Tuesday, April 6, 2010 at 7:30pm
Doctor Who, and Cops with House Music
177 Livingston Street, Brooklyn
Presented by Paul Slocum
Artist Paul Slocum presents two television manipulations: a selection of fan-made reconstructions of lost Doctor Who episodes, and the premiere of his latest project, Cops with House Music.
In order to save on storage costs, the BBC erased or otherwise discarded large portions of their archives of film and videotape in the 1960s and 70s, including over 100 early episodes of their long-running science fiction series Doctor Who. But the show continued to grow in popularity and remains on the air today, amassing a gigantic, international fanbase over the decades. In recent years, some of these fans have put extensive efforts into DIY restorations of lost episodes. The complete audio tracks exist for every episode (in part thanks to home sound recordings), but extant visual information exists in piecemeal form.
Slocum will present a fan restoration of the fourth episode of "The Tenth Planet," which originally aired in 1966. Featuring the first “regeneration” of the Doctor, it is one of the most sought-after lost episodes, and was reconstructed using home-taped audio, 16mm BBC footage used as clips for other programs, film shot by viewers off TV, a series of screen photographs (“telesnaps”) commissioned by the BBC for continuity purposes, and numerous on-set photos.
The second half of the program will be the first look at Slocum’s new project Cops with House Music, which consists of a single episode of the FOX television show Cops set to a variety of house and post-house tracks. A deceptively simple intervention that produces complex effects, Cops with House Music combines two cultural phenomena that hit mainstream America in the late 80s and have never left—reality television and modern club music. By joining the two, Slocum highlights the particular emotional character and minute details of each form, submerging the viewer in a strangely disjunctive environment that colors the non-stop, bodily beats of house music with an equally relentless image: the roving machinery of street-level law enforcement in underclass America.
Paul Slocum is an independent artist, curator, and musician living in Brooklyn, and former director of And/Or Gallery in Dallas, TX. His work often addresses computer technology and culture. Some of Paul's performances and exhibitions include The New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Deitch Projects in New York, Transitio MX in Mexico City, README 2005 in Denmark, The Liverpool Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Thanks to Bohus Blahut (Doctor Who advisor), Kevin Bewersdorf (Cops advisor), and Sean Dack (house music advisor).
Tickets - $7, available at door.