Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

by Alicia Schmidt, BAVC Marketing Strategist

Chris Runde has been working part-time with BAVC for the last few months, and recently started full-time as the Manager of our San Francisco based BUMP programs (part of our Next Gen programming). He’s a talented musician and music instructor who is responsible for helping to craft BAVC’s youth music curriculum and ensure the quality of our music program.

Here comes the Newbie hazing . . .

1. The story of your life starts out with which 10 words?
After 14 hours of labor I stopped torturing my mother.

2. Do you know your astrological sign? What is it?
Taurus (on the cusp with Gemini)

3. How do you take your coffee?
Blacker than Beelzebub’s soul.

4. Name two things you believe in.
Karma and caffeine.

5. What’s the last song/movie you paid money for?
“Calle Go Lem” by Go Lem System feat. Manu Chao

6. Who would play you in the BAVC movie and why?
This is a really hard question that I’ve thought a lot about. The closest I could come up with is The Count from Sesame Street. I don’t really like math though. I’m open to suggestions.

7. Most embarrassing job?
Making photocopies of academic journals for a guy who made his whole living by exploiting the U.C. library system.

8. What snacks do you eat at the movies?
Junior Mints.

9. What are you most likely to be doing at 9pm on a Thursday?
Barting/walking home to Oakland after teaching Digital Pathways.

10. What are you looking forward to most in your new job at BAVC?
Working with really talented and compassionate people in creating unique new opportunities for youth. And champagne at staff meetings.

By Zoe Banks, BAVC Training Advisor

For the second installment of FOCUS, the BAVC Interview Series, we sit down with photographer, instructor and multimedia artist Liz Hickok. Gaining worldwide attention with her landmark San Francisco in Jell-O photography series, Ms. Hickok’s work will be featured in Rohstoff, BAVC’s first digital imaging exhibition which opens February 20th. If you want to meet Liz and see some of her work, you can also join us at the opening reception of Rohstoff on Thursday, February 28th from 6pm to 8pm here at BAVC.

What you do is so unique. Can you tell me about your process?

First, I make balsa wood or foam core buildings and carve little elements out of the balsa wood like windows and doors. Then we paint them up with jesso and seal them up with gel wax so that they’re completely sealed. Once those are finished, I make a little mold of them. To cast the mold using silicone rubber, it’s a two-part mixture, and when you mix it together it starts to activate and harden. So the models are sitting in a tray, and you just pour the silicone on top. It hardens overnight and then I put in the Jell-O. Some of my pieces are made out of clay, for Scottsdale, for instance, I made cacti out of clay.

I didn’t know you did Scottsdale and landscapes outside of San Francisco?

That’s the only one, so far. Scottsdale Public Art commissioned me to come do a piece there. They commissioned me to come down and I made two very large sculptures of two different areas of Scottsdale out of jell-o. They were actual sculptures, and in the background I had a very large print of Camelback Mountain, this iconic mountain range in Scottsdale that looks like a camel.

Do you shoot here in this studio?

I’ve only been in this studio for a few months, so I do my newer shoots here. I was at Blue Studios on Mission & 17th, so most of my work I put together in my studio and shot there, but a few of them were down for a show so they were shot on site, like at the Exploratorium, or my current show at Marin Headlands. (more…)

by Mindy Aronoff, BAVC Director of Training & Resources

People, Places and Things – Thirteen Highlights

1. Adobe CS3! Oh, how we love a sexy software upgrade. Also, Ableton Live, Autodesk Maya and we now have AutoCAD and MotionBuilder!! We also got Maxon’s Cinema 4D. Roar! Oh, and Adobe Lightroom and Apple Aperture. And we upgraded Final Cut Pro. Yummy. So yummy.

2. Beth Pielert donated an awesome PD170 video cam to BAVC—you’ll use it when you take Video Production and Lighting. Thanks again, Beth!

3. We started building a really, really big, gnarly database. Why do you care? Enrolling will be so much easier (and accurate). You’ve put up with our archaic systems long enough, doncha think? Oh, and yes, it will talk to the new website that will launch in April. Heavenly. Only waited ten years for that. :-I

4. Zoë Banks came on in August as our enrollment advisor and she’s quick, hilarious and knows what folks want. Powerhouse. Loves puttin’ custom classes together.

5. Carl Weichert came on in September as our training and curriculum strategist and he has thrown himself into the melee, dedicating his very existence to making your experience relevant and exciting and btw, did I mention he’s hilarious? Alter ego is Ming the Merciless. He’s been teaching here for years.

6. We learned to Twitter. (more…)

by Chris Lincoln, BAVC Director of Technology, Media Arts & Innovation

trans•for•ma•tion
— a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance

— a metamorphosis during the life cycle [of an animal]

— a process by which one figure, expression, or function is converted into another that is equivalent in some important respect but is differently expressed or represented

tran•si•tion
— the process or a period of changing from one state or condition to another
— undergo or cause to undergo a process or period of transition [verb]

So which is it, transformation or transition? Both terms were used liberally at BAVC in 2007 though the former seemingly more than the latter. Certainly elements of both operated at BAVC in 2007 as we moved away from our analog post-production roots to expanding our resources in the web 2.0 and digital domain. But what began in 2006, a transition with the catch phrase—Art + Education + Technology, became a wholesale transformation of technology at BAVC in 2007.

A standalone department was created to include the Media Arts staff and information technology personnel from multiple areas. The new department, Technology, Innovation, and Media Arts (TIMA), combines BAVC’s evolving digital media services and staff with the IT staff responsible for the day-to-day support of our instructional, administrative, and network systems. Most importantly, TIMA is chartered to create BAVC’s future technical architecture and to deliver a technology framework that facilitates growth and innovation supporting BAVC’s core creative mission. (more…)

by Zoe Banks, BAVC Training Advisor

Since 2001, Christopher Willits has taught audio classes including Pro Tools, Ableton Live and Max/MSP/Jitter, at BAVC. He has toured internationally with his ground-breaking, genre-defying solo releases and critically-acclaimed collaborations . His most recent collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, titled “Ocean Fire”, releases this week on 12K. In the first installment of the new BAVC Interview Series FOCUS, training advisor Zoe Banks sits down with Mr. Willits on a rainy Friday to discuss BAVC, Barack, Bernal, and the moons of Jupiter.

Tell me about BAVC…

BAVC’s amazing. If you look at the way the audio department’s evolved in the last 7 years it’s amazing. When I first started working at BAVC in the beginning of 2001 I was a grad student at Mills and Sharon Cheslow (former member of Chalk Circle, first DC all girls punk band) was teaching and invited me to come help out at an experimental sound class, a pilot class, or demonstration. I don’t really remember the specifics. But after that the education coordinator, Chris Gee invited me to come in and do an Intro to Digital Audio class and I was like “hell yeah”.

(more…)

by Alicia Schmidt, BAVC Marketing Strategist

Danielle Lawrence recently started at BAVC as our new Training & Resources Assistant. Working with the other members of the Training and Resource staff, Danielle will be working part-time, helping folks enroll in classes, find their classrooms on weekends, and generally help students navigate their BAVC experience. Danielle is a visual artist with varied experience teaching art to young people in San Francisco, Oakland, and Baja, Mexico! Our version of hazing includes answering the BAVC 10:

1. The story of your life starts out with which 10 words?
The story of my life starts with images not words.

2. Do you know your astrological sign? What is it?
I am a Virbra (1/2 Virgo 1/2 Libra)

3. How do you take your coffee?
Black when I make it. With cream if somebody else makes it.

4. Name two things you believe in.
The ocean and trees.

5. What’s the last song/movie you paid money for?
The last albums I bought were PJ Harvey, White Magic, Isis and Illmatic by Nas..sad but true I haven’t had time to go to a movie in quite some time.

6. Who would play you in the BAVC movie and why?
Lily Taylor. She’s got integrity, humility and soul.

7. Most embarrassing job?
The restaurant Boulevard . . . they made you wear a penguin suit (vest, tie etc). I quit after a week and started doing mural projects with kids in West Oakland instead . . . aaaahh, much better.

8. What snacks do you eat at the movies?
Chocolate

9. What are you most likely to be doing at 9pm on a Thursday?
Working on art in my studio.

10. What are you looking forward to most in your new job at BAVC?
Besides the lovely people everywhere. I look forward to learning new mediums of expression.

by Jen G, Lead Developer, BAVC Strategic Initiatives

If you get to go to Sundance for only a few days, it is imperative to focus on what you’ve seen, not what you’ve missed. I went for four whirlwind days, and spent time at the Queer Lounge, New Frontiers on Main, the Queer Brunch, the Adobe party, the CineVegas party, Film Arts’ condo, the fireplace in the Slamdance lobby, and of course, holed up in the BAVC condo trying to warm my -1°F toes. I skipped Paris Hilton and the US Weekly version of Sundance, but saw a few of my kind of celebrities: Killer Films’ Christine Vachon, speaking on an unadvertised panel about social issue in film at the Queer Lounge, Patti Smith, representing a film about, well, Patti Smith, and Jamie Babbitt, chatting happily on the shuttle on the way to her first screening of the festival. And of course, I focused on seeing as many films as possible. Here are a few documentary gems that glimmered against the bleak white snow in Park City.

Art Star and the Sudanese Twins [New Zealand, 2007, 109 mins]
Directed by Pietra Brettkelley
Edited by Irena Dol, who received the World Cinema Documentary Editing Award at the festival

Brettkelley’s complex, though not entirely critical portrayal of international “art star” Vanessa Beecroft is one of the most thought-provoking documentaries you’ll see this year. Beecroft is known for her controversial participatory photography, in which she arranges human subjects to her liking. Every artist who deals with human subjects struggles with representation, but few do so with such controversy. A scene in the film depicts, for example, Beecroft staging several dozen naked female models as suit-clad art (or naked lady) appreciators sip wine and look at them. Is this feminist, or anti-feminist? If you do ‘the thing’ with minimal commentary, do you become ‘the thing’ itself – objectifying, mysogenist, racist? Beecroft claims to be asking these questions, but the moral question becomes the thrust of the film and of Beecroft’s dilemma. (more…)

by Carol Varney, BAVC Director of Development

On Monday night I joined more than 1,000 fellow San Franciscans (and probably a few people from outside the city, too) to volunteer as an extra to recreate two seminal marches in San Francisco’s history, both of which took place during the lifetime of Harvey Milk. Being an extra was not of real interest to me, but I did want to be part of supporting a project that would bring the legacy of Harvey Milk to a national and international audience.

When I was 17 years and living in rural Maine, a friend rented and we watched, on a fuzzy black and white television in a farm house, the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk.” At the time I had never been to San Francisco, I only knew three gay people (who were out, at least) and yet the film changed my life. Watching this documentary about one of the world’s first openly gay elected officials helped me to understand the difference one person can make in the world, and how important it is to take a stand for what you believe in, particularly in the face of injustice.

So now, many (many) years later, when I got a message from a friend who is a location assistant for the new Gus Van Sant film based on Milk’s life, asking for volunteers to be extras in a recreation of a gay rights march, I knew I had to do it. It’s not often that you get to re-enact such an important historical moment, (not to mention be shouted at through a bullhorn by Emile Hirsch and Sean Penn – he plays Harvey Milk).

Many of the extras were treated to a screening of the documentary “The Times of Harvey Milk” before the marching began. Introducing the film was BAVC friend, San Francisco documentarian, and the documentary’s director, Rob Epstein. He spoke of those who helped him to make the film and his desire to help get the Van Sant feature made. He also introduced Cleve Jones, founder of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt and others who are helping the new film to remain as true to historical fact as possible.

After the documentary screened, we were treated to dinner donated by local Castro merchants (you know I have to thank the corporate donors!), and then we hit the streets to chant and carry signs that implored people to “Stop Hate” and “Save Our Human Rights.” We were then told to go “back to one” (where we started) multiple times. After marching for many hours in the glare of the newly refurbished Castro Theater sign, I limped home with cold feet and a renewed sense that one person can, indeed, make a difference.

I am not ashamed to say that seeing “The Times of Harvey Milk” that night at the Castro theater in San Francisco made me cry. Seeing the City I call home portrayed at such a watershed time in our political history was even more emotional now that I know its history, geography and people more personally than I did when all I could do was view the world from Maine, through the eyes of filmmakers who told the stories of the people who make this City such an amazing place. Being part of this recreated history made me feel more connected to the City’s past, and as I ran into other friends who were on the street as extras, I also felt once more profound gratitude for the media makers who take social issues and explain them in a way that resonates across gender, geography, and political lines. Like all of BAVC’s supporters, members, awardees and friends who do the incredible work of telling the stories that keep us connected to our history and to each other.

by Mindy Aronoff, Director of Training & Resources

I really, really wanted to write something smart about Macworld but what can you say about the ubiquitous black t-shirt, grown white men sportin’ pony tails and bright orange iPod covers that hasn’t already been said? Really, the coolest thing that came from this year’s Macworld was Steve Bayes, who had just recently come back from the Editors Retreat in Puerto Vallarta looking enviously well rested, and who came for a tour of BAVC before he hit Moscone for his mini-keynote on Friday afternoon. (more…)