 
Urban Peasants
Ken Jacobs
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
 
Do almost nothing: re-present (unaltered and arranged by chance) silent family home movies handed down to Flo, (Ken’s wife) and follow them with a “teach yourself Yiddish” cassette tape.
 
Are artists powerless in the face of technology? These often whimsical and amusing films are minimal technological interventions and appropriations but maybe also rigorous takes on the role of popular media and culture in our hyper-technological world.
 
Three days of discussions, performances, actions, dancing and food – continuing No Total’s ongoing contemplation of ways of being together and the ways Arika have been entangled in those, ever since Episode 4.
 
Solo by Jean-Philippe Gross, a French electro-acoustic improviser, working with mixing board, cheap mics, small speakers and an analog synth, built around a honed interest in feedback.
 
This programme takes human subjects as the focus for sound and image construction. And it includes a couple of masterpieces of experimental film: Paul Sharits’ deeply empathetic interpretation of epilepsy and Peter Kubelka’s Webern inspired abstract portrait of Arnulf Rainer.
 
The mutability of the body and the mobility of identity: queered pop culture, drag, lip-sync and performance.
 
Can a collective performance of NourbeSe’s poem of black life as it exceeds containment enact alternative forms of selfhood that emerge in and out of African diasporic experience?
 
How do people living with disability see themselves in today’s sexualised culture? How do we imagine our crip sexual selves despite society wanting to reduce us to non-erotic bodies?
 
Sound as it is endured by space and the body: 15 participants lie face down and pound the floor with a microphone one thousand times, each person choosing their own rhythm and intensity.
 
Real-time video feedback loops submerged in laminal sheets of sound soaked in gauzy timbral detail and multi-valenced, buzzing overtones.
Edinburgh. Sinewave manipulating Giant Tank-ette goes head-to-head with Decaer Pinga’s first lady of noise.
 
An evening of live performances, readings & saucy rococo cakes celebrating the launch of Truth and Lies – An Anthology of Writing and Art by Sex Workers.