Signals: A Video Showcase is a series of three thematic exhibitions designed to highlight the Orange County Museum of Art's collection of video art. Featuring selections from the permanent collection along with additional works by emerging and established artists, each exhibition will last approximately six weeks, giving viewers the opportunity to see up to 14 individual works of video art over the course of the summer.

May 3 - June 13: Mash Up looks at the current cultural obsession with conflating diverse elements of popular and avant-garde media to create new art that is ironic, humorous, and frequently uncanny. Works such as Joel Morrison's Birds/Lewitt (2005), Goody-B. Wiseman's Superlovestarpower 2, 3 and 4 (2006), Ciprian Muresan's Un Chien Andalou (2004), and Jimmy Joe Roche's Ultimate Reality (2007) draw from music, cinema, and the visual arts.

June 14 - July 25: Word Play features artists engaged with the written and/or spoken word as an essential component of their visual language. John Baldessari's I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art (1971), William Kentridge's Automatic Writing (2003), Yucef Mehri's Atari Poetry IV (2004), Julien Bismuth and Lucas Ajemian's Les Tristes (2007), and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Passages Paysages (1978) present a spectrum of unique relationships to words and language.

July 26 - September 14: In California Scenarios, five artists offer thoughtful, poetic meditations on significant sites in California - San Jose's Winchester Mystery House; the animated desert landscapes of Warner Brothers cartoons, produced in their Burbank studios; the rapidly growing Inland Empire; the commuter lanes of Los Angeles; and the entropic wasteland of the Salton Sea. Jeremy Blake's Winchester Redux (2004), Mungo Thomson's The American Desert (for Chuck Jones) (2002), Enid Baxter Blader's Local 909er (2007), Bia Gayotto's Xing LA: From Altadena to Long Beach (2008), and Nicole Antebi's Tilapia Jetty (2007) are featured.

In addition to the video programming, specially selected audio works will also be playing on the Lounge's two listening stations.

Join featured artists and exhibition curator Carol Cheh on August 10 from 3-6 pm for an Artist Reception at the Orange Lounge!

Signals: A Video Showcase is organized by the Orange County Museum of Art and curated by Carol Cheh, curatorial and research associate at OCMA.

Goody-B. Wiseman, Superlovestarpower (2, 3, and 4), 2006;Video installation with three monitors; Collection of Orange County Museum of Art; Museum purchase through the Naomi Vine Biennial Acquisition Fund

A Collaborative Project by Curator Margo Bistis, Author Norman Klein, and Media Artist Andreas Kratky

This historical science-fiction novel takes the form of a large-scale projection, which is an interactive work that includes 2,200 images culled from different visual archives. The story focuses on the whimsical adventures of a woman in the year 1901 who has four different suitors, each with their own vision for the new century. Existing not only as an art installation, but also as a book and a DVD-ROM, The Imaginary 20th Century proposes a new approach to narrative.

Exhibition Related Event:
Meet The Imaginary 20th Century project collaborators and OCMA curator Karen Moss at the Opening Reception on January 17th at the Orange Lounge, South Coast Plaza. Click here for details.

This project was originally co-sponsored by ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany and California Institute of the Arts and is co-directed by Author Norman M. Klein, Curator Margo Bistis, and Media Artist Andreas Kratky.

Image credits:
James Montgomery Flagg, Life, 1905

C. Cole Phillips, Life, 1911

In conjunction with Joseph Grigely's video installation, St. Cecilia, held at the main gallery, this portion of the exhibition includes three additional works by Grigely, each relating to sound or music. In the lounge's back gallery is Remembering is a difficult job, but somebody has to do it (2005), an installation reminiscent of a tropical island with artificial palm trees and a projected image of water. On the floor is a small monitor with a video in which Grigely is first questioned about the music he remembers before he was deafened, then tries to sing the theme song to the Gilligan's Island television program from his recollection.

In the front of the lounge, Grigely's sound installation, You (2001), made with his wife, Amy Vogel, includes a set of speakers that projects the sounds of people mispronouncing the name of the contemporary artist, Ed Ruscha—a familiar name in the art world, but relatively unfamiliar to those outside of it. The varying mispronunciations also appear in prints on the wall and reflect how commonly misunderstandings can occur. In the alcove is a monitor with the video work, Something Say (2000), also made with Amy Vogel, who appears on the brink of speaking as Grigely whistles in the background. In all of these installations, Grigely's overarching intent is to make works that create a situation where hearing people experience linguistic misunderstandings from a similar point of view as a deaf person.

Exhibition Credits
The OCMA presentation of these exhibitions was organized by Karen Moss, Curator of Collections & Director of Education & Public Program and co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs. Major support for this exhibition is provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the Maryland State Arts Council, the Baltimore County Commission on Arts and Sciences, and Cohan and Leslie, New York.

Joseph Grigely, You 2001, sound installation, courtesy of Nadine Gandy Gallery.

Play Tech showcases work by students from the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) program at UC Irvine, a unique and interdisciplinary graduate program that addresses the social and cultural applications of emerging technologies and fosters the development of new cultural practices and technologies. The works in the exhibition are dynamic and most are interactive. They respond to the world, reconfiguring themselves in real time and are thus exemplars of a new kind of art practice only possible with real time computing. They are exercises of a new kind of aesthetic decision-making; the crafting of an aesthetics of behavior and they epitomize the fundamental ideas of the ACE program.

Each of these works includes unique combinations of technologies, much of it designed and built by the artists specifically for these pieces. Given that technologies are designed to fulfill perceived needs, and that available technologies are often not adequate to new ideas, members of the ACE program combine artistic and design practices with rigorous technological development to produce their work. By integrating an understanding of technological and social history these works aspire to transcend gadget or entertainment status.

Artists: Eric Kabisch, Bruno Nadeau, Byeong Sam Jeon, Addiel Ulises de Alba Solis, Shan Jiang, and Simon Penny.

Enter a 360 degrees photographic panorama and immerse yourself in scenes of California landscape. As you move through the space, your body is a musical instrument, translating the image into rhythms, melodies, and harmonies with those around you. Your musical movements are accompanied by visual traces, highlighting the relationship between physical landscape, image landscape, and sonic landscape.

Drawing inspiration from concrete poetry and urban graffiti, Tenses reforms the characters, words, and passages of short poetic texts into complex textual transformations, bridging the gap between semantics and aesthetics.

What if a car you drive in everyday life can create a beautiful painting on the ground instead of generating air pollution?
Drop Drop invites the viewer to drive a remote control car over a computer generated canvas. Appearing on the surface as if by magic, each trail of colorful drops will be printed out for the viewer after the car is parked in its home station.

Using his own unique, specially designed turntables as an interface with an audiovisual generator, Addiel Ulises de Alba, creates an original soundscape with non-conventional musical instruments, including everyday sounds and random textures. Documentation of his opening night performance is shown here.

ACE student Addiel de Albas during the PlayTech opening reception

Play Go on an electronic game board that translates your moves into an elegant aural soundscape. By placing stones on the board, each player triggers photo sensors that a computer transforms into unique musical composition. Meanwhile, the computer also analyzes your moves and gives you "hints" from the text of the I Ching.
(I Ching-"Book of Changes" or "Classic of Changes") is the oldest of the Chinese classic texts. A symbol system designed to identify order in what seem like chance events, it describes an ancient system of cosmology and philosophy that is at the heart of Chinese cultural beliefs.)

ACE student Marvin Park plays GoScape.

ACE Projects at the Lounge is coorganized by Aimee Chang, OCMA curator of contemporary art and Simon Penny, professor of Art & Engineering and co-director, ACE Program, UC Irvine.

ACE addresses emerging practices and career paths that combine skills and sensibilities of technical and scientific disciplines with arts and humanities. ACE exists at the intersection of Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences, Computer Sciences, Engineering and other disciplines. ACE is rigorously interdisciplinary. The ACE program is oriented towards informed production. ACE students make things that work, and they understand the technical, historical and socio-cultural locations of their work. ACE favors originators of novel techno-cultural formations, makers of machines, responsive environments, socio-politically situated action and non-standard technological systems.

Image: Byeong Sam Jeon, Drop Drop, 2007, interactive installation at University of California, Riverside Art Gallery

This winter, the Orange County Museum of Art presents videotapes by renowned Los Angeles based video artists Bruce and Norman Yonemoto. During the mid to late 1980s the Yonemoto brothers collaborated with artists on some of the most poignant and memorable moments in video history. Three Yonemoto videos will be on view at the Orange Lounge, which is free to the public and located at South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa.

Spalding Gray's Map of LA
1984, 27:40 min., color, sound

This collaboration with performance artist Spalding Gray and actors Mary Woronov and Marshall Efron satirizes the mythology of Los Angeles, juxtaposing a parodic fictional narrative with Gray's autobiographical monologues. The ironic reenactment of the New York artist's encounter with the excess of Los Angeles focuses on the Southern Californian obsession with cars as cultural and consumer icons. Gray traces his sentimental education through a series of anecdotal childhood memories that detail his romantic infatuation with cars.

Director/editor: Norman Yonemoto; producer: Bruce Yonemoto; written by Spalding Gray, Marshall Efron, Mary Woronov, Bruce Yonemoto, Norman Yonemoto; starring: Spalding Gray, Marshall Efron, Mary Woronov, Coleen Sterritt.

Kappa
1986, 26 min., color, sound

Deconstructing the myth of Oedipus within the framework of an ancient Japanese folk story, the Kappa, the Yonemotos craft a highly charged discourse of loss and desire. The Kappa, a malevolent Japanese water imp, is played with eerie intensity by artist Mike Kelley; actress Mary Woronov plays Jocasta as a Hollywood vamp. In this ironic yet oddly poignant essay on psychosexual compulsion and catharsis, the Yonemotos demonstrate that, even in debased forms, cultural archetypes hold the power to move and manipulate.

Producers: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto; written by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto and Mike Kelley; performers: Mike Kelley, Mary Woronov, Ed Ruscha.

Blinky
1988, 15:30 min., color, sound

According to Norman Yonemoto: "In the novella Blinky: The Friendly Hen (1978), artist Jeffrey Vallance documented the supermarket purchase of a frozen chicken and its burial in the Los Angeles S.P.C.A. Pet Memorial Park. Naming the fryer Blinky, Vallance transformed poultry into pet, paying tribute to the billions of hens sacrificed each year for our consumption. Ten years later questions of the true cause of Blinky's death continue to swirl. Blinky, the videotape, documents the search for this cause. Alas, like the shroud of Turin, Blinky's death cannot be completely resolved. Blinky's ten-year story ends where it began, in our culture's glistening, dreamlike symbol of heavenly closure, the supermarket."

Directors/producers: Bruce and Norman Yonemoto; based on the book by Jeffrey Vallance.

Bruce and Norman Yonemoto: Videotapes from the 1980s is organized by Karen Moss, Curator of Collections and Director or Public Programs and Education. Major support for Orange Lounge programs is provided by The James Irvine Foundation. Orange Lounge design and construction funded by the Segerstrom Foundation. Technical support provided by Integrated Media Systems.

The 2006 California Biennial not only takes over all the galleries of the museum's main facility in Newport Beach, but also extends the Orange Lounge, OCMA's gallery at South Coast Plaza dedicated to new media art.

Click here for more information on the 2006 California Biennial.

Featured in the video gallery, at the Orange Lounge is Winter in America (2005). In this work Hank Willis thomas, in collaboration with Kambui Olujimi, uses G.I. Joe type action figures to reenact the senseless murder of Hank's cousin. Incorporating the tropes of contemporary cinema, from dramatic lighting to a soundtrack with Outkast and the influential poet-musicianactivist Gil Scott-Heron, the animated film underscores the violence present in much child's play, especially in toys marketed to boys, while accentuating the horrifying reality of the true event.

Also at the Orange Lounge are two video works from the series Cities in Motion by Bull.Miletic-the San Francisco-based team of Synne bull and Dragan Miletic. Their ongoing project, Heaven Can Wait (2001-5), uses footage shot from revolving restaurants in international cities. The buildings serve as giant tripods, rendering the surrounding landscapes as kinetic horizons. Whir, a fast-paced video loop, juxtaposes dissimilar elements of San Francisco, where sharp tempos and striking images rally around an extraordinary urban space bustling with mystery.

The Lounge also features Goody B. Wiseman's series of short videos called Fast,Deluxe and Cheap (2002-3) which explore female subjects, male-female relationships, and the futility of language and intrapersonal communication. Wiseman performs in these videos, assuming the role of a postadolescent, fast and dirty bad-girl, as she retells the story of Snow White, mugs before the camera, and narrates stories of broken relationships. Ultimately, Wiseman is not cynical or nihilistic; instead, she posesses an empathic post feminist sensibility.

*Image Credits

Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui Olujimi, Stills from Winter in America, 2005; collection
of the Orange County Museum of Art.

Bull.Miletic, Island of the Pelicans(installation view), 2003; two-channel video installation; courtesy of the artists.

Goody-B. Wiseman, Beginner's Curse for Sluts and
Psychopaths, 2002-2003; video still; courtesy of the artist and Mandarin Gallery, Los Angeles.

On view throughout the Orange Lounge at South Coast Plaza is a new installation of videos by pioneer video artists. Global Groove (1973) is an early broadcast video by Nam June Paik, the late avant-garde artist and performer.

Image Credits (Top to Bottom):
1,2,3: Nam June Paik, Global Groove, 1973; collection of the Orange
4. Nam June Paik

I Want to See How You See (or a portrait of Cornelia Providoli) by Pipilotti Rist
2003, 4:48 min, color, sound
In this video Rist explores the macrocosm of humanity in a video, art and music collaboration. A lyrical tale of a witch's coven is played over images of a person where each body part symbolically represents an area of the world.
Pipilotti Rist burst onto the international art scene with visually lush video works and multimedia installations that explore female sexuality and media culture, remixing fantasy and the everyday. In the 1980s and '90s the Swiss-born Rist made a series of tapes in which she subverted the form of the music video to explore the female voice and body in pop cultural representations, merging rock music, electronic manipulation, and performance.

Image & Text Credits (Top to Bottom):
1. I Want to See How You See (or a portrait of Cornelia Providoli)by Pipilotti Rist from Electronic Arts Intermix
2. Alan Rath Watcher II, 1999, Aluminum, custom electronics, acrylic, two cathode-ray tubes, Gift of the Curator's Circle
3. 414-3-RAVE-95 by Cory Arcangel and Frankie Martin from Electronic Arts Intermix
4. P-Unit Mixtape 2005; Paper Rad from Electronic Arts Intermix

Performance and the body merge with technology in this Orange Lounge exhibition featuring video, sound, and other new-media works. From playful explorations of a body's movement, to spiritual and symbolic rituals, to intense explorations of bodily danger, the works in this exhibition present a range of human emotions and corporeal experiences.

Poetry and electronic media merge in this solo exhibition of works by new-media artist Yucef Merhi. An artist, poet, and programmer, Merhi engages electronic devices-computers, video games systems, and other machines-in the presentation of his written words. The resulting artworks expand the limitations of language and the traditional context of poetry, proposing a bold new role for the poet in our culture.

Beautiful Losers: Contemporary Art and Street Culture celebrates the extraordinary creative production and cultural influence of youth cultures. Skateboarding, graffiti, and punk have not only affected the worlds of fashion, music, literature, and film, but they have also inspired a generation of young artists who identify with the iconoclastic lifestyle and counterculture stance of these creative forces born from the street. The unifying traits of these young artists, whose styles and distribution channels still remain largely outside the mainstream, include an interest in pop culture iconography, a sense of the absurd, and a strong do-it-yourself attitude. Beautiful Losers traces the early influences on this new generation of artists, filmmakers, and designers, while also exploring the broader cultural trends that inform their work.

Beautiful Losers at the Orange Lounge features a multimedia installation by the design and media collective the Art Dump. Through video, audio, and tactile means, the Art Dump's new installation, entitled You Are Here, explores the impact of the skateboarding and punk rock youth cultures on the worldwide mass consumer population.