Michael Workman

In a very hot, very darkened apartment on Washtenaw, kids are crushed shoulder to shoulder in a narrow hallway, dripping sweat and trying not to move. At least not too much, having picked a vantage from which to peer between heads at the brightly projected image manipulation happening on the wall. It's an art performance, bitmapped scenes flying past at the speed of a VJ flipping dials. On a table across from the entrance, a full stack of pro-grade editing components sit stacked next to a young man hunched over his laptop. In a side room, a video projector mounted on a plastic pedestal beams images transmitted rapid-fire from an Xbox onto a spot in the middle of a picture frame hung on the wall. A boom box on a shelf across the room plays a soundtrack of similarly cut-and-pasted audio files. "Bits" from each converge in a cinematic "mash-up" of visual and audio files, both compiled from works sent in by a total of nearly 100 artists, each frame shown according to an arbitrary duration that's divided by the number of artists. In the middle of it all, a bearded twentysomething wanders through, chugging a tallboy. It's an apartment art show. It's a geeky tech showoff party.

It's the R4wb1t5 (codespeak for "rawbits") microfest, which you can check out online at http://R4wb1t5.org/2005.08.27. Organized by partners Jon Cates and John Satrom, the R4wb1t5 microfest first hit the scene on May 25 at hipster dive hangout the Mutiny, and has since branched out to include tonight's event, held in an abandoned apartment that the organizers are squatting. That free-form approach is an important element of the show, something Cates hopes that he can offer as "a microfest framework that we want to encourage others to use when staging these festivals themselves." So far, they've had interest from a gallery in Knoxville, Tennessee called, appropriately enough, The Gallery of Knoxville, and are fielding invitations from curators as far away as Strasbourg, France and Brazil. "We just started the project and it's important to keep it small-scale and manageable," explains Cates, "so it can be fast and happen in such a way that it can be realized easily and simply." Why so? "That ethic is central to, or at least embedded in new media, digital art and a kind of hacker ethic; this idea of transparency, and the ability to realize things on your own--all that's important. We decided to do the first one at the Mutiny, for instance, because they've had this 'bands wanted' sign in the window for years."

And the R4wb1t5 microfest--much like the currently inchoate technology-based art culture it's meant to evoke--certainly screams DIY. That approach, however, may limit the scope of the audience whom they can expose and educate about new media. Problem is, new media's often so new, and some of its conventions so unfamiliar, that when first confronted with it, most have no idea what they're looking at. When Cates first posted an announcement for the R4wb1t5 fest on a popular local visual-art listserv, for instance, the announcement was so riddled with codespeak, a text difficult to read at first glance as graffiti lettering, that he was mistaken for a hacker and banned from the list. On the flipside, that approach has also helped them establish criteria for staging the fest elsewhere: an artist in Strasbourg interested in putting on the show asked if there was any funding available, a question that led to a conversation about how there's a general lack of arts funding of the U.S. That conversation, in turn, helped them explain that the proper way to stage the show was to seek out a basement or an abandoned apartment, print up some flyers and then, explains Cates, to consider how to book the show, "based on a network or digital culture: how do you shift and adapt? How do you work in these different systems? What does that allow you to do in terms of the commentary you want to make on the socio-political culture you're working in? Asking those kind of questions are what's really at the heart of our efforts."

Their socio-political approach clearly has implications for visual art as well. By seeding their approach in a digital punk culture, they're making a commentary on the kind of cleanliness inherent to digital work. "That's another critique I hope we're mobilizing, that there can be a kind of rawness to the work," says Cates. And it's difficult to disagree. As one girl in a sticky T-shirt raises her arms above her head and sways her hips in a dance to what's essentially a silent room, it suddenly becomes hard to imagine new media going very far without it.

(2005-08-30)

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