" Censorship and Propaganda – In the US and Abroad" and an evening in Dallas with Morehshin and company

Centraltrack is a small gallery. The State fair traffic was a mess for miles all around. Right on par with our signature style, Pippins and I arrived an hour and a half late. We payed a woman who I'm pretty sure was on crystal meth $15 to park under an overpass and walked into a surprisingly intimate Q&A session between a panel of participants (all dressed in black) including Morehshin and perhaps 30 guests. We stood in the back and I watched the projected film looping on the front wall, it was a recording of Olympic events, with the athletes blocked over (poorly) by black sensor bars. I was watching it for while, thinking that Morehshin had added the censor bars to the footage herself. I was wrong, it was the publicly broadcasted Olympic footage as seen in Iran. It's funny, but also it makes you think about the degree of censorship that people are living with. Morehshin's work always makes me feel so American, that's the best way to describe it; lucky, then self-absorbed, small-minded, then oblivious. The Q&A wrapped up, there was no applause, which made me feel unsettled. I offered to help clean up, but Pippins and I mostly just stood around like idiots. Morehshin came over and hugged us, and told us to stick around. We talked with a few people in the gallery, then Morehshin, her husband, David Stout, and their two friends invited Pippins and I to go to a bar with them. We all walked together down exhibition avenue and Morehshin saw one of the flyers she had handed out on the ground and we stopped so she could take a picture of it. I told her that I got written up at work for unprofessional hair, and she smiled and said "your hair is being censored." I agreed. " If you were a man," she said," I bet they wouldn't care if your hair was messy." We all went into the bar and sat at the table farthest to the back. Nobody talked about the show, I think they were all just tired from setting it up all day. Morehshin asked me about my 16mm film project, and I told her that the camera I bought off ebay had come loaded with KodaChrome film from 1963, and that when I tried to develop it, I had ended up with a splotchy scratched mottled mess in black and white. Everyone at the table laughed and said "well, that's your project! Work with that!" Andrew, Morehshin's husband, asked me what I wanted to do for a living, and I told him that I didn't want to be an artist on my own, I wanted to work for a corporation, so I could have some guaranteed income. He told me that he expects his students to achieve more than just working a job at Pixar or wherever. Then he told Pippins and I to learn java, html, and max programming immediately, and to buy ourselves webpages and to make extracurricular projects constantly. I told him that I was considering moving in with my parents so I could afford to buy a nice mac, he said that was stupid, and that 30 years ago people were building 3d models on computers less powerful than my cell phone and that any limitations I felt I had due to a lack of technological means were all in my head. We listened to David Stout's stories, he's pretty funny. Morehshin invited Pippins and I to come sit in on one of her classes at UTD sometime, and we told her to come visit our class. That was the night out with new media. I liked what I saw of the show, and the group has given me some ideas for future projects of my own.