This Week’s Must-See Art Events: For Goths, Hackers, and Knitters

Knitters unite, and make your own Guerrilla Girls balaclava (pattern available for free download) at the Bruce’s new FUG gallery. Check out the Guerrilla Girls BroadBand exhibition while you’re there, too.

Andi Harriman, music anthropologist and author of Some Wear Leather, Some Wear Lace: A Worldwide Compendium of Postpunk and Goth in the 1980s, presents an illustrated lecture on the aesthetic history of Goth leading up to the early 1990s. The talk will focus on the visual signals members of the subculture utilized to communicate their identity to the mainstream. We couldn’t be more excited about this event; at least one member of the AFC staff wrote their graduate thesis partially about black lipstick.

Want to know how to think about and create the city of tomorrow? Go to Ideas City. With over 100 free Ideas City events, it’s hard to know which ones to attend. You may as well go with your gut, or, in some cases, your nose (Saturday includes a smog-tasting event). What you should know: Thursday and Friday’s events are ticketed, while Saturday’s are mostly street-fair style in the Lower East Side.

On Thursday:

Ideas City conference, 9:30 – 7:30 p.m. (ticketed event)

Highlights include:

Keynote: Lawrence Lessig on “Seeing Through the Noise,”  on art, culture, and data

Panel discussion: Full Disclosure and the Morality of Information, with Trevor Paglen, Christopher Soghoian, Jillian C. York, and Gabriella Coleman (moderator) (ticketed event)

Panel discussion: Mayoral panel, with the mayors of Houston, San Juan, and Ithaca, moderated by radio celeb Kurt Andersen (ticketed event)

“Gay Death Cult” is the title of an essay by Allan Doyle accompanying Elijah Burgher’s exhibition, which should give you a hint at what’s in store with this exhibition of colored-pencil portraits of cultish, stoic nudes (you might have seen them at the 2014 Whitney Biennial), prints, and paintings on drop cloths.

Cyberfeminist research group Deep Lab is gonna be the best part of Ideas City. “Formed” at Carnegie Mellon University’s Studio for Creative Inquiry in 2014, the group has published essays ranging on topics from hacking to tracking down the physical internet on city streets. NEW INC is hosting the artists, technologists, and writers in Deep Lab for a week-long residency, resulting in what looks like a great day of talks on Friday (there’s a drone painting demonstration on Thursday, and a walking tour on Saturday, too).

Full schedule, here.

For Ideas City’s Saturday events, expect a street fair with eco-friendly architecture disbursed throughout. Among the gazillion events, we’ve spotted a smog-tasting and a sewer in a suitcase.

Do you know anything about psychoacoustics? You will, after Saturday’s symposium on contemporary sound art and how we experience it, in both body and mind. With talks, presentations, installations, and performances by Ron Kuivila, professor of Music, Wesleyan University; Seth Cluett, artist and composer, Professor Stevens Institute of Technology; C Lavender, sound artist; Sophie Landres, PhD candidate in Art History, Stony Brook University & Mellon Fellow at Creative Time; Josh Millrod, artist and M.M.T. candidate, Music Psychiatrics, NYU; Jules Gimbrone, artist and composer; A.K. Burns, artist, co-founder W.A.G.E., Callicoon Gallery; and Suzanne Dikker, research scientist, NYU.