate the materialism of it all when it comes to the video installation challenge. Conversely I see the material of rusted thrown out garbage decaying to a point where it becomes alive.

BELOW: Warsaw, Poland. A bas-relief of a mother with child from the socialist realism era within Poland slowly decays in the acidic rain as a late capitalist cultural force represented by ZORK leaves its global human scrawl beneath it.

ABOVE: POLAND a quick pic of the Warsaw Center City. I am performing at www.cialoumysl.pl with DJ Brian Coxx

I have been taking lots of pictures long before the digital era when I was given a Kodak instamatic rectangular black box. Now with the ability to share it has changed the game for me. In earlier years a contact sheet was printed negatives stored away and that was it. If an image was particularly well done I would give it to my friend who worked at a lab and he would print them 8 by 10 color on the side for free. Each image now is a passing thought whereas before it was a work that earned its right to be printed. I love photography. I am not a photgrapher.

BELOW are a few recent photos. I try and focus on some thought or statement with these. Bank Owned is particularly relevant to this era where taxpayers are giving money to a government that is paying banks that fail billions to stay afloat while regular folk suffer with unemployment and degradaton of their quality of life. The McMansion on the right side of the frame is an icon of the banking debacle and wild nature in the distance puts it all in scale.

Salt Lake City Utah

 

 

 

 

 

Pittsburgh, PA

INNOVATION and ACCIDENT. This past spring I taught a semester long course at Pennsylvania State University called Innovation and Accident. The course involved some reading, some development of tools to define failures in communication and to then address those failures via innovative solutions. The course peaked with a student presentation of different approaches and strategies to problems they defined within their own very personal landscape. The solutions final class involved a group outing to a Nuclear Reactor site used for research on the edge of the main campus of the school.

I was sent these images by VIDF with no information about the photographer. photos by Chris Randle. ChrisRandle.com.  The stills are from my performance of Spatial Theory at the Vancouver International Dance Festival. I performed the evening length work two nights. I believe these stills are from the first night because the audience was so interactive and one of them threw me a bottle to have a drink during the section of the show where I keep crashing. Anyway I will update the site with the photographers name when I find out.

Images from my recent trip through Sweden.

ABOVE: Driving down the east coast of Sweden I came to this lovely bridge with a smooth underbelly.. being from the city of Steel and Bridges I had to jump off the E4 and capture the structural beauty of this amazing bridge

 

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ABOVE: My host in Stockholm Dansens Hus. photo by Arto just in case you missed how low the camera was to the ground.

spatiotemporality is a solo exhibit by Bill Shannon at DNA galleries featuring two video installation works, (clik thru for vids ) "Bench" a three channel six camera composited in the round street capture and "The Evolution of William Foster Shannon" a 20 Screen video wall documenting and mixing the diversity of performance and video projects over the past 20 years. The works are on display thru June 18th daily from 10am to 8pm 53 Chambers st.

The event is called AfterHours.  I will be showing a new video sculpture that is site specific to the HH plaza courtesy of Douz and Mille and performing live dance and performance with a select group of dancers, DJs and VJ.

here is the link to tickets and more info. http://hirshhorn.si.edu/afterhours