MEI.collectiv :

is an art and design collective based in San Francisco. Its members are inspired by a common creative desire to mix up sensibilities and skills, exploring socially, culturally and environmentally engaging themes that reflect our times and personal interactions with the world.
 

Jorge Bachmann (founding member) is a Swiss-Colombian multidisciplinary artist : Sound/Video/Photo/Sculpture. He harvests sounds and visuals like bees collect pollen, focusing on the mundane with an aesthetic of the strange, the unique and the microscopic. His strong myopia plays a critical role as he becomes self-taught photographer, and sculpts wax, metal, to add a sensible dimension to the sound landscapes created. His work has been exhibited internationally in North America, Europe, Japan and Latin America.

Jessica Resmond (founding member) is a French American artist who received her BFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She lives and works in Marseille. Her work includes site specific installations, interactive or multimedia sculptures and experimental collaborations. Resmond’s work is conceptual and tactile. She focuses on the existing tensions between biological rhythms & organisms, in order to better grasp alternatives for the fast pace technology/economy driven global landscape. Borders and boundaries – where exchanges take place, lead her creative process. She has shown her work in the US, Colombia, Indonesia and Europe.

Géraud Bec is a sound artist who currently lives in Paris. Also sound editor, he splits his time between sound design for medias and acoustic composition. His music is often characterized by contrasted fluctuations between violent sound events and contemplative scapes, inspired by nature phenomena. He won a prize for a Radio France radiophonic contest with a short sound poem called “First spring” and his music has been played in several contemporary music festivals in France and abroad (U.S.A, Canada, South Korea, Scotland, Chile, Argentina, Spain and Morocco). His current researches mainly focus on creating a “living” musical system.

Ignacio Valero is a current associate professor of Humanities and Sciences at CCA. Ignacio was formerly with the International Center for Environmental Education, CIFCA, and the United Nations environment and development programs UNEP and UNDP.
Ignacio’s current interests include the political economy of the image, consumption, desire, and the society of the spectacle; environment, globalization, and the commons; and the aesthetic, philosophical, and cultural dimensions of “archaic modernity” in science fiction, anime, gender and sexual difference, mass media, and sociopolitical development. He is also interested in understanding practices leading to critical and creative pedagogy, and he is working on a poetry manuscript.

MEI.collectiv Art Residency

Stage 1 : Paris – May 2011

Finally, all 4 members of the MEI.collectiv met physically in Paris, in order to strategize for the June 2011 art residency. We used this precious opportunity to glean new ideas together, connect with potential partners.

Stage 2 : “Marais”( Clermont-Ferrand, France ) – June 2011

We put our words into actions, headed down south to the Massif Central, to become part of the local landscape, harvest, cook and taste its food and culture, learn how to make honey, and weave the very architecture of our newly imagined project.

Ignacio Valero jumped back on a plane to San Diego, California, to participate in the “political equator” mobile conference centered on the concept of “co-existence”.
www.politicalequator.org
 

Savoirs Fantômatiques :

The MEI collectiv creates a multimedia installation which invites visitors to enter a peaceful “bubble” in which we can reconnect with forgotten traditions, as we look for ALTERNATIVES,  regain consciousness of our earthly roots and belonging, through the aesthetic of WONDER and COMMON. This system aims to facilitate individual and collective lived experiences in order for what we call “savoirs fantômatiques” to emerge. This unconscious and embryonic knowledge, made of non-rationalized  and primary representations, invites the visitor to feel and to grasp his/her reality, and this, beyond the spectacles produced and sold by modern society.

Savoirs fantômatiques website coming soon… under construction

In fabula :

This sensuous journey represents diverse species of creatures and plants, revealing the inherent and eccentric beauty of the natural world. Field recordings participate in blurring the boundary between body/environment, skin/earth which are both biotopes or habitats for biological communities. Soil, vegetation, and rocks are the planet’s outer skin, fungi its digestive system, trees and plants the lung and so forth. This outer skin has the ability to record time, climate, experience and even monitor the health of the planet. Nature, in all of its diversity is in our very flesh and bones, from the melanin pigments to the microscopic creases of our cells, constantly renewing themselves thanks to a fragile balance of organisms, minerals and water.

Illuminated forest :

The act of illumination has many meanings: “intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, knowledge, revelation, insight, wisdom,” or more bluntly, “decoration of lights, usually colored lights” – Dictionary.com. I have been pondering a lot about what it means to be illuminated in its most physical sense as well as a more intellectual and spiritual sense. What purpose, or more so, responsibility, do we have in our lives and the lives of others, future generations, living beings, organisms and plantlife? What role do our personal relationships to each other and the world have on the ability to survive?
The Illuminated Forest is an imagined environment and reactive performance space that deconstructs the core of our relationships. Artists have created imagined spaces and installations to reflect this connection: a world that becomes alive with our presence. The space itself, designed by artists Jorge Bachmann (video, fabric), Ben Bracken (interactivity, sound), Jessica Resmond (video), Agnes Szelag (video, sound, fabric) and Alan So (trees, concept), is manufactured by projections, motion, distance and sound -activated sensors, MAX/MSP software, sound, painted tree branches (offcuts from the SF Park and Rec Department), light/shadow, and organically-hung fabrics from ceiling to ground to create open groves and little eddies for new discoveries in the environment. The visitors in the Forest become its inhabitants and part of its ecosystem: their presence activates both visual and auditory sensations, and leaves an imprint on the environment long after they are gone.

JetLag (multimedia in situ installation)

 
JetLag uses the metaphors of the brain and the airplane travel experience to engage us in a discussion about the disconnection and alienation experienced by many in our society, despite easier and greater access to places and people, facilitated by technology including computers, internet, and airplanes. JetLag provides a comment on this increased freedom in communication and access, both geographical and virtual. It also addresses the limitations experienced by individuals involved in these processes: confinement in airplanes versus the experience of unlimited skies ; confinement behind a computer desk versus the ability to connect (at a distance) with many.

O2 : interactive installation with aircraft and airport sound recordings
Hublots : projection installation
Left brain : video
Right brain : video
Biorhythms : photo series (J.Resmond)
Clouds : photo series (J.Bachmann)

Shipped : Global Terroir

 
Inkjet prints (24’’x32’’ each) and headphones 2008
Art At The Cheese Factory Gallery, USA

Shipped: Global Terroir, draws attention to non-local food practices, dominating the current consumer landscape.
“Mexico”, “Chile”, “Peru”, “Costa Rica”, “Ecuador”, “Canada”, “Israel”, and “USA” -under the corporation brand name- become abstractions. Transportation and displacement, trade agreements and food legislations involved in the production/consumption cycle of fruits and vegetables disappear behind the enormous and powerful food industry/complex.

Terroir is a tangible space, which is not only at the very basis of a site-specific food or wine (climate, soil, position of the sun…) but that also has a whole cultural dimension to it, allowing for a sense of trust and community.
The labels cannot carry the more complex implications of work conditions, food safety, let alone “place”, provenance and culture.

Transit :

Every day thousands of people cross the famous “international orange” structure at the mouth of the San Francisco bay. Every day thousands of people move across this 80,000 miles mass of wire, creating a sustained bio-mechanical flow. Every year, China alone moves 50 million containers through the gate, supposedly reaching 100 million in 2020. In between ocean and bay, the bridge majestically vibrates in a drone-like hum and occasionally whistles like a harp in the wind.
“We’re All Millionaires” is a group show of contemporary artworks that are to be sold for 1 Million Rupiah. The exhibition concept aims to poke fun at the cultural misconceptions of the term “millionaire”, and address the oddities of art economics and ownership status”.
Curated by C&C Projects for A.O.D. Art Space -Jakarta, Indonesia.

View photos of the opening : http://tinyurl.com/nj8nu3

SkunkFunk :

Skunkfunk is a multi-media intervention produced by Jorge Bachmann, Jessica Resmond and Anne Chao for Funk Fall-Winter 2008 collection launch party.
Storefront in situ Installation + Site Specific Realtime Projections by MEI.collectiv
Clothes + Accessories by Skunkfunk
Music by DJ MEZUKI

P.O.Box 15953
San Francisco,
CA 94115-90953
USA

meicollectiv [at] gmail [dot] com