AMP: Artists' Meeting Place and Resource Collective

Call for Submissions at Gallerie Schmallerie Acid Test

Wanted:

Artworks relating control, sociability and psychedelia.

Detail:

Gallerie Schmallerie, for it's second project, is recreating an Acid Test as conceived by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. The recreation is set in the context of present day recreational drug use and it's common environments and will comprise of musical performances, multi-media and live interventions as well as 2D or 3D artworks.

When:

Deadline for submission of work and proposals for performances is 5pm, November 25th, 2006. The event will take place for one night from 9pm till 3am in the Pelican Club under the Hotel Metro on Aberdeen's Market Street, Friday 22nd December.

Formats:

Artists wishing to present live digital media should mount all work on DVD. Specific requirements for sculptural, wall based and audio installations should be addressed to the organisation. Performance pieces will be documented through video and digital photography. Audio pieces will be documented as MP3 recordings.

Send to:

Gallerie Schmallerie
C/O Justin Orde
The Stables
Pinnaclehill Farm
Kelso
TD5 8ES

E: gallerieschmallerie@googlemail.com

But of course! - the feeling - out here at night, free, with the motor running and the adrenaline flowing, cruising in the neon glories and the new American night "it was very Heaven to be the first wave of the most extraordinary kids in the history of the world, only 15, 16, 17 years old, dressed in the haute couture of pink Oxford shirts,
sharp pants, snaky half-inch belts, fast shoes, and with all this straight 6 and V-8 power underneath and all this neon glamour overhead which somehow tied in with the super-heroics of the jet, TV, atomic subs, ultrasonics, Post-War American suburbs, glorious world! and
the hell with the intellectual bad mouthers of America's tailfin culture... they couldn't know what it was like or else they had it cultivated out of them, the feeling, to very Superkids! the world's first generation of little devils' feeling immune, beyond calamity. One's Parents remembered the sloughing common order, War & Depression, but Superkids knew only the surge of the great pay off, when nothing was common any longer, The Life! A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon Renaissance, and the myths that actually hit you at that time, not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas, but Superman, Captain Marvel, Batman, The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner, Captain America, The Flash, but of course! ...It was a fantasy world
already, this electro-pastel world of Mum&Dad&Buddy&Sis in the suburbs. There they go, in the family car, a white Pontiac Bonneville sedan, the family car! - a huge crazy god-awful-power fantasy to begin with, 327 horsepower, shaped like twenty-seven nights of lubricious luxury brougham seduction, you're already there, in
Fantasyland, so why not move off your snug harbour quilty-bed dead centre and cut loose, go ahead and say it, SHAZAM! - juice it up to what it's already aching to be: 370,000 horsepower, a whole superhighway long, and soaring, screaming on toward... Edge City, and ultimate fantasies, current and future... Billy Batson said Shazam! And turned into Captain Marvel. Jay Garrick inhaled an experimental
gas in a research lab... and began travelling and thinking at the speed of light as... the Flash... the current fantasy.

The mysteries of the synch! Very strange.... the Acid Tests turned out, in fact, to be an art form foreseen in that strange book, Childhood's End, a form called 'total identification': 'The history of film gave a clue to their actions. First sound, then colour, then stereoscopy, then Cinerama, had made the old moving pictures more and more like reality itself. Where was the end of the story? Surely the final stage would be reached when the audience forgot it was the audience, and became part of the action. To achieve this would require stimulation of all the senses and perhaps hypnosis as well... When the goal was attained, there would be an enormous enrichment of human experience. A man could become - for a while, at least, - any other person, and could take part in any conceivable adventure, real or
imaginary... And when the program was over, he would have acquired a memory as vivid as any experience in his actual life, indeed indistinguishable from reality itself.'

Both texts taken from "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test" by Tom Wolfe.