5th Annual Transmodern Festival Live.Art.Action

Smelling Salt Amusements is Heather Romney and Peter Redgrave. They are educators by trade and entertainers by whim. Please visit smellingsaltamusements.org for more information.

Project Name: Overlookeds: Points of Interest
Project Description: Five noteworthy views have been chosen in the neighborhood of Load of Fun studios: 19 1/2 Street, A Borrowed View, The Piazza del Pughot, West Trenton Dam, and the Garden of the Humble Bureaucrat. Participants will receive a booklet from Smelling Salt Amusements representatives and are invited to tour the sites. At each spot they will find a guide and a stamp. Visitors can collect the stamps in their albums.

SHUA GROUP is a New York/New Jersey based performance company and not for profit organization directed by choreographer Joshua Bisset and artist Laura Quattrocchi. Shua Group is committed to broadening the interface of movement based art and public life. 2008 projects include a mass performance opposite ground zero at the World Financial Center (May) and the development of a physical installation on the sides of Federal Hill Baltimore (Fall) through the American Visionary Arts Museum. (Please contact info@shuagroup.org if you are interested in participating in the Federal Hill event.) The group is supported by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, Hudson County Cultural Affairs and the American Music Center.

Project Title: Intersection Play
Project Description: Intersection Play is a performance installation for the intersection of North and Howard in Baltimore. Performers will absorb and reshape the movement of pedestrians and cars of the intersection, thereby creating a space for observation and play. A busy sight of constant transition becomes a space for the observation and play. Viewers are invited to join the work, as they understand its logic.

Snacks are Dan Breen and Tom Boram. we built the south beach audio to light modulator but it kept breaking, probably ’cause the integrated circuits were shit. the optocouplers went shit. when it was working it was beautiful. we’d have an invisible kick drum driving a green incandescent right under dan’s drum stool. dan’s snare mic would be driving a blob of blue christmas lights wrapped in 12 feet of saran. tom’s left out would be a randomized patch blinking like a psychopath’s naked pendulous kitchen bulb. tom’s right out would split in the signal multiple made out of an anchovy tin, then one going to the amp, the other driving a blacklight fluorescing a gin and tonic with marshmallows in it.

Straight Punch to the Crotch is a synth-folk-pop band that is slashing and burning the rock-forest of Virginia. Straight Punch to the Crotch hits you where it counts, and you like it. Get ready to feel the love, as we summon the powers of earth, wind, fire and, most importantly, heart.

Straight Punch to the Crotch will hit you during David NeSmith’s “Opera on the Hour” spectacular.

The Theft and Rescue Society: Daniel Huyberts, Michael Ries, and Dana Solano was formed in 2006 by interactive media artists Daniel Huyberts and Dana Solano. The Society held their first event in Baltimore, Maryland in December of 2006. Since that time, the group has expanded to include fellow interactive media artist Michael Ries and the group has participated in a number of festivals including the Conflux Festival in Brooklyn and the Enzimi Festival in Rome.

Project name: Theft and Rescue
Project Description: Allegedly, stuffed animal bunnies have been being used to smuggle contraband into the US, only to be abandoned once that contraband is removed. Now, these pathetic, but adorable, bunnies are in need of new homes. The Theft and Rescue Society encourages people to seek out, rescue, and adopt these wayward cottontails. Individuals can get location information and share the story of their bunny’s rescue all through the Society’s website, http://www.theftandrescue.com.

The Tingle Troupe happened when Sarah Buccheri, Theresa Columbus, Kimberly Miller, and Jinnene Ross began regularly emceeing the Tingle Showcase, an unbelievably great performance art showcase in Milwaukee, WI. Working collaboratively and individually, the troupe produced their own dramatic or poetically comical pieces, which they performed at Darling Hall, the Marcus Center for the Arts Performance Showcase, and on an east coast tour where unsuspecting audiences were filled with delight.

Renato Umali has born in Manila, Philippines and grew up in Jersey City, NJ. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Northwestern University, and received an MFA in Film and Video Performance from UW-Milwaukee. Much of his current work is derived in some way or another from data about his life, which collects and stores in various spread sheets. His work takes form in videos and performances. He teaches in the UW-Milwaukee Film Department, and maintains a piano studio for private instruction.

URBANtells is a collective based in Baltimore. Participants working on this project are Steve Bradley and Brian Garner.

Project Name: High Frequency
Project Description: High Frequency utilizes several FM transmitters that broadcast into the parking lot between the MICA building and Korean store on the corner of North and Maryland Ave. Each transmitter sends out recordings of different people telling stories, including music, poems, and other kinds of field recordings created around Station North and surrounding neighborhoods over the past two years.

Elisa Urtiaga is from Chicago, but has found a second Home in Uruguay and has held residence in Baltimore for the past 4 years. She studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art, majoring in Fiber Arts, concentrating on Fashion and Culture. Additionally, she studied music in the jazz department at the Peabody Institute as part of her Music and Culture Minor. Elisa’s costumes are made of recycled materials, using techniques acquired during an apprenticeship with Cat Chow in Chicago. Music and intentional silence have always been a part of Elisa’s work, which is influenced by both traditional, non-traditional and free jazz. Recently, Elisa has focused her performances in Baltimore and the DC metro area, but has also performed in Montevideo, Uruguay. In the latter, she initiated “La Casa Encantada,” a starting-off for the project “Subsuelo” — a performance series curated by Brazilian Biennale artist Martin Molinaro. It was an immersive night of performances both composed and improvised, conceived by el Nucleo, a collective of artists who share a vision of performance art as interactive and challenging forms of social communication. She continually challenges established ideas about art by taking it out of the gallery setting and putting it into direct social spaces showcasing in bars, streets and rooftops. Lately she has been working on burlesque-inspired works by introducing sideshow audiences to the less traditional participatory experiences of her work. She is a rotating regular at the “Viva la Decadence” series at The Palace of Wonders under the stage name La Malicia Pajarita.

photo credit: Rick Fleddermann (C) 2007 - All Rights Reserved

Daniel Van Allen has been creating a visionary environment in Baltimore since 1980. He has been driving an art car since 1976. Van Allen has operated his own furniture restoration business for 35 years. He is the founder and organizer of the Intertribal Powwow (an annual cultural expo) and The Arabber Preservation Society (for our horse cart vendors); Dan directed The Sowebo Arts Festival for 6 years and helps organize several art organizations around town. His work includes multimedia art and architecture documentation, installation; mixed media, found object and wood sculpture; painting and performance.

Project Name: Teapee
Project Description: “Teapee” will be an interactive installation/performance/happening consisting of three 14′unmilled poles lashed together with a 10′ bamboo flagpole extending upwards. Gay flags will announce the suspension of a cauldron of steaming ginger tea over a hemispherical fire pot.

“Teapee” strives to make a positive connection between aboriginal encampments, contemporary impromptu “peoples parks” and easily recognizable cultural events.

Virginia Warwick describes herself mainly as a sculptor while also incorporating performance, sound, and installations into her work. Born in 1982, She spent the majority of her childhood in Frederick, Maryland where she grew up on two and a half acres of land. She grew to love wild life and animals which has influenced the subject choices in her artwork. She is currently in graduate school at the Rinehart School of Sculpture and is scheduled to graduate in May of 2008. This past year she has shown in the Artscape Outdoor Sculpture Competition, hosted the Underwater Adventure 2007 at Load of Fun Studios, and is scheduled to show at the Arlington Arts Center in the fall of 2008.

Kathryn Williamson believes an artwork should never reveal all to the viewer, some things should be left unsaid. This gives the viewer the opportunity to be active; the chance to think for themselves and later contemplate what they experienced.

Project Name: The Trolly Museum is a Load of Fun!
Project Description: Kathryn will give a tour of the abandoned train tracks near Load of Fun. Kathryn is currently the artist in residence at The Trolly Museum in Baltimore. www.idowhatido.com

Erin Womack is perpetually seeking an entryway into outer space — via printed matter, the moving image, and other methods much simpler than astronautics. Although born of this planet, her spirituality and creative energy remain rooted in a distant astral plane. She is a 2007 graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, and has since bided time at Brooklyn publisher, Picturebox Inc. The Force propels her forward as she continues her humble quest.

http://www.youtube.com/user/erinwomack

I live in Baltimore though I have a southern heart and track red clay everywhere. I have lived throughout the South and in Philadelphia. I make drawings and crafts and friends and anything that might comprise a tight life. I do the best I can. I eat nice food so that I’ll be strong when the world festival comes. GET LIVE.