Events

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Tripping the Protozoic

  • Utilizing the connective structure of an Exquisite Corpse exercise, Sybil Wendler will ask the audience to illustrate, via drawings or performances, the participatory elements of being in a gathering, the  dynamics of shared space, of shared observations, of moving like a large organism with multiple parts, synchronized and elemental in behavior.  The group will be placed in [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Arousing the Imagination

  • Niklaus Largier will discuss the history of flagellation in terms of pornographic and sex practices, accompanied by a performative staging and an ‘arousal performance’ by members of The Public School.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Experiences of Mortality

  • Anxiety, Abandon, Suffering, Becoming a Corpse

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Contact

  • Close contact: caresses.  Contact over distance: tact.
    Collaboration between Alphonso Lingis and Norman Bryson.

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Outside

  • Humans and jellyfish. Just look at our feet: they are long and set parallel, made to move on

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • To Have Been Dangerous

  • We do not know what happens, what is, if we do not know great joys, great pains.

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Art Tap-Out

  • Art Tap Out is a live critique of four artists’ work in a ring that references forms of head to head combat such as boxing, Ultimate fighting and dog or cock fighting. Each artist has one twenty minute round against the critic/collaborator Kevin Freitas. Audience participation is strongly encouraged. As the ‘owner’ [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Becoming Dragon

  • Becoming Dragon questions the one-year requirement of Real Life Experience that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive Gender Confirmation Surgery (Sexual Reassignment Surgery), and asks if this could be replaced by one year of Second Life Experience to lead to Species Reassignment Surgery.

  • Dec 4, 2008
  • Look at Me

  • Many similarities are present: body covering, sculptural elements, and movement. Its placement in the world relies on my infiltration and the participant’s integration. With this performance I’m laying down a dividing line between adjectives and visuals and defining what makes an experience fashion and what makes an experience art.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Training

  • Nina Waisman explores how gesture and sound have long been employed as mediums of social control, through which a body can be made to transduce social and political formulas

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • EVERYTHING IS UP

  • Comprises of experiments with hand-made electronics, shareware, live-performance, and music from scores. Sounds generated from unknown worries, public interventions, and ecstasy. Making a music of things coming together and falling apart. Includes interpretations of John Cage’s “Variations” compositions. Originally designed highly-structured improvisations, alternately contemplative and chaotic.

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Tree Talk

  • In a sandy grove graced by old gnarled trees, their limbs sprawling, to provide seating for tired pilgrims, Lesley Stern wonders whether trees have souls and memories. She will perform a few of her writings in which tree ghosts whisper, telling tall tales, sad stories and whimsical secrets.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Balloons

  • Managed by one undergraduate, an air tank and balloons. The student inflates a balloon and sets it free up into the sky. This is done every five minutes. If a child comes by and asks for a balloon he may have one, but if an adult asks for one, the answer is “no.”

  • Untitled

  • AFFECTS are spreading in the current global financial crisis. I would like to extract different quotes, from financial experts, government officials, general public about how they feel what is going on. One idea is to print these different quotes in 8 1/2 x 11 sheets, each one having one quote on one side of paper, [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Go/ne Beyond (for Anh Tu)

  • Jenik will chant the heart sutra for one full hour. Text of the chant and its translation will be available on site. Others are welcome to join.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Raw and Cooked

  • Louis Hock will lead a group on a walk describing the area as a park as designated by the University based on a 1983 biological study, noting the flora, fauna, and topography. Returning he will describe the future plans for the area contrasting the uses and inviting the audience to consider the space as site [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • un_speakable: 5 phrase events

  • “The phrase event remains indeterminate.” - Jean-François Lyotard
    Verbals (Holly Eskew, Helaine Gawlica, Autumn Hays, Pinar Yorgancioglu and Ricardo Dominguez) will present five “un_speakable” gestures that echo indeterminate words, gaps and bodies that we have constructed collectively as phrase events – all that happens between signs and skins.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • From Centers to Flows: Plazas, Malls and labyrinths

  • A brief walking tour of the Price Student Center, moving from the old building to its brand new wing, will introduce the participants to two different ways of constructing space through the choreography of gathering and circulation flow.

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • On the Punctuality of Networks: Kahn, Salk, Latour

  • A number of participants drawn from the audience will read sections in series of a cut up text to each other while seated at the same table. It is intended that the content will not reference what happens at the Salk, but two enabling networks about the Salk — Kahn’s design and Latour’s theorizations — [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • I Wish I May, I Wish I Might

  • I Wish I May, I Wish I Might is a performance partly inspired by the iconic African-American performer Jospehine Baker also known as the “Black Venus.”  Perched on a foam structure atop the fountain, the artist will perform a series of rituals that wrap and unwrap constructs of womanhood and desire.  In this performance, Western [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Faith Is the Unseen Abductor

  • Blood alone moves the wheels of history. Be thou comforted, little ape, thou too in resurrection shall have a little golden hard drive. Every man must do two things alone; he must do his own lying and his own dying. Faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding. A live media liturgy, re-assembling [...]

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Whippings

  • An exploration of the emotional and sensual, religious and erotic excitement of the whip, a crucial instrument of stimulation in devotional and sexual practices, focusing on its role in the modern pornographic imagination. Here flagellation becomes a form of affective-imaginary arousal that both affirms and deterritorializes the body.  Accompanied by a whipping demonstration and preceded [...]

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Delicatessen

  • A discussion of contemporary “food staging” as a medium to stimulate and evoke sensation. Arrangements of objects that present specific objects of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and seeing, read not as allegorical representations (which they are as well), but as artifacts that are meant to guide the “application of the senses” — a technique that [...]

  • Dec 6, 2008
  • Rubber Rose

  • Niklaus Largier will discuss the history of flagellation in terms of pornographic and sex practices, accompanied by a performative staging and an ‘arousal performance’ by members of The Public School.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Pillar Saints

  • Niklaus Largier will discuss religious/spiritual practices (involving prayer, martrydom, etc.) in terms of how they serve to stimulate the senses and inform the artistic imagination.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Untitled Video

  • A writer from another time and place encounters joggers on the beach at sunset.
    Through the interplay of sound and image, this piece focuses on movement, texture, and sensation, creating an experience made up of a series of intensities that unfold mysteriously, as in a dream.

  • Son of Man/Sun of Man

  • This performance is named after a painting by Rene Magritte. Lili Chin will fast for four days, ahead of a silent two-day communal performance involving a series of objects and the activities of reading and writing. On the third day, an ‘event’ will occur, in an attempt to capture an epiphany with the sun.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • San Francisco Street Fairs

  • Photographs from San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair and Up Your Alley Fair will be projected onto Tim Hawkinson’s Bear sculpture, temporarily bringing together two different histories and presences creating a dichotomy of reverberations and sensations.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • I Wish to Say

  • A woman will sit at a desk, dressed in vintage office attire, hands perched on a manual typewriter. As people walk by, she will invite them to send a postcard to the next president, which she’ll type verbatim.

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Notes

  • Micki will erect a make-shift home fashioned out of cardboard in honor of a playhouse her father built for her as a child.  She will sit outside the hut and smile at every person walking by, until a passerby’s curiosity gets the best of him or her and they approach her cardboard memory incubator.  The [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • stimulus package

  • Andrew Allen Wilson will curate a selection of devices and bury them around campus. Todd Margolis will geo-tag these objects into the android mobile phone application Auradust. The devices will serve as anomalies – forces of potential transformation for the collective arrangement of people. Throughout the day we will harness small clusters of conference [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Re-Animating The Dead

  • Anna Chiaretta Lavatelli makes formalist deconstructions of cinema in order to glean a feminist perspective on the role of the starlet and femme fatale that move beyond the female body to embrace the uncanny. For “Something is Happening” she will stage and direct a performative film shoot featuring the re-animation of the dead in order [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Hear & Now

  • This performance, with Jerry Truong and Megan Philip, references “The Autonomy of Affect”, where Brian Massumi talks about the distinction between logical signifiers, or content, and its effect on the viewer in terms of affect. Their desire to evoke different intensities of the sensation of music is experienced through the visual cue of hands keeping [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Quilting at Porter’s Pub

  • Brianna will sit in Porter’s Pub, quilting, and anyone can join her. She will provide needles, string and fabric. The participants will quilt together and drink some beers.  The stitch is called The Drunkards Path. The participants will follow that path in more ways than one.  This project is meant to investigate how community is [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Untitled Moon Project

  • Noah will set up a table, a chair, a telescope, and a pad of paper.  He will then sit at the table, look into the telescope, and spend some time with the moon (approximately an hour or two).  During this time he will think about the moon as an object, as a destination, and as a [...]

  • Off-Center

  • To assemble a cluster of balloons, attach a global positioning system unit, and set it off unmanned into the winds. Does the continuously dissolving balloon, moving away from the concentrated community of language and sign and towards a turbulent restructuring, have a purpose, can the attention follow it, hone in on its source – the [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Sextrument

  • Elle Mehrmand will attach a sensor to her hand. It will measure the speed and intensity of her movement as she masturbates for one hour. Behind a locked door, she will invite viewers to look in through the peephole as she plays her Sextrument. The sensor will run through an audio program creating sound, [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • The inner revolutionaries

  • At this evening event the audience can participate in their own inner revolution, with the aid of wigs and disco. Within this there is a certain amount of anonymity, and a collective energy that helps participants to free themselves of inhibitions and allow a “hidden self” to emerge. This sense of freedom and collective unity [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Psst

  • A social experiment, exploring uninvited communication between strangers, takes place in the campus restrooms. The instruments employed in this investigation take the form of mischievous devices, designed to create micro-interventions into the washroom routine of visitors. From one restroom stall to its neighbor, the electromechanical instruments intrude into what is a solitary act, [...]

  • Dec 5, 2008
  • Image and Story

  • function of story, image, and anthropological fieldwork in creating the affect-idea confluence

Maps

Events by Author

Events by Location

  • Outside Visual Arts Facility performance ...
  • Visual Arts Facility performance space
  • University Art Gallery, Mandeville Cente ...
  • Torrey Pines State Reserve
  • Kellogg Park Beach, La Jolla Shores
  • Agitprop 2837 University Ave. North Park ...
  • CRCA, Atkinson Hall, Room 1613
  • MCASD
  • Visual Arts Facility
  • Gilman Parking Structure
  • Library Walk
  • behind Pepper Canyon
  • Behind Pepper Canyon
  • in front of UCSD Art Gallery
  • Old Student Center\'s Plaza
  • Salk Institute
  • Kiki Smith sculpture site
  • Rubber Rose, North Park
  • Torrey Pines State Reserve (Bag lunch/ S ...
  • North Park
  • Hubbs Hall, 3rd floor veranda
  • Calit2 Court Yard
  • starts at Visual Arts Facility
  • eucalyptus grove on library walk
  • bus stop on Gilman Drive
  • Porter's Pub
  • Campus, nearby Kiki Smith sculpture site ...
  • VAF Restroom, 1st Floor
  • Price Center
  • La Jolla Shores Hotel veranda

About

SOMETHING is HAPPENING is a 3-day event that focuses on the dynamics of sensation and the nature of gatherings. Rather than experiencing a single, formal presentation, audiences can freely gather and disband at a collection of different sites in the San Diego area including the UC campus, the Salk Institute, Torrey Pines State Reserve, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. At these meeting points, audiences are immersed in sensory and atmospheric experiences through which concepts are not only elaborated but enacted.
SOMETHING is HAPPENING is a collage of verbal and performative presentations that encourages the cultivation of moods, atmospheres, and various forms of bodily apprehension and awareness. By addressing the audience as a sensing body -- whether as individuals or collectively as a group -- the presenters seek to not only share ideas but also to activate multiple sensory connections with the spectators. In this way we are not taking a reductive approach so much as an excessive one -- opening up conceptual flows and sensorial intensities that always carry with them the possibility of extension and amplification.

Organization

SOMETHING is HAPPENING is produced by the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego, as part of its new Public Culture program, in collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD). The event is organized by Jordan Crandall with Sybil Wendler and UCSD graduate students George Bolster, Mauricio Chernovetzky, Lili Chin, Micki Davis, Noah Doely, Rob Duarte, Anna Lavatelli, Elle Mehrmand, Zac Montanaro, Sheryl Oring, Brianna Rigg, Lesha Rodriguez, Jerry Truong, David White, Andrew Wilson, and Suzanne Wright. Based on an original concept developed by Jordan Crandall, Steve Fagin, and Lesley Stern. Additional support provided by the UCSD Department of Anthropology and the Department of Ethnic Studies.

Gathering

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