Before Social Media, there was Virtual Community. Before Facebook, there was The Well. And it’s for sale.

Posted on June 30, 2012 by magdalen

Before Social Media, there was Virtual Community. Before Facebook, there was The Well. And it’s for sale. Tell the most recent owners, Salon.com, to give The Well a flippin’ break before dashing it on the rocks and selling its domain name, well.com. Salon may or may not listen at their salon.com/feedback link.

Bruce Sterling (pictured) asks, “Will some sensible person or institution please buy the WELL so I can keep my time-honored email account? Thanks very much. — bruces@well.com”

If you got anything out of the Tiffany Lee Brown interview series in the latest Plazm magazine, then you’re the kind of person who should follow this development. Exploring digital media, the death of print, and neverstopping social online, interviewees were Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, Sherry Turkle, Erik Davis, Amber Case, Nicholas Carr, and Kevin Kelly, most of whom had or have a connection to The Well.

Welloids have reason to believe that this time, Salon is going to kick us to the curb. More at the New York Times.

Posted in Opinion | Leave a comment

Update on Josh Berger’s Recovery from Traumatic Brain Injury / Bike Accident

Posted on June 9, 2012 by magdalen

Josh’s health is improving daily. Many challenges and months of recovery ahead of him, but making beautiful progress. For info, to help out, to keep updated on new stuff and photos:

www.getwelljosh.com

Thanks, everybody, for the amazing support you’ve shown, and the good wishes and prayers and fabulous vibes from all over the world. They seem to be working. Keep ‘em coming!

Joshua Berger is a co-founder of Plazm and art director for, oh, like twenty years. Here’s his official bio:

Joshua Berger, Creative Director
Joshua Berger is a founder and creative director of Plazm. Recognized by numerous design publications and award shows, he received the Gold Medal at the Leipzig Bookfair for his collaboration with John C Jay on the book Soul of the Game, and the Gold Medal at Portland Design Festival for XXX: The Power of Sex in Contemporary Design. His art and design work have been exhibited by The Museum of Sex in New York, ZGRAF Festival in Zagreb, Croatia, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and featured in Eye, Graphis, Communication Arts, Idn, and IDEA. He was recently a finalist for the Contemporary Northwest Art Awards at the Portland Art Museum and is a board co-chair at the Rock ‘n’ Roll Camp for Girls. Contact: josh [at] plazm.com.)

 

 

Posted in Opinion | Leave a comment

Plazm’s Josh Berger in Serious Accident

Posted on May 29, 2012 by magdalen

Joshua Berger, art director of Plazm magazine, was in a bike accident in Portland eleven days ago. He has been in trauma wards at hospital ever since, and is making steady improvements. However, he has sustained considerable Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBI) that will likely take months of recovery. Perhaps years.

Please keep Josh and our family in your thoughts, wishes, prayers, meditations, whatever it is you’re into. We’ll update this site with more info and ways to get involved, and send things out on the Plazm newsletter (sign up at plazm.com top of page) & facebook page.

Visiting is still very limited. We’ll let you know as things kind of open up for more visitors.

With love to all the amazing friends & collaborators Josh has out there,

Tiffany
(josh’s wife / plazm co editor / etc.)

Image: Josh working on his Collateral Damage ongoing art piece at Place. At some point he’ll be able to tell me the photo credit.

Posted in lots of good wonderfulness, Love, Opinion, reality, zine | 2 Comments

William Damiano: “Art Show” in Portland

Posted on May 15, 2012 by Nora Robertson
Burnside Street gallery Nationale hosts the watercolors of  William Damiano through the 27th of this month. While a multitude of pop-cultural and historical figures–Sonic the Hedgehog, Marilyn Monroe and Busby Berkeley among them–appear in or are referenced by Damiano’s broader body of work, Nationale’s selection, entitled “Art Show,” spotlights characters of Damiano’s own invention.

The allure of ”Patricia Poodle”– a purple miniskirted, floppy-eared, gogo-booted canine–accumulates over the a series of smaller works and culminates in a larger format portrait of Patricia posing like a pinup. Damiano depicts a family of foxes–mother, father, sister, brother, cousin, baby–in a range of moods and modes: the family at work on a movie project, the family clad as Lonely Hearts Club band members.

Damiano investigates how group dynamics might manifest under extraordinary circumstances. What if the Fox Family were a poker deck? Who would play the joker? Damiano’s wry wit and wisdom are revealed through his reorientation of funny page figuration. Damiano is one of many artists working at  Project Grow. Nationale’s May Barruel will curate a group show of Project Grow artist work at Stumptown Coffee this summer. —Elizabeth Pusack
Posted in Art, Opinion, portland, portland galleries | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

You are what you eat.

Posted on May 6, 2012 by Joshua Berger

Posted in Opinion | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Jon Raymond Rain Dragon reading at Powell’s

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Joshua Berger

Plazm editor Jon Raymond will read from his new novel, Rain Dragon, Friday at Powell’s Burnside.

Damon and Amy have had enough of Los Angeles. Fitful and tired and dreaming of a simpler life, they leave the city to go work on a community farm. But they’ve scarcely arrived when their vague hopes start to come unraveled. Rain Dragon (Bloomsbury), the new novel from Jon Raymond (screenwriter of Wendy and Lucy), is a fresh, searching story about love and work and the life destinies that we sadly only recognize in retrospect.

Jon will be signing books after the reading. If you can’t make it, live out of town, or are just lazy, you can order a signed edition from Plazm.com.

Friday, May 4th @ 7:30pm
Powell’s City of Books on Burnside
1005 W Burnside, Portland, OR

Posted in Art, events, jon raymond | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Transformation Time with Vanessa Renwick

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Joshua Berger

Vanessa Renwick is on her way back from a week of Portland at La Gaîté Lyrique just in time to do an in-gallery presentation at the White Box tomorrow night. This is a great opportunity to experience her Portland 2012 Biennial work, Medusa Smack. I asked her about these pieces in a mini-interview below.

Medusa Smack is running through May 26th at the White Box.
Gallery talk, First Thursday
7:30 pm
in the gallery. 24 Northwest 1st Avenue, Portland, OR 97209

The day after that closes, May 27th two of Vanessa’s films show at the Hollywood Theater accompanied by live scores. Charismatic Megafauna has its Portland premier along with Mighty Tacoma, as part of the EFF Fest and the Hollywood Theater’s Sound & Vision Festival.
More details here.

You have called Charismatic Megafauna a transformative piece. Did you experience transformation in creating it?

This piece is hard for me. It makes me feel uneasy. Although I champion the work the biologists have done to help with the reintroduction of wolves in the western USA, it is hard to watch all the manipulation that we as humans are doing to animals to help balance the landscape. Of course, my piece is not a documentary. It is an experimental, poetic take on actions that happened over many years condensed into 50 minutes with no talking and a live score by amazing musicians. So, please remember that. In a way at times it comes across as alien abduction from the sky. Making this piece allowed me to examine a lot of footage of the reintroduction, and to create something longer than I would be able to in a traditional documentary. It premiered in Seattle in a beautiful chapel. There has been great feedback on it, but it definitely is an eye opener. The musicians do an amazing job at contributing emotion to the footage, and I think having them play live is an important element of the piece. I think it helps to bring you out of it at points, where you can watch them, and then slip back into it. In a way this reminds me of Worse, the piece I made on abortion protesters. I went in with one idea, and came out questioning my preconceived notions. That’s what I love about making films, they bring you places further, expand your outlook. This piece is a definite eye opener. You’ve never experienced what you will see here in 50 minutes on the nature channel. There is so much going on behind the scenes in wildlife management that people do not know. Good and bad.

How was Medusa Smack presented and received at Centre Pompidou-Paris and Centre Pompidou-Metz compared to here in Portland?

Medusa Smack was projected large, single channel, and Tara Jane O’Neil played a live score to it. So, it was a different experience, as in Portland, it is a two projector video installation that one lays under a giant jellyfish screen. The imagery is very different from just seeing one channel huge on a screen in a theater. The people in France didn’t know they were missing an even more relaxing take on it, and they appeared to have the same reaction people in Portland have had to my installation piece, one of wanting it in their bedroom…..it appears to work its magic either way. Plus, Tara Jane O’Neil was doing an amazing score live to it, working her ass off, playing many instruments while the flick played. She did this twice. At the Centre Pompidou in Paris and in the Centre Pompidou-Metz.

A recent extended interview with Vanessa Renwick by Nora Robertson can be found on Plazm.org.

Posted in Art, events, film | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off

Light Structures

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Nora Robertson

Laura Fritz

Show preview by Elizabeth Pusack

Prisms, projections, and shadow play are among the previously employed strategies of the five artists featured in False Front’s forthcoming show of light installations, curated by Canadian-born Portland artist Laura Hughes. False Front is keeping the particulars in the shadows pre-show, but Hughes conjures the history of human conceptions of light in her curatorial statement.

Sydney S. Kim

“In ancient times, it was thought light was contained within the eye itself: emitting onto the seen object like aiming a lantern. We now understand light through modern science as electromagnetic radiation visible to the human eye measured by wavelength, frequency, speed, and direction.” She, and presumably the show, explore perception and visual engagement with everyday life.

Adam Ekberg

Artist Laura Fritz, who exhibited an intriguing installation at Plazm’s 20th Anniversary event last summer, contributes new work to “Light Structures.” Says the Seattle Post Intelligencer, Fritz’s work involves “the inside of your brain, the place where you process light, make memories and filter out stray things. In your account of what happened on any given day, you may not include the strand of hair that fell across your face, the inanimate objects that appeared to jump at the edge of your vision, the moth you saw trapped on a screen or the cat waiting behind a door. Those stray things appeal to Fritz.”

Also eagerly anticipated is an Adam Ekberg “minor spectacle–” his works often pass for especially charming screen-shots–as well as new works by Cay Horiuchi, Sydney S. Kim, and Scott Rodgers.

Cay Horiuchi

The show opens on April 7th, with an opening reception from 6-9, and runs through April 29th. Viewing hours are Saturday and Sunday from 12-3 or by appointment. False Front’s mission is to provide regional artists and curators with with an exhibition option beyond the conventional gallery.

Posted in portland galleries | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

[PANK] Invades Portland

Posted on March 21, 2012 by Nora Robertson

[Pank] Magazine is bringing its national reading series, [PANK] Invasion, to Portland this Friday at E.A.T Chapel with readers Monica Drake, Gigi Little, Ryan Bradley, Marcelle Heath, Rebecca Olson, and Domi Shoemaker.  I caught up with editor M. Bartley Seigel to ask him a few questions about [PANK] and the imminent invasion.  

 [Pank] fosters access to emerging and experimental poetry and prose.  What is the edge of things these days?

The edge of things tends to find us, and all we can really do is decide whether or not to publish it.

Find out more about what you can expect from a [PANK] invasion and running an arts collective on peanuts and duct tape after the jump.

Continue reading →

Posted in events, literature, portland, publishing | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Neon Frontier on 107.1 FM: Skatepark Revolution

Posted on March 3, 2012 by Nora Robertson

By the  early 90’s, skateboarding was in a slump again.  The sport had gotten to a new level in California in the 70’s when skaters brought surf-style moves to the empty swimming pools and decaying urban infrastructure that littered the edges of towns like Venice Beach. But then, street skating ran into community opposition in most parts of the country, and skate parks were having liability issues.  Mark Scott, Dreamland Skateparks owner and one of the original builders of the Burnside skatepark, sat down with me to discuss how it took a DIY community of Portland skaters building an indie skatepark under the Burnside bridge, in cooperation with the local business community and retroactively approved by the city, to kick off what Mark described to me as the skatepark revolution.

Check out the podcast on 107.1 FM here.

Posted in awesomeness, culture, DIY, interview, New Oregon Interview Series, portland, skate | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment