SAN FRANCISCO -- Projexpo 98, A Spaceport Resort, is one group's vision of what a 24th-century spaceport lounge might be like.
"Attention Art Freaks, Sci-Fi Geeks, and Media Whores" proclaimed a computer screen welcoming visitors to the art installation/night club that opened here Thursday night. Conceived and executed by Please Louise Productions and Museo Contempo, it will run Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays throughout the month of September at The Lab, an art and performance space.
The self-proclaimed figurehead behind Please Louise Productions, Jeffrey Winter, is a video artist who grew tired of two-dimensional audience viewing formats. Winter and friends have been creating yearly Projexpos since 1994.
A commanding figure in a gem-studded, one-piece pantsuit and large circular sunglasses, Winter said that he hoped to "create media that people experience in a different way." The space theme was one that he hoped would resonate not only with popular trends, but with his own life.
"My only consistent daily experience, since I was 11 years old, has been the watching of Star Trek," said Winter, now 30. He expressed an admiration for the way society's problems have been solved on the show, so that no one is concerned with money, for instance, or lack of space.
"We're in a society right now that really wants to get off the earth," he said. However, he added, since "we're not off the planet; we're not getting off for a long time," other ways must be found to explore those desires.
Winter hopes that A Spaceport Resort will be an experiment in what it might mean to live free from earthly constraints, in a "hopeful future full of stimulation."
A large room partitioned by strips of gauze is the setting for Winter's "stimulation." The 50 or so people involved in the project created a number of special effects and augmented them with an assortment of amusements carrying a science-fiction theme. Effects were achieved using slide projectors, colored lights, and plexiglass, in combination with video screens and bean-bag chairs set under headphones attached to the walls.
Visitors entering the room were first met by two tall, androgynous clowns of cyber fame, Tina and Mrs. Vera, perched atop a plexiglass platform and armed with what appeared to be feather dusters. In order to get by, one needed to climb the glowing, unstable-looking table, and submit to a frenzied dusting, er, "decontamination."
Once settled in, a roster of entertainment, dubbed the Man-Ray Electro-Cabaret, and often involving performers singing in their best futuristic, vaguely Russian-sounding space language, stretched well into the starry night.
Master of ceremonies and performer Allison Hennessy soothed the audience in a slowly rhythmic call, "Release yourself.... Lose all pretensions.... We are beautifully insignificant specks bobbing in the wilderness of space." Aided by rhythm machines and digital samplers, she then sang a folk song from a distant planet, about the love between a pigeon and a cat, separated by a glass wall in "what you would call an apartment."
With so many artists involved in building Projexpo 98, the evening seemed to be devoted as much to them as the audience. One artist who was clearly having a good time was Larry Ackerman, who was pleased to be able to combine his daily work in microscopy at the University of California at San Francisco with his art.
Ackerman had built a huge wall of Plexiglass as a screen for 12 slide projectors. Spectators knelt on pads in front of the wall of light as 500 slides, many of which were taken from Ackerman's work, made fantastic patterns. Often, a human figure would appear between the light and the screen, interacting with the shapes and colors of the paintings.
"The idea is to create a window of our perception of space," said video artist Joseph Bucciarelli, of Spaceport.
Then, after a pause: "The bottom line is it's an excuse to make everything really trippy."
