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Enter the strange alternative comedy scene spawned by the ubiquitous Microsoft application.
When news hit last month of a television production company holding auditions for a new reality series called 94110, about “six leading technology executives living, learning, and loving together in San Francisco’s Mission District,” many on Twitter and other online forums asked, “Is this real?”
Last month fliers began appearing on certain blocks of San Francisco advertising open auditions for a television pilot about "six leading technology executives living, learning, and loving together in San Francisco’s Mission District." The shlocky concept was named 94110after the neighborhood's zip code, and was roundly ridiculed online. Nonetheless, nearly 100 hopefuls showed up for the casting call this weekend, which was held at SFAQ, a dinged-up, lived-in little art gallery in the Tenderloin.
Scott Vermeire’s practice hovers in a performative space between art and comedy. His abilities as a deadpan performer allow him to create characters that are absurd, threatening, and hilarious, while earnestly exploring what it means to be evil, to be a failure, to be desperate, or to experience self-defeat. Although some comedic practices, sketch comedy for example, might draw characters in quick, archetypal strokes, Scott’s commitment to personifying the characters he imagines leads to surprising, moving encounters with his audience.
Live Radio Auction appropriates a format from rural American radio stations in which the DJ auctions items over the airwaves and the public calls in to bid on the objects as a way of raising funds for the radio station. In rural America, the items auctioned are usually intended to be desirable and are donated by local businesses. Live Radio Auction bends that idea by harvesting the auction items from a local thrift store, the East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse, with a keen eye set to the ordinary, the obsolete, and the nearly valueless objects one might find, like used shoes, damaged cookware, or a fire extinguisher in need of a refill—the detritus of our long-forgotten yesterday. All proceeds from the auction go to the thrift store.
The morale of high school students might not be the world’s biggest problem, but it’s got the attention of three Oakland, California-based artists who have come up with a Kickstarter campaign to combat teen malaise. Scott Vermeire, Packard Jennings, and Steuart Pittman, who make up Wonderment Consortium, an Oakland-based art collective, have decided to take on the challenge of finding a way to inspire high school students through public art.