COLLABORATIONS: GCM: ART-if-ACTS, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston MA 2012

Collaborating as Gang Clan Mafia since 2006, performance artists Dirk Adams and Vela Phelan create improvised, live visuals, and sound collages in dialogue with physical actions and alluring objects. Using found digital artifacts, their own bodies, field recordings and their eclectic collections as material, Gang Clan Mafia's dense agglomerations blur divisions between their tactile presence as performers and the digitally surreal. Like previous works, their June 14th performance was designed with its site in mind. ART-if-ACTS examines the Museum of Fine Arts Boston as a guardian for many cultural treasures. The artists draw on images of the Museum's collection and ideologies specific to major arts institutions, and combine them with interviews they conducted with other Boston-area artists. As the title ART-if-ACTS suggests, an art object's value is determined by the knowledge invested in it – by its level of institutional recognition, and by the meanings that are layered onto it via its presentation in a Museum. Remixing digital versions of art objects in the place that houses them, Art-If-Facts asks – Where and how do virtual materials cross into the realm of the real? Who determines the worth of an object and how is that worth declared? Does the value of an object decrease the more accessible it becomes to the public? Gang Clan Mafia animates an under-utilized space in the Museum, rethinking its real-estate - both its physical and imaginary assets. Liz Munsell

Gang Clan Mafia creates improvised, live sound.  It is a sound collage, landscape, journey and conversation.  Video, installation, and performance actions are used as a visual Transportation Pod.
 
Gang Clan Mafia is:
Vela (turntable,samplers, knobs, transmissions, video.)
mrdirky (found sound, constructed sound, mic, effects, video)

www.gangClanMafia.com

•