Brown sugar

I'm blogging from Sayles Hall at Brown University in Rhode Island. I'm here for the annual Performance Studies international conference. I'm here mainly for the Franklin Furnace panel I organized with Martha Wilson. This session brings two FF artists-in-residence: Yury Gitman and Joshua Kinberg.

My work with/on FF reminds me that I should really focus more energy on getting a publisher for my book about the Furnace this summer. I believe that there's a book publisher in the UK waiting for me, even though I recently sang the praises of self-publishing and the internet as an alternative medium to traditional publishing.

Yury and Joshua are very interesting artists. Their recent work with bikes (MagicBike and Bikes Against Bush) is one aspect of what they're interested in and what they're doing. Yesterday I had a very interesting conversation with Yury about his interest in vibrators. I was also introduced to ANT by Joshua, and I have a feeling you'll be hearing more about ANT very soon; ANT = ANT is not TV. We spoke about my writing an article about them for an upcoming issue of Leonardo. So I'm sure I'll be blogging some more about them and their work sometime this summer.

The conference this year is quite large. There are far more panels, round tables, performances, installations and other such sessions than anyone can physically attend. What makes things worse is that some of the things I really want to attend are being held at the same time. I missed a great session on blogging and the performance of personal identity. Another session I missed was thankfully repeated today and I'm glad I could attend the Unheimlich session by the Chameleons Group. Unheimlich is the best use of the internet for a live full-screen broadcast quality video hook-up I've ever seen; it's as good as any ISDN, satellite, or even Internet 2 session I've attended before.

I don't know that I'll blog about the conference again before I return to New York, but at least this little taste of what's going on here at Brown right now gives regular readers of my blog a little insight into the various lives of Toni Sant.

Now I'm of to an interesting session that attracted me though the final sentence in the program description: "when the shit hits the fan, what would Buddha do?"

I just read what I wrote blog today and I can see that I blog better when I'm naked.