It’s hard to believe, given the endless summer, that it’s almost time to pull your head out of that can of Ranier you’re floating down a river with and put your Art Pants on. But lo, TBA:14 kicks off TOMORROW!
If you’ve yet to peruse this year’s offerings, you’re late! Luckily we’ll have our own guide to the festival on the streets by the end of today. (Also see the new Agenda arts guide for our capsule descriptions.) In the meanwhile, there are two other ways for you to get your TBA pre-game on starting now:
Miranda July’s Somebody app: The deal is you download this free app from iTunes, create an account, and then you are able to send and receive messages between other users. Except, when you send someone a message, it won’t go directly to them. It will go to the Somebody user closest to them. They’ll get an alert and be able to see the message, including the intended recipient’s photo (so they can find them, because presumably this will be a stranger). Then the idea is they go over and deliver the message, to which the sender can add instructions like “crying” or “hug.” As you can imagine, this only really works when there is a critical mass of users in the same general area or “hotspot.” So ta-da, PICA and TBA are hotspots. While you’re waiting, you can go ahead and download it to get started and practice. It would be helpful if some of you would do that, in fact, so I could test mine out. I already asked my husband and he said no before I could finish explaining it. 🙁
The project, by the way, launched at the Venice Film Festival along with a short demo film that’s part of the (fancy, awesome) clothing brand Miu Miu’s Women’s Tales Series:
Guess which part of that film I thought was the most awkward.
Also, head over to the Mercury‘s TBA blog, which is waking up from its long slumber since last year’s festival for one more way you can play with tomorrow’s TBA… today!