be happy. surround yourself with + more art.

As a media artist, I have been fascinated with the battle between the spectacle and the viewer. I see this struggle as one of our societal identity in the future. Simply put: Are we going to consume or make? This question is particularly relevant for young people and is also at the heart of this project.

When thinking about our project at the Chelsea schools, I wanted to do something collaborative with the young people, which involved performance, language and sound. This culminated in a video chorus, titled "AWGTHTGTTA." formerly, we started out with a creative writing assignment, which unbeknown to the students, would become the foundation for their involvement in the chorus. It was a simple assignment aimed at defining and loosely encapsulating the students notions of a an idealized future and would charge the project optimistically. Then, I produced a poetic text related to contemporary communications (for example, cell phone acronyms and electronic gaming culture) with the idea that this text would eventually be performed in a group at the school. I then went to the school and recorded each student reading their own text. These stories produced by the students were fascinating and moving and excerpts of these are represented in the final edit. I'm most grateful to the English department for their contribution here. Many of these texts were written and spoken by students whose grasp of English was marginal, as they are part of a special ESL program. Their heavy accents are a wonderful reminder that New York is a world city and that language is a fugitive and living fabric here, which seems to change from block to block. Serendipitously, the group I was able to work with at the Chelsea School had just finished working on a musical project together and were used to performing as a group. So, when the cameras rolled they were able to transform my text in ways I had never imagined. All of these elements came together, when finally the work was projected onto a generic New York brick wall, on a playground near a basketball hoop, after the sun went down - in a neighborhood where those young performers live."