Oddball Films Media
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Oct 12, 2013
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Oddball Films has the rare opportunity to present the fifth annual installment in the innovative interview-based series MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon) featuring punk innovator and collage artist Winston Smith. Los Angeles media artist and curator Gerry Fialka will interview Smith in person on the Oddball Cine Stage. A Punk Art Surrealist and master of “hand-carved” collage, Winston Smith has crafting thought-provoking art since the 1970’s. Smith first became known (and later beloved) for his collaborations with punk legends Dead Kennedys and his numerous album covers, inserts and flyers for the band in their formative years. His technique of cutting out by hand and gluing each individual element has inspired a generation of artists. Winston has constructed over 50 album covers for a variety of artists and is also a prolific illustrator who has worked for such prestigious and anti-prestigious magazines as The New Yorker and Playboy.This event is a MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon), an engaging interview by Gerry Fialka with the following modern thinkers who'll address the metaphysics of their callings and the nitty-gritty of their crafts.
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film clips at 8PM, interview at 8:30 PM
Venue: Oddball Films, 275 Capp Street San Francisco
Admission: $10.00 in advance, $12.00 at the door. Limited Seating RSVP to RSVP@oddballfilm.com or (415) 558-8117
Punk Art Surrealist Winston Smith, a master of “hand-carved” collage, has been crafting his thought-provoking art since the 1970’s. After being abroad for six years, Winston returned to America and was astonished by the complacency the American public exhibited towards the corporate domination in their society. Winston began taking “safe” images from magazines and combining them to create politically charged works of art that challenge the viewer to confront incongruities and political paradoxes of modern society.
Smith first became known (and later beloved) for his collaborations with punk legends Dead Kennedys and his numerous album covers, inserts and flyers for the band in their formative years. His technique of cutting out by hand and gluing each individual element has inspired a generation of artists.
In 1981, his political shock piece, Idol (pictured to the left – originally conceived in 1977) brazenly adorned the Dead Kennedys album, In God We Trust, Inc. That album, banned in England and condemned by the American religious right, landed Smith and Dead Kennedys a permanent spot in the punk culture “Hall of Shame.”
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About MESS
MESS (Media Ecology Soul Salon), produced by Gerry Fialka since 1997, is based on Marshall McLuhan's insight: "If you don't study the effects of technology, you become its slave." And by "technology" McLuhan was referring to anything humans invent, from language to computers, from philosophy to books, from toothpicks to bulldozers. In dialogues with modern thinkers, MESS provides a forum for probing both the form and the content of media, and for comprehensively surveying-its services and disservices, avoiding bias or point of view. MESS is percept-plunder for the recent future.
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Participants -- including writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and activists -- are the early radar systems and rear-view mirrors detecting how major transformations in technology affect us. As we live in a MESS-age, this interactive series shakes people out of their regular agendas and reality tunnels. MESS promotes mapmakers who search for new lands and new data. MESS seeks meticulous understanding of every thing we see, hear , feel, taste, and smell, passionately needling the somnambulists and proving that learning can and must be fun. As McLuhan asked, "How are you to argue with people who insist on sticking their heads in the in visible teeth of technology, calling the whole thing freedom?" "Technologies are not mere exterior ads," said Walter Ong, "but also interior transformations of consciousness." And, in his book Immediatism, Hakim Bey observed, "Simply to meet face-to-face is already an action against the forces that oppress us by isolation, by loneliness, by the trance of media." "If it works, it's obsolete." -- McLuhan. "Another fine MESS." - Random Lengths News.
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"Gerry Fialka's MESS series is a unique opportunity to meet special artists in a unique, intimate and revealing setting. His intelligence and dedication to research leads to a stimulating and highly interactive interview that is both entertaining and amazingly enlightening." - Phil Proctor of the "Firesign Theatre"
"Great interviewing requires a stimulating interviewer and Gerry Fialka is certainly that. Best part is that he makes the rare act of deep thinking in public before an audience flow as creatively and easily as a Basquiat painting." - Jay Levin, LA Weekly founder and former editor-in-chief
"My experience in Gerry Fialka's MESS series was a scintillating discussion of history, culture, philosophy, sociology and the creative process. His questions and ideas transcend the accepted, traditional limitations of 'the interview.' " - Brad Schreiber, author, producer, screenwriter, journalist
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http://www.laughtears.com/mess.html and http://www.laughtears.com/