2005

The Eighth Annual Activating the Medium Festival
SomArts, San Francisco, February 12
Cuesta Fine Arts Gallery, San Luis Obispo, February 14 - March 18

23five Incorporated proudly presents the Eighth Annual Activating the Medium. Founded in 1998, The Activating the Medium festivals set out to expose and educate new audiences to trans-disciplinary themes explored within the genre of Sound Art. Since its inception, seven festivals have spanned the state of California.

This year's festival brings together a reunion of early pioneers of "American Noise". In other words, this year's festival celebrates the "OLD SCHOOL" noise scene. The eighth installment of Activating the Medium will feature a first-time ever Bay Area live appearance from the influential artist CHOP SHOP (New York). Also performing will be BLACKHUMOUR (Washington), AMK (Los Angeles), and local hero THE HATERS (San Francisco). Curated by Randy H.Y. Yau and David Prochaska.

Saturday , February 12:
SomArts, San Francisco
Chop Shop (New York)
Blackhumour (Washington)
AMK (Los Angeles)
The Haters (San Francisco)

February 14 - March 18:
Cuesta College Fine Arts Gallery, San Luis Obispo
Joe Colley (San Francisco): "Sound as Second Language"

Curated by Randy H.Y. Yau, Scott Arford and David Prochaska.

Artist's Information:

AMK's primary tools are records and the turntable, although he is quick to distance himself from the realm of DJ culture. His body of work resembles an assemblage of sounds regurgitated from broken records, scrambled and archaically pieced back together in disembodied forms. Simply put, he sculpts records, scratches records, cuts records, glues records, plays records, and puts out records. AMK is also the owner of Banned Production, a label that in its 15 years of existence has released over 115 recordings of experimental sounds.

Blackhumour is the sensation everyone will be anticipating. We are still uncertain of what to expect from this disguised individual or clan from the Pacific North West. All we can expect is to not know what to expect. Blackhumour says it all.

Since 1987, Scott Konzelmann has worked under the moniker Chop Shop, presenting installations, performances, and installations involving heavily fortified speaker constructions. The assemblages of scavenged materials and loudspeakers operate with specific sounds that reflect these objects' particular physical and sonic characteristics. Chop Shop's contribution to the Francisco Lopez project Buildings NYC received an honorable mention at the prestigious Ars Electronica in 2002.

Joe Colley explores the multiple conceptual possibilities of sound, through music production, installations, or collaborations with video artists, dancers, and even prisoners. His latest installations attempted to dissimulate the artist by concentrating on the instigation of unstable situations unique to the composition of random sound. Colley first began recording under the moniker Crawl Unit in 1993, and later dropped the name in favor of his given name in 2001. He's released numerous recordings for Auscultare, Antifrost, ERS, Manifold, C.I.P, and his own Povertech Industries.

GX Jupitter-Larsen formed The Haters in New York in 1979 as a personal post-punk mandate that was seaking the kind of noise not necessarily audible through the ears, but through a kind of sociological transmission. The Haters have performed around the globe over 150 times, focusing upon such conceptual agendas as the celebration of entropy, the building of negative space, the measurement of the psychic weight for sound, and the theatrical absurdity of professional wrestling.