PAUSE :: Icons of Attention

Including FREE gallery admission!

Watch an interview with Kamau Patton:

Bay Area-based video and performance artist Kamau Patton presents the multi-media installation Icons of Attention. Modeled after 1930s science fiction broadcasts and underground 1980s music shows, the artist experiments with radio’s potential to bring the distant, fantastic or confusing into vivid, close proximity for audiences. Patton has invited local performance art personalities, musicians and intellectuals to participate in a dynamic workshop/studio environment and improvise with installed objects, print media and sound. The artist develops narratives and sound scripts in collaboration with invited guests, asking gallery visitors to perform various tasks which include voice dramatizations, sampling and special effects.  A low-power radio transmitter at YBCA allows listeners within a two-mile radius to tune in to the installation, which is activated and broadcast by the audience’s interaction with the installation. Icons of Attention encourages a freedom of imagination, interpretation and emotional response in the viewer that is not based on the literal or the descriptive, but rather on the abstract qualities of sound and image.