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L@TE Friday Nights: An Evening of Experimental Sound and Performance

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The eclectic music and performance arts series, L@TE: Friday Nights, is a Berkeley Art Museum afterhours arts party known for its unexpected pairings. The program returns on August 5, 2011 with Brooklyn artists C. Spencer Yeh and David Horvitz.

Yeh, a Taiwanese-American, is an artist and musician whose past art, video, and sound projects have been exhibited internationally. He’s known for his skill in improvising with conventional tools such as electronics, violin, and voice in not so conventional methods. By manipulating these instruments, he creates rhythmic and slightly hypnotic noise.

Yeh’s 2009 cassette release, Always Been A Storm / Memories of Murder, featuring the track “Chinese Water Torture 2,” is an excellent example. Using voice, water, and a cheap aluminum watering can, he creates Atari-like blips amongst a background of rushing breath.

Yeh’s past work, which includes collaborations with Thurston Moore and Prurient, can be heard and downloaded on UbuWeb.

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The visual art portion of the evening features David Horvitz, a Japanese-American, who will be creating a publication live for attendees to take away. Horvitz is a performance artist and photographer, best known for his collaborations with Bay Area band Xiu Xiu.

Horvitz’s artistic philosophy is “you can make something (or make something happen) anywhere at anytime in any circumstance.” He explores this through the intersection of photography and social media. Most recently, Horvitz asked his Tumblr audience to mail a copy of a photograph by a photographer they admire. The photos were shown in his hotel room during the Arles Photography Festival in France as a “bootleg” exhibit. Not only is this concept amusing, it can be interpreted as a statement on showing art without discrimination; whether the photographer was well-known or an amateur, their work existed in the same temporary gallery.

One of his most famous projects, 241543903, spawned an Internet meme in 2009 that continues today. Horvitz placed a photograph of himself sticking his head in a freezer on the popular photography site, Flickr, tagging it as 241543903. He followed up by putting out a call to action on his Tumblr blog for others to do the same. Two years later, over eighteen thousand people “like” the project on Facebook and over a thousand photographs on Flickr bearing the tag 241543903 can be found, all featuring various people with their heads in a freezer.

241543903

C. Spencer Yeh and David Horvitz will be at the Berkeley Art Museum on August 5, 2011 at 7:30pm. Doors open at 5pm, DJ set by Matt Thompson at 6:30pm. Entry fee is $7.

This event is curated by George Chen, founder of ZUM, a record label and music blog.

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