Performative Lecture

"The Frankenstein of Everyday Life" performative lecture at the Black Sheep Festival, Pittsburgh, 2006

"The Moon and Our Future" performative lecture at Rutherfurd Hall, 2012

"Medium Manifesto" performative lecture at for the Alternative Media Confernce, Goddard College, 2013

Performative lectures predate the ages of information and industrialization, harkening back to times when people needed to step outside to hear someone talk about science or history. I use performative objects—pictures, masks, contraptions and household items from everyday life—as conveyances for ideas, often inviting audience members to step into the process. Because of their interdisciplinary and interactive nature, the performative lecture can happen at the theater, on the street, and even in a conventional lecture hall.

Also see Picture Performance: A History

Wikipedia Articles

Once in a while I discover something I want to know has been under-researched. The information is out there, stuffed deep in the stacks of libraries or floating on the strands of the World Wide Web, but without much dedicated aggregation.

Making a Wikipedia article is one way to put all that data into a handy place, to connect loose threads, and to invite a community of detail-obsessed editors to add what they might know.

Here's a sampling of entries I started and regularly maintain. Some have attained “good article” status on Wikipedia:

Social Thriller

With the release of Get Out in 2017, director Jordan Peele propelled the genre of social thriller into notoriety—at least in the United States. Meanwhile India's biggest film star touted the genre a year before Peele as a way to finally make political films palatable to Bollywood fans. On both sides of the globe scant film makers and a slew of film critics were bandying the term about for decades hence to describe the work of Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracy, Claude Chabrol, Aleksandr Faintsimmer and many others. So what is a social thriller anyway?

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Ronald Reagan in Music

Although the presence of Ronald Reagan in music often draws associations to the punk rock counter-culture of the 1980s, it dates back much earlier. During the 1960s, folk, rock and satirical musicians jabbed at him for his red-baiting, attacks on free speech, and violent backlash against political dissent. He first appeared on album covers in the 1950s during his time as a Hollywood actor, well before his political career. Post-presidency (and post-Reagan altogether) he remains an icon and pariah for artists in many genres.

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Oprical Sound

The optical sound technology for synching dialogue with a motion picture is about as old as talking pictures themselves. Few may be aware that It's the same technology used by naval ships to transmit secret codes, by Walt Disney to record his greatest film, and by proto-punk art-band Devo to produce weird sounds on their early recordings.

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Tofu Curtain

A mountain range in Massachusetts, a commercial corridor in Melbourne, and a cultural divide between East Asia and the rest of the world have all been nicknamed "the Tofu Curtain." But if one looks a little closer at what's happening in these regions, one might notice these soy-based drapes are thinner than they seem.

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Mecki Mark Men

The first Swedish rock band to tour the U.S. often found themselves hedging Hendrix and Zappa, floundering between success and disaster, and bridging protest culture and high art. Ultimately the longest lasting contribution of Stockholm's Mecki Mark Men may have been scoring the Swedish language version of the musical Hair lest we forget the legacy of a racist dope-smoking hedgehog.

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Ramshackle Enterprises

The ATM Show, 2006

From 2001 to 2008 I created and toured several DIY theatre pieces with puppeteer Eli Nixon. Known for their cardboard storytelling and paper mâché magic, Eli makes "art to reclaim public spaces, to spread real news, to surprise us out of our daily zombiedom with homemade spectacle and celebration." For many years Eli and I also cohosted the Puppet Uprising cabaret series in Philadelphia and the annual Black Sheep Puppet Festival in Pittsburgh.

Selected collaborations:

• Puppetual Motion Cycle Circus (2001)
• So Many Dynamos (2002)
• Sloth Teeth (2003-04)
• Where Do Things Belong? (2005)
• Awaken The Mud (2006)
• Mite We? (2008)

Eli's Ramshackle Enterprises website

L-R: Mite We? (Philadelphia, 2008), ATM (Baltimore, 2006), on stage at Great Small Works International Toy Theater Festival (NYC, 2005), and performing on WKBS-TV channel 48 (Philadelphia, 2002).