TAG SALE COSMOLOGY

The Lounge - Online Exhibition

Several of my videos are featured in an online show that opens today at No Commercial Value (.org) called The Lounge, curated by Natasha Chuk and Cat Mallone. The show will run for two weeks. Please check out the show description below!

This show is a presentation of work by six contributing creators and thinkers who uniquely probe the complexity of how we construct, inhabit, and share our living spaces. The body of work we selected collectively illustrates a collapse of one’s personal and private living spaces and the objects that occupy them. Individually, each work invites users to engage in a unique experience of mediated access and contemplation.

The term “lounge” was selected to describe a broadly defined space of relaxation, exploration, creativity, production, and domesticity, from which a range of activities and the allusion to a complex system of memory and objects emerge. The shifting contexts of living spaces are addressed through new and purportedly obsolete media as a means of channeling the dizzyingly abstruse notion of imagined and realized spaces of dwelling and habitation.

Participating artists include:
Amy Casey
Gregory Fenton
Brian Knauer
Erica Magrey
Hollis B. Thornton
Ann Toebbe

Metalmags and the Alien Ambassador: Synchronicity

Lo and behold, the long-awaited sequel to An Opportunity for Social Engagement has arrived. Join our alien friends as they get down in the outer reaches of space. As always, the characters are played by myself and by Collin Cunningham.

Watch the video on my youtube channel, Mags to Riches.

View the growing Metalmags and Alien Ambassador playlist on my channel.

Two more Metalmags and the Alien Ambassador projects are in the works, so you’ll be seeing more of us! Look out for a preview of the upcoming long form project on my website.

Newest and Perhaps Greatest Symphony of Science

A few days after I posted about the two previous Symphony of Science videos I saw this third installment in the series. (It’s all very confusing to me because I feel like I saw them a year ago and wrote a post about them and then fell into a time warp and came out and there was a new video but I had neglected to write about it.) At any rate, Our Place in the Cosmos is a notch above the rest IMHO. In it, Carl Sagan speaks to our cosmic responsibility, the fact that we must push on to survive, not just for ourselves, but because we owe it to the cosmos from which we came. He also has a great line in the refrain: “One of the great revelations of space exploration is the image of the Earth, finite and lonely, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.” (Sounds more charming auto-tuned, oddly enough.) It probably sounds corny, but both points bring me to tears thinking about them, especially when presented by Sagan, a figure both familiar and nostalgic, as my friend Jeremy and I geeked out on Cosmos in high school. In the amazing documentary For All Mankind, a few astronauts comment on that view of the Earth from the moon as the ultimate reality check, the biggest and most beautiful gift of the big picture they could have imagined, and that always stuck with me.

Just realized all episodes of Carl Sagan’s amazing video series Cosmos (from which this video borrows heavily) can be seen here on Hulu. Yesss!!

Finally, an auto-tune experiment worth watching

“We Are All Connected” is the second in a series of auto-tune compositions by the Symphony of Science. The creator John Boswell used clips of Carl Sagan from the Cosmos series, as well as Bill Nye, Richard Feynman and Neil deGrasse Tyson. Cosmos in itself is an amazing series that should be viewed in all seriousness. Impressively, this video succeeds in making such observations jovial without casting an irritating ironic shadow over the whole production. Bravo! Go to Symphony of Science to download the songs and videos. As seen on Geekologie.

We Are All Connected

Also check out the first video A Glorious Dawn, mostly comprised of Cosmos footage, enhanced by a verse by Stephen Hawking.

New Video!

Behold my new video An Opportunity for Social Engagement, illustrating a chance meeting between Metalmags and the Alien Ambassador in an elevator aboard a spaceship. Featuring yours truly (Erica Magrey) and Collin Cunningham. See the embedded version below or HERE on youtube (remember to click on “watch in high quality.”)

For other videos with these characters see Alien Lounge Scene and Metalmags Performs on Chic-a-go-go!

This Looks Disgusting but it’s Fucking Cool

UFO Series

My friend and co-worker Frank just turned me on to UFO, a British TV series from 1970 by way of an extremely in-depth fan site. The main attraction is a set of galleries of beautiful full color (and b/w) stills, featuring dope silver space costumes, fake rocks, and an host of detailed miniature vehicles being prepped for action. In addition, you can check out music tracks, sound effects, cast info, movie clips (unfortch windows media player), fan art, viewmaster reels, an episode guide, and many other awesome and fanatical little tidbits. Check out the site here!

And yes, they do have the 8-disc series on Netflix.

For the Love of Gene Rodenberry

Picard’s got a lotta love. Watch him get Vaudevillian.

Star Trekkin’

I was searching youtube for items tagged “star trek dance” for an upcoming project on the theme and I came across this gem. Kirk Incorporated, a group of guys aged 14 to 30, performs the classic novelty song “Star Trekking” (with the addition of a few extra verses) on a local Minnesota station during a holiday fundraiser. Though not all members of the group come across as hardcore fans, several of them are animated and/or dedicated in their delivery. The teen portraying Uhura utilizes his most general female impersonation, but he couples this with falsies - a bold move for local TV! Spock’s stand-in demonstrates a firm commitment to his muse, and Scotty turns out to be a bit of a spotlight hog. And all the while, ads scroll across the bottom of the screen….Sauk Rapids Plumbing and Heating Services $10, etc.

It’s worth watching through to the end if you can bear it. You can always skip ahead - but some of the natural (?) rhythm is lost. I made it through, but just barely, and I can tolerate (and rather enjoy) those things in life that live on the high end of the cringe factor scale.

New Space Uniform

I’ve been looking at a lot of Star Trek suits lately, and they’re kind of classified based on whether they’ll be used on duty or recreationally. This ensemble isn’t quite formal enough to be duty wear - it’s more or less casual. It might be worn by a student, a worker (more of a service type job than that of a commanding officer), or perhaps simply a citizen, as collin suggested when he saw it.

I started this shirt probably about a year ago and put it aside, becoming discouraged. I revived it and finished it, combining it with my old Danger Mouse costume pants and some white dance shoes that I just knew would come in handy for something.

See more related content in my Fashion Statement Flickr set.