 
Bleu Shut
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
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.
 
Bleu Shut reveals, and allows us to enjoy, our gullibility within the pervasive absurdity of modern life.
 
5 days of film, music, discussion and study of our collective incompleteness—arrayed against the colonial ordering of how we come to know the world—practicing how we might exist otherwise, right here and now. Can we start to know and practice the world to come?
 
The most sophisticated synthetic music around: timbrally otherwise body music as sonified fictions and auditive sociograms.
 
Jacobs’ pulsing and abstract 3D Nervous Magic Lantern performance grounded by Eric La Casa’s manipulated recordings of everyday locations.
 
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.
 
Open-ended, paradoxical and performed investigations into: misunderstanding, language games, form saturated with sense, and consecutive matters…
 
Laser beam sine tones used to draw delicate, abstract patterns by vibrating charcoal, placed atop of a great strip of paper running through the gallery; beautiful, fragile sound-created autonomous drawing.
 
A dialogical meeting of Baraka’s radical poetry and Grimes’ free jazz syncopation.
 
A Performance exploring the nature of acousmatic listening; sound removed from visual context and understood for it’s own properties.
 
A performative survey of listening, as we managed to find it being used as a tool in different practices, disciplines and communities in North America (music, poetry, film, philosophy, activism…).
 
A queer black operatic requiem for piano and voice that asks us to stay in the hold of the slave ship, that tries to understand the connection from the slave ship to the prison.
West Coast drone-age guitar grumbler/ consumer electronic reclaimer meets free-thinking clang/ chime/ drone bluesman of The East.