Celebrate the triumph of the radical new technology, Infinity 88’s Rosary 1653 beta test at the Vinyl Church! Captured on film by Machines In Between staff photographer, Jenny Schulder, the results were transformative.
the ART bARTer mART is BACK!
The ART bARTer mART has returned from it’s extended vacation at Franklin & Marshall’s Phillips Museum and is back in front of Modern Art. Come on over and check it out!
Whether you want to take some art, make some art or leave some art, we’ve got it all right here in this handy cabinet. It’s all free, and open all day, everyday for all your art swapping needs.
A Strange Occurrence at the Vinyl Church
A cache of photos from the Vinyl Church have been found on the camera roll of Machines in Between staff photographer, Jenny Schulder Brant. We are developing them slowly, given their fragility and mystery. The images are of unknown origin and depict another world- one both utterly strange and frighteningly familiar.
Machines in Between and the Vinyl Church Announce Spring 2023 Events!
Please join us for a series of on-beat and off-beat performances, lectures, and live music in the Vinyl Church. Check out our Events Calendar for more information, and keep an ear to the ground for more exciting announcements as we roll into spring.
Thursday, March 9:
PUBLIC TALK: AN EVENING WITH CHARISMATECH BY DONAVAN SCHAEFER
Saturday, March 18:
WEIRD MIRROR AT THE VINYL CHURCH
Thursday, March 23:
PUBLIC TALK: PREACHERS AND THE TALKING MACHINE WITH DR. LARONE A. MARTIN
Thursday, April 20:
PERFORMANCE: CORY MCABEE PRESENTS "CULTURED CELL CULTURE"
Friday, May 19:
THE NIELSEN FAMILY BAND AT THE VINYL CHURCH
Welcome to the (Analog) Neighborhood at Franklin & Marshall's Phillips Gallery
Modern Art’s work as part of the City of Lancaster’s PACE Neighbors Program will be on display at Franklin & Marshall’s Phillips Museum from February through May of 2023. Featuring the Phonotel, Maps of Neighborhood Delights, Narrative Delights, Analog-gram, and the ART bARTer mart, the project explores how we think and use our neighborhood in light of this era of technological saturation.
Opening reception on Thursday, February 9 from 4:30-6:30 pm. See you there!
It’s been an honor working with this talented group of community artists: Teatro Paloma, Matty Geez, Sir Dominique Jordan and Shauna Yorty, as part of the first cohort to go through Lancaster’s PACE program. (click on the link to learn more about each of our projects.)
Through a series of surprising, curious, and unconventional installations, events, surveys, performances in and around my studio in the West End, I’ve worked to reintroduce my neighbors to the beauty and magic of their neighborhood— the people in it, the spaces, and the small, magical things we often miss when we are connecting only via screens. I’ve been working to engage people’s attention from a structure outside of an algorithmic architecture —unmediated by an institution—and one that they don’t have an obvious category for. This can catch people off guard, giving them an opportunity to think about, and interact with their neighborhood differently. Ideally with poignancy, humor, delight, and agency, rather than rage, angst and frustration with an imperfect world.
Through the collaborative projects of Welcome to the Analog Neighborhood, I’m exploring how participatory art can lead neighbors in the collective art of community building. I encourage participants to experience their essential role in the neighborhood, to take ownership of it, to care about it and care for it. Whether it’s following a map of delights around the block, imagining secret portals to other worlds, checking your phone into a hotel, putting a line from a poem on a sign in your window, writing love notes, listening to a record with a stranger, making, sharing and talking about art, these projects open doors that beckon people to enter, engage and enjoy.
Music For Everyone: Songs for Justice Volume 1 Event
On Tuesday, January 31, Modern Art and Machines in Between had the pleasure hosting Music For Everyone Songs for Justice Volume One artists Terrian Mack, Le Hinton and Gerry McCritty to the Vinyl Church for an evening of inspiration.
“Songs For Justice is a convergence of music, spoken word, visual art, poetry, history as well as discussion questions into a series of vinyl 45 records that include inspiring and educational information and resources to stimulate dialogue and, ultimately, healing and change. These records are released periodically on significant historical dates in the struggle for civil and human rights. Each record features various leaders, events and narratives around an array of civil and human rights causes and issues.”
And mark your calendar’s for the last Tuesday of every month for more Music for Everyone Songs for Justice programming.
House of Poetry Open Mic at Modern Art's Vinyl Church
A big thank you to the wonderful folks from Nobody’s Pen, and all of the talented poets who showed up to share their energy, words and warmth at the Vinyl Church.
Machines In Between Episode 1: Saturation
We are proud to announce the release of Machines in Between’s first episode. Available on www.machinesinbetween.com or wherever you download your sound.
Machines in Between is a genre-bending serial audio drama that considers our present state of technological saturation. It is part mixtape, surreal performance, and philosophical experiment. Hosts John and Libby Modern guide the listener through a scintillating sonic landscape—an accumulation of bent stories, surprising cultural analysis, historical reflection, lush soundscapes, and beats sampled from obscure religious records. And along the way John and Libby negotiate their own relationship and their own sense of reality as they confront the creeping influence of the world’s leading tech-wellness group, Infinity 88, and its mysterious CEO Kelvin Trinsel.
In the first episode of this off-kilter variety show, the listener is treated to a lush array of samples, original beats, and eclectic stories that take up the question of what is happening now. What is to be done as we grow entangled with machines, their pleasures, their economies, and their conditions of possibility? Smart devices. Sex toys. Robot intimacies. Kitchen appliances. Religious technics. Urban cyborgs. And machines that rust and wound and bleed into the ground. In Saturation hosts John and Libby Modern invite world-renowned philosophers, historians, and musicians to consider how machines reveal something about who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be. With appearances from Joan Scott, William Robert, Maia Kotrosits, and Ahmad Greene-Hayes, the premier episode of Machines in Between is also the first public demonstration of the Rosary 1653, a new sonic-emotional-spiritual technology provided by series sponsor Infinity 88.
Thank you, analog neighbors!
A big shout out to all the wonderful people who helped out, participated, came to visit, gave their phones a vacation, performed, paraded, waved, bellhopped, concierge-ed, lobby boy-ed, interviewed, photographed, hosted signs in their yards, braved the heat to walk the maps of delights, set up neighborhood delights along the way, and so much more, during Modern Art's Welcome to the Analog Weekend. We had a blast!
Shout out to Michelle Johnsen for all of the amazing photos below (and for stepping in to help out along the way), to Matt Johnson, Lina Seijo Herbert, Gabrielle Buzgo-Martin, Kerry Sherin Wright, Michele Lombardo and family, Dennis Herbert, Lauren Snell, and Nicole Michels for volunteering, Cristian Toro Meza for interviewing and interpreting, Jill Good for inspiring, Mary Smucker Schroeder , Jenny Schulder Brant and Sidney Brant for helping me pull this together, John Modern for all the love and audio fixing, Scott Bookman and Laura Roberts for setting up their wacko sidewalk boutique, Streetbeans for the fabulous music and parade and not flinching despite the heat, Dawn Cox for feeding me, Shauna Yorty for almost getting stuck in the portal to Nebraska but finding her way out (!), thanks to the Lancaster's Chestnut Hill Neighbors for hosting the 40+ signs in your yards, to Stephanie Bradford, Michele Lombardo, and Erik Anderson for your narrative delights, to Ron B Leik for cutting wood for the Phonotel sign, Amanda Barber for creating a chalk amusement park on the path, To Matty Geez for his magical cacti, to Mean Cup for offering fist bumps and stickers to participants. And a big thank you to the City of Lancaster, PA and Neighborhood Engagement Lancaster for supporting this project through their PACE Neighbors program. (and thanks to all the people I know I'm forgetting!!)
Welcome to the (analog) Neighborhood
After a long winter of being stuck inside with way too much time on various screened devices, it’s time to get out there and experience all that the real live world has to offer! Bring yourself, and your devices, on over to Modern Art for a weekend a screen-free neighborhood delights. You can check your phone into the newly-remodeled Phonotel, drop your iPad off at the CrashPad, and we’ll provide you with everything you need to enjoy the people and world around you.
Machines In Between
Modern Art has been quietly working behind the scenes to make disturbing sense of our present state of saturation. Our new collaborative project, Machines in Between, will soon ask you to grow differently entangled with machines, their myths and their promise. It will soon invite you to imagine things otherwise.
Made up of a collective of artists, musicians, and writers, MACHINES IN BETWEEN is a network phenomenon, a variety show for those bored with hot takes and corpse-cold orthodoxies.
Mark your calendars for Fall 2022 for the launch of sound and spectacle. (Until then, spend a little more time with your this machine while you check out the website.)
PACE Neighbors
Modern Art is super pumped to be participating in Lancaster’s PACE (Public Art Community Engagement) Neighbors residency-signed to support a cohort of local artists in making temporary public art projects to engage Lancaster city residents in discovering the connections between art and civic government. Keep an eye out for new projects, conducted in and around Lancaster’s West End.
PACE Neighbors is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency; Franklin & Marshall College; The City of Lancaster’s Comprehensive Plan, the Lancaster County Community Foundation; the High Family Foundation; and the Rick and Gail Gray Fund.
One of many Neighborhood MAPS OF DELIGHTS
Self Portrait with My Alogrithm
Instagram ads from the Modern Art feed, April 15, 5-5:30 am.
Self Portrait with my Phone:
The last 36 photos taken with my phone (from April 8-15).
Shenks Ferry Wildflower Preserve
It’s a beautiful time of year to check out Lancaster Conservancy’s Shenks Ferry Wildflower Preserve, and while you’re there, pick up one of these lovely stickers, designed by Modern Art, with illustrations by our wonderful friend and former intern Bailey Watro.
SOME NEWS:
Make Lancaster Weird(er)!
Friends and neighbors, when we reminded you to Make Lancaster Weird a few years back, you leaned into our call with gusto. With dinosaur costumes. With tiny pianos and celery. With odd plastic dolls outside political headquarters. With unmentionable weirdness. But now, weirdos, you’re ready for something bigger. it’s time to get out there and MAKE LANCASTER WEIRDER. Not sure where to start on your oddball journey? How about with a soft, purple t-shirt? All proceeds support the cause.
L'Chai'M
Check out the lovely new packaging Modern Art designed for this lovely new product: J. Sugarmama’s Masala Chai blend, L’Chai’M. Now go get yourself some!
Don't Forget How to Read
Friends! We submit to you, Modern Art’s entry into the holiday window decoration contest: Don’t Forget How to Read. Worried that people were, indeed, forgetting how to read, I set up a cozy, comfortable, quiet, but highly visible, nook for volunteers to sit and read in hour-long shifts in the studio’s front window. As neighbors pass by, perhaps they would look longingly in the window and think, "wow, what a wonderful way to spend time. I’m going to go read a book.” They’d be happy if they did!
THANKSGIVING WITH (friends of modern) ART
Well, Thanksgiving turned out to be just as weird as we’d imagined. Thanks to everyone who walked by, jazzercized, danced, waved, laughed, looked confused, or stopped and stared at our window while our group of crazy friends did their thing. Check out some of the photos from the day here:
the ART bARTer mART at Modern ART
A neighborhood art swap.
Come on over to Modern Art’s sidewalk where you can make art, take art, leave art or be art. The mART’s 27 drawers are open for any kind of creative swapping: drawings, paintings, poems, zines, photos, cards, stories, macrame, prints -- whatever your crazy heart desires.
Here's how it works:
LOOKING FOR some ART? Look inside the drawers labeled “TAKE ART” to find a piece of art that you'd like for your own. Admire it, bring it home, give it to someone, keep it as long as you like, or swap it out for another piece of art later.
GOT SOME ART TO SWAP? Wonderful! Just pick a drawer with the “LEAVE ART” label and put your work inside. Be sure to put your name and contact info (if you wish) so that whoever takes your art knows who you are and can tell you how much they love your piece. Any type of art you can fit into the 9(w) x 12(d) x 3(h) drawer is welcome!
WANT TO MAKE SOME ART TO SWAP? Cool! Check out the top middle drawer labeled “SUPPLIES” and get to work.
The mART will live outside Modern Art at 529 W. Chestnut Street indefinitely, as long as it holds up. Check out some of our friendly neighborhood artists and the artwork they swapped below:
