Lexie Mountain and David Reville speak at DMC's Artist Talk

 (DMC) hosted artists David Reville and Lexie Mountiain in their Artist Talk event cosponsored by the High Zero foundation. The two spoke in the Mattin Center's SDS Room last Sunday about their use of technology in the arts.
"Where does the future come from?" Reville said. "It comes from everywhere."
Reville, who works as a composer and musicologist, also teaches music technology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Reville focused his talk on how the arts have tried to divine the future of technology through mediums, such as film and fashion, to varying levels of inaccuracy. Playing behind Reville during his talk were a collection of clips from various science-fiction films through the decades, including scenes from Minority Report.
In many of these scene, Reville finds that the technology portrayed is not actually of the future, but may be a reflection of ourselves.
"Sometimes, what we see depicted is not so much a guess about the future as it a mirror image of ourselves."
One technology theme that Reville alluded to with respect to speculations on future technologies was an element of fear in the outlook individuals may have.
"If we're afraid of the future because of the speed of technological change - I mean as a culture - that of course can result in a view that is apocalyptic," he said.
Reville also shared his views on what has hindered technological advances, namely the trouble that people can have in embracing something new - they couldn't see the use of a new device. "When the telephone was first introduced, people didn't see the point," he said. "People would ask the question, 'Well why the heck would I want to speak to someone who isn't here.'
As Reville told The News-Letter, his focus on the role of technology in the arts was recent within the past three or four years, but he has maintained a much longer-term interest in the subject.
"It made me reflect on how those things fit together and how it's going to relate to the bigger things, the bigger questions in life in a way."
While his teaching at UMBC focuses more on training students to utilize editing programs, occasionally he discusses some of the larger questions of the arts and technology with his students.
"It's just something that is evident in the way we talk about things, maybe more than sitting a class down trying to have a philosophical discussion," Reville said. "Things come up naturally to the students. . .It's a bit of an osmosis approach to theorizing rather than something that's going to be build into a class."
Alexandra Macchi, who goes by her stage name of Lexie Mountain, highlighted segments of her expansive portfolio of artwork in various mediums. In her musical work, Mountain has her own solo projects but highlighted a collaborative project with several other women entitled the Lexie Mountain Boys. The group utilized various vocalizations without any form of instrumental accompaniment or commonplace musical structure.
"This is how we are reacting to each other; this is how we are reacting to the world and this is how we are navigating the social environment by turning it into these songs. We felt really strongly about bringing it into the world in a way that is semi-confrontational."
Macchi also felt that the group confronted the usual conformations of music and the gender identities that society had usually ascribed to women. However, the challenge for her was to convey it through humor in a way that people would be able to understand it and appreciate it.
"We, in a sense, wanted to intrude on people's space and at the same time let them be in on the joke, that these roles are put upon people and we have a choice," she said. "The way you transmit humor is really tangled and you can't always say 'guys this is the joke' because some will want to figure it out for themselves."
The project had garnered significant reaction online, which excited Macchi regardless of what she would read from them.
"One thing about Mountain Boys is that it always draws a reaction out of people, which is interesting to me because a purely sort of innocuous band or an innocuous painting is not enough to really enrage people," she said. "Mountain Boys really drew out some spectacular reactions from people and it was often people who could not stand what we were trying to do. We didn't have instruments or anything. . .so we would make up things on the fly."
"People either really liked it or they really hated it, and my goodness they really hated it."
Macchi has also worked on a number of installation projects, including a display at Baltimore's Transmodern festival.
"I basically transformed this space into a rear projection-type cinema, and each night there were different featured performers."
Recently, Macchi has been working on projects in the UMBC imaging and digital art graduate program, which include taking image stills from highly compressed files used in HD camcorders.
"When you look at it in this open-source video program, it creates patterns and things that weren't there," she explained. "To my mind these are unique footprints, unique artifacts... This is a sort of an accidental discovery, but I have been making these. I would say that these are a sort of a new uniform that we have in art."
According to Rose Burt, an audio specialist at the DMC, Artist Talk is not a formal series, but there is an overarching theme.
"We're interested in technology and the arts, so a lot of these speakers tend to be artists who are using technology," Burt said.