What is What

I recently Performed in Torino Italy. I was performing primarily for pedestrians, tourists and local people who happened to pass me by. My Italian language skills being next to nothing forced me to stick to entirely non-verbal means.

ABOVE: With the right angle and framing a George Romero horror narrative emerges from a lighthearted moment of creative improvisation with the environment and random people. Chance is my guide and light my primary subject. It always has been. Photo by Andrea Macchia

ABOVE: This is a still of me communing with a canine audience member in Pittsburgh a few years back. Posting this up because I am looking forward to my European street performances coming up this spring 2011.

ABOVE: BENCH Alternate Edit

ABOVE: i have been dumpster diving a sign store now for years now and I am completely out of space to store anymore. I have enough letters now to write out a new message in three foot high letters of varied fonts. The truth is I love making multi-channel surround and multi-channel composite video works but lately I have fallen back into a place where the physical handmade object is reborn in the spirit of my imagination.

BELOW: Warsaw, Poland. A bas-relief of a mother with child from the socialist realism era within Poland slowly decays in the acidic rain as a late capitalist cultural force represented by ZORK leaves its global human scrawl beneath it.

ABOVE: POLAND a quick pic of the Warsaw Center City. I am performing at www.cialoumysl.pl with DJ Brian Coxx

Ben Shannon recording in the studio - nice job bro-

if you dont see the tracks here is the link http://benshannonmusic.com

I have been taking lots of pictures long before the digital era when I was given a Kodak instamatic rectangular black box. Now with the ability to share it has changed the game for me. In earlier years a contact sheet was printed negatives stored away and that was it. If an image was particularly well done I would give it to my friend who worked at a lab and he would print them 8 by 10 color on the side for free. Each image now is a passing thought whereas before it was a work that earned its right to be printed. I love photography. I am not a photgrapher.

BELOW are a few recent photos. I try and focus on some thought or statement with these. Bank Owned is particularly relevant to this era where taxpayers are giving money to a government that is paying banks that fail billions to stay afloat while regular folk suffer with unemployment and degradaton of their quality of life. The McMansion on the right side of the frame is an icon of the banking debacle and wild nature in the distance puts it all in scale.

Salt Lake City Utah

Pittsburgh, PA