GAMBLETRON

Building on their most recent collaboration, Gambletron and Johnny Forever's newest work Meet Me At The Woodshop explores the erotics of labour and the relationship between the body and its immediate built environment. Sourcing materials, imagery, and sound from their experience in construction, Gambletron and Forever work queer fantasy into the world of quick and dirty home renovation.

The work is an installation activated by several scheduled performances. Gambletron's rumbling house-influenced beats, roughly hewn from a collection of synths and homemade electronics are layered over tones produced via electric musical saw. This sound comes through heavy-duty jobsite radios via multichannel transmission. Meanwhile, Johnny Forever transforms typical home improvement labour into chaotic, precariously executed queer burlesque.

As a queer couple who have spent many years on nightlife scenes and construction sites, the artists are allowing themselves space to flirt with the image of a babely nonbinary handiperson just doing their job while bringing their usual absurdist experiments with technical failure and material decay into the play space/work site.

This project lived in a german forest for three months acting as both an FM radio station and a feedback resonant machine. Antennae rumbling and activated by cyclic wiring in conjunction with transmitted sound being fed into the sculpture via surface transducers.

Curators: Maria Hinze, Peter Becker

The media festival included 20 ish artists internationally and was programmed adjacent to Documenta 15 and had busses running from Kassel.

A VIDEO CONFERENCE CONSTRUCTION SITE WITH FM TRANSMISSION

In this durational performance, Johnny Forever and Gambletron appeared remotely via video conference from Spaceless Gallery and Local Loser’s Gallery located in Sylix Okanagan/ Vernon, BC as a pair of counterpart performers ( Bean Nunnerly, Winnie Ho, Rebecca Ladida)  mirrored their work in Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal at a pop-up gallery for Undefine Radio’s Bodies in Resonance Festival co-produced with Suoni Per il Popolo. Curated by Martín Rodríguez and Emmanuel Madan.

Each duo built a series of resonant structures from construction site detritus. This installation became a makeshift sonic home for a live FM radio transmission combining sound from both sites in an audio feedback loop. The Embracing the potential for communication breakdown and material mess, the work is a reflection on the precarity of the social body as well as the contemporary built environment.

http://undefine.fm/

 https://suoniperilpopolo.org/program/bodies-in-resonance-presents-gambletron-and-johnny-forever?fbclid=IwAR1jllHXg5o4NIALrAkaXWNX0HzqDn4VE96dBJYlZooPm5zhXofc3K-e0R4

Mixed motor is the sister sculpture to Forest Antenna. It was curated by Marcella Moser @ Spaceless.ca with artists Johnny Forever Nawracaj and photographer Zev Tiefenbach. It is a sculpture using found objects, radio transmission, antenna, wood, electronics, radios to create feedback between radio receivers and FM transmission through the magic of vibrating antennas and sheets of metal. In a way i would call this a junk-selfie.  A perfect conversation between two things that ultimately should be working together but when uniting in an unorthodox manner create friction. Welcome 2020. We were very lucky to have this art show as part of a residency at Caetani Art Centre in Vernon, BC despite the pandemic. As usual this sculpture is also used for the purpose of performance - it can be played by bringing the antennas to and from the metal. Also the effect changes when you play with the volume of each component and the transmitter. 

https://www.caetani.org/2020/10/13/b-u-i-l-d-u-p-pop-up-exhibition-performance-october-17-18/

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"45 Library is a collection of speculations by artists, designers, and architects on the subject of the presidential library for the 45th president."           -45 Library Collective

45library.com

Talk To Your Legal Limit is a mobile, performative soundscape. Through an armor of portable synths and a short range FM transmitter, Gambletron broadcasts into a set of radios manipulated by Johnny Forever. The duo engages the transmission from opposite ends of the Zócalo, pointing to the limits of public access by evoking the pirate radio platform.

Video posted below at this link:

https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/encuentro-2019-roaming-cabaret/item/2990-johnny-forever-and-gambletron.html

This is a second instalment of a performance that was originally performed on Lake Ontario in 2015, created with Johnny Forever. On August 18 2018 a newer version was created this time with floating radio air balloons instead of rafts performed by Gambletron and Jes Dolan.

This piece features a mobile radio transmitter cart on the beach broadcasting a synth noise performance to radios floating on the ocean.  Wading among the radios, Jes Dolan guided the floatilla screaming into a mic, also transmitted into the radios.  Gambletron remotely pushed live noise through their mobile radio FM transmitter using synths and homemade instruments. The Audience was invited to immerse themselves in the sound piece both in the water and on the beach. The water was cold so Jes was alone. They were encouraged to follow Gambletron and Dolan as the performance unfolded, audience members were utilized to carry the radio antenna made from drift wood from the beach. 

Sculptural broadcast and performance platform taking the shape of a Kabalistic structure revelatory of the infinite, this sculpture explores the evocation of totality that often occurs during improvisational performance.

An antenna situated in the centre of the space feeds a low power FM transmitter.  A signal from the transmitter was relayed to several radios placed in ten concentric circles. Sound will be broadcast into the installation from a roving radio station throughout the week, creating a sound piece sourced from interviews and interventions with improvisors participating at the festival.

Each Radio represents a line on the above Kabbalistic chart. This project hopes to redefine these 10 steps that bring us closer to the divine through the act of improvisation.

A more in depth description along with the interviews that were broadcast can be experienced here at the sculpture’s live blog:

https://sephirot-transmission.tumblr.com/

Chapter one includes interviews with: Emilie Mouchous, Julie Richard, Shahzad Ismaily, and Nels Cline.

Collaborative performance by Johnny Forever and Gambletron for Encuentro 2016 hosted in Santiago, Chile by New York University's Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics as well as the Universidad de Chile.

In this performance Gambletron (Lisa Gamble) creates a live transmission of improvised noise, heavy beats, and distorted vocalizations using a wearable mobile FM radio station/synthesizer suit. Clad in their iconic, bold, femme drag Johnny Forever manipulates a set of ten to twenty or more radios laid out in an outdoor space, changing their locations to explore acoustical differences and constantly adjusting the tuning in search of Gambletron's pirate transmission performance amid regular programming and static.

This work is a chapter in an ever morphing, site specific series in which Gambletron and Forever take audiences through urban environments, augmenting spaces with the sound and movement of radio. The piece is completely mobile. Gambletron, covered in this collage of digital and analogue technologies- some augmented and some homemade, pushes a veritable wall of sound through to a roving audience. Meanwhile, Johnny Forever engages audience members by handing them radios and encouraging them to move Gambletron's transmission down city streets, into alleyways, around corners, to stack radios or swing them around, in a word- to experiment. Gambletron's wearable transmitter works at a range of several kilometres, giving the performers and participating audience members a wide berth for experimentation. A rogue audience member may choose to take a unit around a corner, becoming momentarily invisible but still able to access the sound. People holding radios may also choose to come together and build a wall of sound.

Ether Underground is an improvisational performance with radio transmission and video projection created with sound artist Gambletron in September 2016 for the canyons of Starved Rock State Park, Illinois and Episode 75 of Chicago based experimental radio platform, Radius.  It was later featured in the Sonic Arcade curation of RADIUS in NYC’s Museum of Art and Design Feb 2018.

Photography and curation Jeff Kolar

http://theradius.us/episode75

SPAM is a multimedia installation with durational performance. Gambletron and Johnny Forever create an immersive and interactive “social media funhouse” projecting video conferencing platforms to create visual and sonic feedback loops mimicking the sensation of a funhouse maze of mirrors. Simultaneously, a pirate FM transmission created from the sounds in the room comes through a series of radios scattered throughout the installation. The radio transmission, along with the movement of human bodies and the manual manipulation of devices within the space act as analogue media restructuring digital identities and interactions with highly surveilled digital media.

This piece featured a mobile radio transmitter broadcasting to radios floating on tiny rafts close by on the lake. As queer performers, the gay and trans community history of the Hanlan’s Point beach, whether for cruising or chosen family picnics, continues to be an important queer site in Toronto. In tribute to this site, the performance aspect of this project was heavily drag-inflected. Wading among the radios, Johnny Forever took on one of their many deep drag persona’s while Gambletron remotely pushed live noise through her mobile radio transmitter and synths incorporated into her costume.  The Audience was invited to immerse themselves in the sound piece both in the water and on the beach. They were encouraged to follow Gambletron and Forever as the performance unfolded.

The second instalment of this piece was later featured at a sound art festival in Gaspé, QC mid August 2018 with Jes Dolan performing the part of Johnny.