Drayton Hiers

My friend Shailoh Phillips made this beautiful film - though she prefers the term audio visual poem - for Studio 1824 a few weeks back. You can read more about the project, or just enjoy the poem.

Eyebeam just launched their new and super awesome website today.  (Please read that hyperlink in the appropriate snotty, 80’s kid tone of voice.)  As part of the re-launch, I’m now on the Staff page, with my rabbit ear photo and my new (and super awesome?) bio:

Drayton Hiers is a writer, director and designer fascinated by transience, urban decay and things that are pretty.  He is a co-founder of Zebra Crossing, a Brooklyn based theatre company; co-creator of the Video Womb, which premiered at Eyebeam Underground; and has toured with the rock band The Suite Unraveling, providing an array of shiny robots and blinking lights.  His secret dream is to be a punk rock Anton Chekhov.  Or to go into space.

I’m not kidding about the space thing, by the way.  If you have a friend at NASA, hook me up.

A few weeks ago, I Twittered the following:

Something strange has happened.  Being rejected by Yale has made me feel better about myself, rather than worse.  I can’t explain this.

Which is actually true.  In some ways, applying to graduate school is like going to the Olympics.  Some people win the gold medal, and other are just happy to hang out at the Olympic Village and have the chance to compete.  So far I haven’t made it into any of my schools, but I’ve spent the last four months working very intensely on my writing and on my sense of myself as a writer.  Aside from simply producing content - a very good new play, which I’ve realized is part of a tryptich about (what else?) failure - I’ve had the chance to clarify for myself what I do, why I do it, and that I’m going to keep doing it.

Some people win a gold medal, others are just happy to be at the party.

And then yesterday, a friend told me that I’d made it onto The Daily Beast, which I have to admit is one of my favorite websites.  They ran a bunch of recent Tweets about college and grad school rejects, with the accompanying text: As the college rejection letters pour in, Twitter boards are lighting up, proving brevity can be the soul of agony, too.

Some of us are taking the rejection better than others.  You can read all of the Tweets here.  I love the guy who gets turned down by Waterloo, but gets into Harvard.  What, like that’s hard?

Christina, Dan and I are were pleased to have the opportunity to present the Video Womb once again at Eyebeam, this time for the Holiday Hackshop.  We added a new element to the mix - live video manipulation and free play - and I got behind the wheels of the mixing board (so to speak) for the first time, and actually did some full-on VJing.  As they would say in France, “super cool” (Sew-pir Kewl).

Here is some video from the event. We spoke to a guy from the BBC Digital Planet who really enjoyed the project, but since it was so incredibly visual, it didn’t really work for radio.  As a side note - doing an interview for radio is ridiculously hard.  You have to explain everything, and do it in easy to understand sound bites.  Maddening.

Instant Party from christina kral on Vimeo.

So after a lot of hard work and some restless nights, Video Womb was unveiled this past Saturday at Eyebeam’s MIXER underground. David Jimison and his crew put a lot of energy and creativity into this one-of-a-kind event, and the result was spectacular: a giant maze, rat tunnels, dancing lizards, glam rock bands and art, art everywhere.  Gothamist raved about it, saying ”the enthusiasm was contagious, evoking the spirit of the old Rubulad parties when they started in pre-gentrified South Williamsburg”.

Photos and more from underground and Video Womb are coming, but for now, take a peek at these:

Many of these photos were taken by John Huntington. Thanks John!

Find out at Underground, November 8 at Eyebeam.

This Promises to Be. The Party. Of the Year.

To say any more would ruin the surprise.

Our second night of the tour, we played at Eyedrum, a super funky art gallery and performance space near downtown Atlanta. I had come to Atlanta with a lot of trepidation - as a Southerner, I’d always regarded Atlanta as something of a Northern monstrosity in the midst of the Deep South - but it was actually a very charming place, the nearest thing the South has to a Los Angeles type city, with both the good and bad that implies. (As a side note, Dallas is arguably even more LA than Atlanta, but Dallas is less a city than a giant mistake parceled up into areas that consider themselves neighborhoods, so I’m dismissing it out of hand.)

We spent the afternoon resting and hanging out with Lily’s cousin, and then descended upon the gravel parking lot of Eyedrum, where Evan felt compelled to spin some donuts - in our minivan - with our mannequins up on the roof and instruments in the back - in front of the water tower.

The guys went out to get barbecue on our dinner break, and then Evan and Adam snuck a swig of whiskey in the van before the show, as if they were hiding a shared cigarette from their parents, all of which might go some distance to explaining the following performance. This, by the way, easily makes my top ten list of great moments on the tour. I don’t know what it will take to entice Evan to do a repeat performance, but hopefully it won’t be too long in coming.

(Since we’re coming into this in the middle of the story: a girl’s out on her own, camping, but keeps getting the feeling she’s being watched…)

I’m not sure if Eyedrum has recovered yet.

Many months ago, when I was visiting Amsterdam for what may turn out to be the last time for a number of years (after visiting or living there every year since 2003), I went to Rotterdam to do some investigation into the art scene. Friends in Amsterdam had been telling me that to truly get a taste of the underground art world, I would have to head to - well, really, I’d have to go to Berlin, but failing that, I could go to Rotterdam. So I went.

I turned the results into an essay that was featured in Ins&Outs,a local magazine put out by some arty folks up in Long Island City. A sample of it goes like this:

“Rotterdam has a very active scene for being still a small city,” Ties explains. We’re drinking tea in his live-work space in an old public school in the Charlois neighborhood of Rotterdam. The building was squatted nearly twenty years ago by a bunch of art students who had formed their own foundation, and is now an important arts and event space in the city’s working class South Side. “You look at Berlin and things are happening every night and there’s so much energy, but Berlin is maybe twenty times the size of Rotterdam. And it feels like a lot of what’s happening there is as much about being able to do something, rather than the quality of the work. I think we get to focus more on the work we’re doing here.”

He explains that artists in Rotterdam are more interested in building an identity and a community for themselves. They are undertaking initiatives to work with each other on large scale projects, as well as bringing in artists from around the world. “We have to work together,” Ties says. “It’s the only way to survive.”

For the full story, follow this link to Ins&Outs, and then click on “Planet”.