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  Festival runs in over 50 venues.

By PATRICIA DONOVAN

Published: July 19, 2010

“Art Under the Radar,” Buffalo’s sixth annual infringement festival featuring 350 art projects and 700 performances, concerts, exhibitions, films and plays, opens on July 22, and UB artists will be in the thick of it, saving the city’s historic Scajaquada Drain, offering comic books on demand and much, much more.

The festival will run through Aug. 1 in more than 50 venues throughout the city.

One of the biggest and boldest of the UB entries will be “PLAY/SHARE BEYOND/IN: A City-wide Street Game,” developed by two groups: the Intermedia Performance Studio, a collaborative initiative housed at UB that includes researchers, scientists and artists from the departments of Media Study, Theatre and Dance, and Computer Science and Engineering, and Beyond/In Western New York 2010, the international curatorial collaboration of 12 of Western New York’s museums and galleries.

The “PLAY/SHARE BEYOND/IN” entry is a “pervasive game” that will be played on two days between the real streets of Buffalo and a fantastic alternative history city, using mobile phones, live performances, social web media and virtual constructs. Game Day One will begin at 10 a.m. July 31 at Sugar City, 19 Wadsworth St., Buffalo. Game Day Two will be held Oct. 3, and will be an outreach event for the Beyond/In Western New York Exhibition that will showcase the work of more than 100 extraordinary artists from the region and beyond from Sept. 24 through the end of the year.

Between Game Days One and Two, the “play/share beyond/in’s” online network will feature writing contests and a community of players and makers. Visit the website to learn how to play or become a creator of alternate history.

Click here for a draft schedule of additional events being held as part of the festival.

UB’s participation also will include performances by the Genkin Philharmonic, led by Jon Nelson, assistant professor of music. The orchestra features some of the finest student performers in the Department of Music and performs unique and complex arrangements of cover tunes, creations of original works and electronic arrangements of classical works.

Other UB events will include:

• Media study graduate student and teaching assistant Jordan Dalton will present “Beyond the Multitude,” a protypical sound installation for the “sonic daylighting” of the 3.5 miles of Scajaquada Creek buried beneath Buffalo’s East Side (the Scajaquada Drain). Dalton uses sound as a tool for scientific research and here he presents his prototype for a project designed to encourage the exploration and appreciation of the latent ecology of the Scajaquada Drain (built, historical, cultural, acoustic and otherwise) and advocate for the “greening” of the drain and the surrounding neighborhoods, leading to the eventual resurrection of the Scajaquada. To this end, his long-term proposal calls for the modification or augmentation of 12 to 15 sewer covers, selected for location relative to green space, as well as for their acoustic qualities using a variety of acoustical, amplification and broadcast methods.

• Media Study MFA student Ron Douglas will present "Double Your Money, or How to Make it in Tough Economic Times,” which proposes two solutions: more TVs and more space in the street in which the destitute can ask for that free floating, constantly diminishing commodity—spare change.

• Anna Scime, a lecturer in the Department of Media Study, will offer "Hymns of the Absurd," experimental short films and videos she and local and once-local artists Liz Chow, Ekrem Serdar, Masha Shaw, Josh Strauss and Neil Terry, among others, have produced.

• Tim Goodman, an instructional support assistant in the Center for the Arts and alumnus of the Department of Theatre and Dance, will exhibit “Self Choreography Projects,” a set of unique dance works showcasing ballet, contemporary dance and the work of show girls, which is expected to delight and entertain audiences. Performers will include UB students.

• Department of Visual Studies student Alice Alexandrescu, along with Kyle Butler and Marc Tomko, will present “MommyDaddyBaby: Saving the Universe,” an experimental work of theatrical performance-action that uses video, sound, dialogue, dance, props, mobile assemblages, inflatables and crab walking to fascinate and appall.

• Visual studies student Katrina Boemig will offer “Community Installation Introduction,” a live installation built in Buffalo using gifts and instructions mailed from around the world.

• Local comic artist and visual studies student Caitlin Cass will present “Comics by the Cover,” an art performance piece in which she will make short comics based on the covers of books people bring her, whether she has read them or not.

• Carolyn Kaser, a visual studies fine arts major, will offer "Policy Makers,” a series of seven drawings, each drawing representing the faces from one day’s worth of news.

• Visual studies student Jason Seeley will present “Project Free Collage,” an installation consisting of a series of small collages, hidden in plain view in various locations throughout the festival grounds.

• Shasti O’Leary Soudant, a graduate student in the Department of Visual Studies, will exhibit “Gender-Bent Buffalo,” a series of portraits taken in the Gender-Bending Photo Booth at the Hallwalls Artists and Models Stimulus event held this spring.