dear thingsters,

after a longer hiatus, the thing's monday screenings resume at a new location. we are very happy to have found a new place in the basement of VON at bleecker and bowery. i will be traveling in europe for a while longer, but i am confident shelly, cassandra, caspar and harold can manage without me.

best wishes,

wolfgang

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The Thing@VON presents an evening with Joshua Thorson

Where? VON, 3 Bleecker Street (at Bowery) When? Monday April 16th, 7:30

Joshua Thorson is an artist, curator, and writer. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues. His recent essay on Lisa Steele’s narrative works will appear in the forthcoming DVD box set of her work from Vtape in Toronto. In addition to his dissertation projects, Thorson has been working on a body of short fiction.

Screening:

Rock and a Hard Place, 2006, 22" (Color, Stereo, 4:3, DVcam and VHS video). One night in New York, not long after 9/11, a friend gave me a New Yorker article about some events that took place in mid-‘90s; the article was titled “Virtual Love” and was written by Tad Friend. The story was everything that troubled me about what had happened after identity politics took hold in the 1990s, leaving in its wake a compartmentalized, quarantined, impotent struggle between individuals who answer to no one–where victims are suspect. The script is adapted from an amalgam of articles, media, and online information regarding a boy named Anthony Godby Johnson, author of the “best-selling” memoir, A Rock and a Hard Place. (Coincidentally, as I finished this tape, the J.T. Leroy phenomenon broke).

Protest Rushes, 2009, 3" (Color, Silent, 4:3, Super8 transferred to DV video). Part of an ongoing project of filming, on Super8, one-person protests of seemingly innocuous locations or phenomenon that comprise the banal failures of every day life.

New Testament, 2007, 20" (Color, Stereo, 16:9, HDV video). Near the end of Bush’s presidency, I desperately wanted to be able to think about the future again. This video is about the use and abuse of the idea of “Christ” by politicians who distort the basic ideas and teachings into their image of a capitalist society of control, and how ridiculously impossible that is; it is just as much about how race has been manipulated for political purposes. In this video, the black Christ figure continuously escapes control towards..... Is that Isis? The script is loosely based on two texts by D.H. Lawrence, among his last works, Apocalypse and The Man Who Died, while keeping in mind Philip K. Dick’s Valis trilogy.

Divorce 2.0, 2010, 14" (Color, Stereo, 16:9, HD animation and DVcam video). I developed this piece out of a one-paragraph “news-of-the-weird” article that was in the New York Post. I wasn’t entirely sure why I saved this article until I began to think about how I hover around my laptop at certain times during the day, checking messages or email or the news or blogs or Facebook, whatever–the way that I circle the computer, come in for a dive, leave the room, come back, leave again, return... And how easy it is to lash out online at someone I’ve never seen, or simply delete a person from my world or change my preferences to hide them from view. What are the consequences of friendship reconfigured as a digital apparition and its inherent disposability?

Horizon, 2011, 13" (Color, Stereo, 16:9, High-8 video transferred to web transferred to HD video). In 1982 EPCOT Center, or, the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, opened–a little late in for such a utopic modernist project. It featured a ride called “Horizons,” which was sponsored by G.E, that showed a future in which technology and innovation coupled with the family unit would evolve into exciting and previously unimaginable territories–colonies in outer space and under the Earth’s oceans, etc. In 2000, the ride was demolished. Sometimes I nostalgically mourn the passing of the Modern moment, especially in terms of architecture and its desire to think the future, even if, as was the case for G.E.’s “Horizons,” it was all just a manipulative corporate ruse. The story in the video was written to loosely accompany the archival video footage of the ride.

Masturbation in Space (collab. with Mike Harringer), 2011, 4" (Color, Stereo, 16:9, HD Animation and Mpeg video). This video, commissioned by Suzie Silver for her Strange Attractors project, is a collaboration between myself and Mike Harringer, who I met at a book fair in 2009. Harringer recounts an extra-terrestrial abduction that followed a humorous late-night conversation he had with his boyfriend about Whitley Streiber and Christopher Walken. Harringer's story is accompanied by CGI video sequences that vaguely illustrate Harringer’s story about auto-eroticism-as-performance for curious, sex-positive alien anthropologists.