“Our advertisers penetrate urban markets with maximum efficiency and profitability. (We create) dominant exposure in multicultural markets through the use of consistently proactive, completely penetrating mobile media. (Our) audiences can’t change a channel, turn a page, take a different route to work or throw your advertisements away. You will impact anyone living, working, playing, visiting or just passing through the urban marketplace. Your product or message is inescapable.”
—from a promotional brochure by Cab-Ads, West Seneca New York

HEAR OUR MESSAGE NOW, YOU CAPITALISTS!

Our urban neighborhoods demand liberation from the oppressive mental environment caused by advertising, creeping into every little space that our eyes can see and our ears can hear. A warning for you: the closer you get to us with your brands, the more surely we will take those brands right out of your hands and use them against you.

This struggle has already begun—we jam and fight and jujitsu your ass more and more every day. We find new energy from our victories and learn from our defeats. We teach each other, we learn the ghost dance and pass it on, we build solidarity amongst ourselves and drop the knowledge on those who have been lost in the wilderness.

We are becoming!
The dissemination of this knowledge and these tools—of the slight of hand, of the secret actions, of the diversion, of the détournement—will now accelerate by a hundredfold.

Behold! We have captured your greatest weapon:
Your corporate logos and trademarks. Image files of over 6,000 of them, on CD-ROM, now titled The Détournement Kit. These hi-res EPS files are accessible to Mac and PC users, and can be printed, manipulated and copied. These disks will be distributed freely among people with a handshake or a hug; with warmth, wariness and purpose.

Détournement has led to the toppling of kings.
Détournement has led to the liberation of the heart.
This is just the first in a series of tool kits designed to undermine your media machine at every turn. Our resistance is deeply rooted now, and we will persist in finding new ways to deflect your billion-dollar campaigns. Do you think you can ever make us stop?

Your symbols now belong to us, and from here there is no going back. Now we will control your brand identity. We will undermine your consistency, your homogeneity, your idea and your promise. Your one-way message has been disrupted and we will grease the pathways of our social dialogue with the fat of your prized calf.

Rely on the Working Class Wholeheartedly! ponders the repetition and banality of work, with stories of some favorite and least-favorite jobs. This video was originally screened at a downtown Chicago Burger King during lunch rush, as part of the Counter Productive Industries exhibition at 1926 Space.

Rely on the Working Class Wholeheartedly!, 2000. Production still from 14min video.

Voice Trail, 2001. Sonicate Records #SR001 cassette.

Voice Trail (Excerpt) 1:16 [ listen ]

Read the review in Lumpen magazine (PDF)

These three site-specific sound pieces were broadcast from Neighborhood Sonification Units (secured, portable audio devices) in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, as Fuz Fon’s entry in the Department of Space and Land Reclamation exhibition in 2001. Each Unit was an attempted intervention into the pyshco-social makeup of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. 
StarSuck was locked down in the enterance of a Starbucks coffee shop, Chicago Avenue Breakdown blasted the sidewalk in front of a real estate office, and Gentropy was hung from high up on an El bridge over an abandonded lot.

“In medicine, doctors break up kidney stones by focusing concentrated sound waves at the blockage. The waves break up the stones until the passage is clear. In much the same way, Fuz Fon proposes to break up the process of gentrification by aiming sound waves at a specific location where the tumor is visible.”

1. Gentropy (Excerpt) 2:04 [ listen ]
2. StarSuck (Excerpt) 1:16 [ listen ]
3. Chicago Avenue Breakdown (Excerpt) 2:00 [ listen ]

Neighborhood Sonification Unit, 2001. 
Modified lunch cooler, bike lock, CD, CD player, speakers.

A fruitful collaboration with Jonathan Crenshaw from 1999–2001, Fuz Fon produced several sound and video pieces, performances and interventions. The intersection of fine art and independent music backgrounds led to a collage-based investigation of discarded sentiment, low-wage labor and urban development.

Fuz Fon (l-r): Steven L. Anderson, Johnathan Mead-Crenshaw, 2001.
Photo: Angela Mead-Crenshaw


Opening & performance by Steven L. Anderson: Friday, February 22, 7 – 11pm
Also featuring lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu.

Monte Vista Projects is pleased to present Power Plant, Steven L. Anderson’s solo exhibition of painting, drawing, video, and performances. Power Plant is a collection of strategies for charging, releasing, projecting, negating, and focusing energy. Spiraling, text-based drawings become tools for directing vibrations. A large “prayer rug” serves as a charging station for staging performative, creative actions. Tripods supporting video cameras appear as totemic signposts in the energy landscape. On the cameras’ tiny screens, short videos testify to the electricity one feels while exploring the wilderness, reaching a mountain’s summit, or encountering the sublime.

The rhythms of our daily lives, our politics and culture, and our technology surround us completely, encompassing us in white noise—but when we escape into the outdoors, we gain perspective. As our senses refocus, our bodies discover rhythms that can’t be represented on clocks. We begin to experience older, deeper rhythms, of energy flowing through and around us. The exhilaration of the human spirit fuses with the ferocious beauty of nature to make a palpable, tingling essence, and—-if an artist is attuned-—this energy can become a medium in itself.

The exhibition will feature lectures, performances, and workshops by Riah Buchanan, Shade Falcon, Robby Herbst, Charles Irvin, Los Angeles Mystery Project, Tom McKenzie, and Guru Rugu. Audiences are limited to 15 people. Schedule and sign-ups will be posted at the gallery and online at montevistaprojects.com.

Steven L. Anderson works in a variety of media to explore the nature of power, and the power of Nature. His career as an artist has been a cycle of collaborative and individual production, including projects with Tom McKenzie (as Ecstatic Energy Consultants, Inc.); Karl Erickson & Robby Herbst; Elana Mann; Llano del Rio Collective; Signify, Sanctify, Believe; and Cakewalk magazine. Anderson was a 2011 Artist-in-Residence at Joshua Tree National Park, and his work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago. A longtime resident of Los Angeles, Steven now lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia.

at
Monte Vista
5442 Monte Vista St.
Los Angeles, CA 90042
www.montevistaprojects.com
hours: Saturday & Sunday 12–5 and by appointment

This Saturday, April 23 at 7pm!

Two locations:
Free Church of Public Fiction
749 Avenue 50, Los Angeles, CA 90042
and
Lost Horse Ranger Station, Joshua Tree National Park
Please plan to arrive early by around 7:00 pm for a warm-ups and libations.
Due to this happening’s participatory nature, there will be no admittance after 7:38 pm.
Artists:
Steven L. Anderson, Tom McKenzie
http://www.ecstaticenergy.com

We Are Transmitters is how we will communicate with one another in the future, now, from this point on. Without using any communications technology, people will contact and visit each other through purely magical, spiritual, and/or psychic means. We will exist in two places at once. We will love each other and then drift back into the night. Join us on may day for a foray into post-silicon-based networks that will galvanize the next revolution for humanity.

Here’s how it will work: on Sunday, May 1st, 2011, EEC Field Agent Tom McKenzie will lead a group of willing souls in a ceremony at the headquarters for sanctify, signify, believe. Meanwhile, at the Lost Horse Ranger Station at Joshua Tree National Park, Field Agent Steven L. Anderson will undertake a simultaneous ceremony. Without the use of phone, internet, car, etc., the two parties will, at the climax of the ceremonies, travel across the mountains and the desert and join each other in both places at the same time.

At the Free Church as the sun slips behind the hills, a sage smudge will be lit and music will start to signal the beginning of the event. Tom will lead the party in some social and physical exercises, so that people get a feel for one another, loosen up and shed their reservations. At Joshua Tree, Steve will simultaneously going about similar activities. The music—consisting of collaged bell, gong and drum sounds with sampled “spiritual” music—will cue various phases of the performative score. As the sound shifts to sets of rhythmic loops emanating in and out-of-phase, both parties will voice a mantra to the rhythm, which will become a frenzied chant as the telepathic portal opens on which the parties will telepathically embark on a visualization of flight over the city, the mountains, and the desert; to the ranger station and to the church of public fiction. The happening participants will engage in group movement and then to jump up to their feet and bounce around in place, then run in circles together around the ceremonial space. As the ceremonies reach their climax, the rhythm will end in an explosion of sound and echoes that blisses out in a shower of aural sparks. In the following silence, both parties will shout out the message of the hour. Afterwhich, we will celebrate, then say goodbye, over and out. This will conclude the ceremony.

As a spiritual/psychedelic exercise, We Are Transmitters will help us all come in tune with one another, no matter where we are. But this magic can, with the same goal, have a more practical effect. The worldwide revolutionary events of 2011 may have been initiated through facebook and twitter, but we have seen how easily those in power can shut off this kind of communication. But as the D.H. Lawrence poem says, “as we live, we are transmitters of life.” And this channel cannot be changed or turned off quite as easily.

The ceremonies at each site will be videotaped. At the Free Church there will be additional documentation in the form of photography and live tweets.

About:
Ecstatic Energy Consultants Inc. is a Los Angeles–based firm that provides experiential assessments into the relationships between institutions, the public, and the natural sphere. Our team’s combined accomplishments in the fields of activism, art, design, new-age physical therapy, non-profit administration, publishing, psychedelics, sailing, and theater enable us to offer our clients a sensitive, multi-dimensional approach.Visit http://www.ecstaticenergy.com.