Writers Resist is a national initiative of writers gathering in selective venues around the country on the 15th of January, 2017, and speaking/reading words which better articulate a just and compassionate society. In San Antonio the literary organization Gemini Ink took it upon themselves to facilitate and organize the event locally. I joined about a hundred others in this public reading. My offering was “Transported: a Journey into the Past.” A slightly modified version of the text portion of the film I presented for Jump-Start’s 32nd annual Performance Party.
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Transported: a Journey into the Past
This is a little piece I created for Jump-Start Performance Co.’s Performance Party 32. Because the venue of the annual fundraising event was not at their home theater (too small of a space for so many performances), the theme for this year was “Transported.” I decided to write a short low-energy rant about how our present social climate seems to be so hung up on desiring a return to a past which never was. I pulled a couple hundred clips from old public domain newsreels (items from the wonderful Prelinger Archives, lovingly parked at archive.org). I vignetted the one-second clips in oval cameos and played them over an animated nighttime highway (thank you, Liran Tabib, for that great After Effects tutorial!). Add in a minimalist repetitive score. And top it off with a voice-over recording of myself reading the piece. Five minutes is just the right length, before things begin to get too boring. Or so I like to tell myself. As has been the case for the last seven or eight years I have been asked to contribute work for the Performance Parties, it was a great honor to share a line-up with so many extraordinary creative people, from the polished veterans to the exciting possibilities exhibited by the younger crowd of emerging artists and performers. Here’s hoping for many more Performance Parties to come!
Orion’s Feet on the Water
What a nice end to a rather murky year. December 29th of 2016 marks the third short story I have had published this year. “Orion’s Feet on the Water” appeared in Maudlin House, an online literary magazine. Here is the link.
2016: My Year in Instagrams
This is the fifth year I’ve made one of these little films. This is my year, curated specifically from my Instagram feed. Very pretty and filled with adventure! I’ve set it to the music of Bill Callahan. The song is, Drover.
The Silverfish Trilogy
This was my foray into the world of self-publishing. I had been curious how to go about preparing a manuscript for Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing service. It’s quite easy to not only create the proper Kindle-friendly file, but also to place the item onto Amazon’s database.
The Silverfish Trilogy, three short pieces.
UPDATE: Currently this little item has been removed from Amazon. As I move to upload other books I have decided to take this down until I can create a better cover and make another few editing passes.
Where the Pain Is
For one of San Antonio’s November arts fest, writers Laurie Dietrich, Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson, Ben Tremillo, and myself were brought together by Gemini Ink (San Antonio’s preeminent literary arts non-profit organization) to create a 30 minute presentation. The piece was titled “Page to Stage.” However, as we began the collaborative process, we came up with the title “Where the Pain Is.” Perhaps this can all be smoothed out by calling the work “Page to Stage: Where the Pain Is.”
The piece was performed on the night of Nov. 11, 2016, at the Little Carver, the black box theatre of the Carver Community Cultural Center. I provided the visual imagery, live projections, and real-time commentary, while the others read, and performed.
We were not able to document the piece (though we might recreate it at a later date for some sort of archival document), but it seemed to be received quite well. Below is a little promotional teaser I made of some of the imagery projected during the performance.
Invocation
Invocation, a performance piece Laurie and I have been working on for maybe 9 months, finally made it’s debut at URBAN-15 on November 4th, 2016.
Here is some information from the press release:
INVOCATION is a new performance art piece by San Antonio artists Erik Bosse (writer, film-maker, and sound artist) and Laurie Dietrich (writer, photographer, and performance artist). An experiment in enhanced storytelling, INVOCATION is comprised of sixty short pieces of flash-fiction, paired with photographs and soundscapes. However, at each show the audience will hear only thirty as, taking turns, the artists will randomly draw numbers during the show which correspond to particular stories, images, and pieces of music or sound effects. As projected images appear and disappear and the soundscape builds—evolving, generative—a story emerges. Your story might be the same as that of the artists or the person sitting next to you, but probably not. Invoking the muses to give shape to these seemingly disparate text selections, images, and sound elements means invoking as many different stories as there are people in the room.
This event is part of URBAN-15’s Sonic Provocation series, an experimental project whose aim is to provide a setting for sound artists to showcase original material, taking it out of the laboratory and into the ears of the public. Sonic Provocation offers artists the creative freedom to present their work beyond the constraints of audience expectation—and in turn offers audiences the opportunity to experience something acoustically different and unique.
Below is a full run, recorded during our final rehearsal. As each performance is different, this is just one of numerous possible iterations.
Beyond the Bamboo
In October I had my first publication in a literary journal. Back in my twenties I had a few items appear in a couple of ‘zines, but those were run by family and friends. So I was quite excited to hear back from The Bitter Oleander. They wanted to publish my short story, “Beyond the Bamboo,” in their autumn issue. That would be Volume 22; Number 2.
No money involved. But I did get a complementary copy in the mail. Opening my mailbox today was very rewarding. I hope this enthusiasm sticks, goading me to continue submitting work out into the world.
Rapid Eye Movement
Some weeks back I was asked by Julie Marin of the FIRE Collaborative (a new San Antonio-base theater company) to provide the video design for their collaboratively-created play, Rapid Eye Movement. It was staged at Jump-Start Performance Co. as part of that organization’s INKUBATOR program. What an honor to work with these (mostly) young artists. I also ran the video and the sound, so I had the great privileged to see all performances of this excellent show!
Here’s a video documentation of one of the performances.
CARAS III
A few months back, my friend Deborah Keller-Rihn invited me to participate in a group photography show she was curating at the Centro Cultural Aztlan. The show was part of a larger, city-wide month of photography, Fotoseptiembre. Caras is Spanish for faces. Each artist was asked to provide four portraits. I decided to create four photographs, each with two images of my subject, one with a blindfold, one without. I wanted them subtly aware of one another. They would all be seated on the same chair, and shot at various exterior nighttime locations around town. The photos were printed large (16′ x 20′) and dry-mounted to wooden cradle boards. Then I finished them with a layer of epoxy.
The project forced me to learn to play nice with Photoshop. And now I’m much more comfortable with a ubiquitous program which had been thumbing its nose at me for years.
I made a quick promo graphic for my contribution to the show.
And below are the images from the show. The subjects are (in the same order as above–left to right): Logan Magz, Antonia Padilla, Darian Thomas, and Michi Fink.