Sean Ongley

Curators and Artists of T:BA Festival 2009

KBOO Air Signal Audio from Art Focus 09-01-09

In the weeks leading up to the 2009 iteration of the Time-Based Art Festival annually produced by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), I was given a chance to guest host an episode of Art Focus on KBOO, September 01, 2009. Host Eva Lake gave me a chance to program my own show. I ran with it, packing in guests.

Featuring the guest artistic director at that time Cathy Edwards and monologist Mike Daisey on the phone, visual artists Fawn Krieger and Jesse Hayward in pre-recorded interviews, plus staff curators Erin Boberg and Kristan Kennedy in the studio, this moment is kind of amazing.

The first segment introduces the festival with Cathy, Erin, and Kristan. I bring in Mike, and the discussion gets underway. Around 20 minutes, I cut to a produced segment with Fawn and Jesse, their interviews stitched together with a brief music concrete piece built with field recordings at The Works, the combined art exhibition and temporary night club space that acts as a centerpiece for the festival. The final few minutes are given to pontificate on contemporary art.

It was fun to listen to this again, even though I cringe at a few things. The funny thing about community radio is that hosts have minimal media training, and I mean that in both the technical sense and in quotes, “media training,” a euphemism for polite, energetic, palatable behavior for the audience.

There is a moment when everybody is going on about Philadelphia Live Arts Festival (now Fringe Festival). Inwardly, I’m freaking out because I lost control. Without media training, I crudely redirect the conversation back to TBA. Okay, it was fine.

As a result of what I felt to be aggressive behavior, I started doing the now ubiquitous vocal fry thing. When the microphone picks up your voice in every detail, it’s easy to slip into. I just think it’s a bad habit that became popular.

Whenever I did these live day time talk shows, I felt pressure to be far more professional and palatable than I was on my late night shows, but really I’m a basket case behind this calm demeanor that I manage to project.

I overcompensated by packing in guests. Thirty minutes with Mike Daisey talking about TBA alone could have been a great show.

Somehow, I expected to bring Oregon Painting Society on despite having these wonderful guests in the studio and on the phone. That would have been saturation. Thankfully, they never showed up, or there was a miscommunication, I cannot recall, but I mentioned it at the end of the show.

To reflect on the oddness that the most comparable event to TBA just so happened to be in the city I now live and love, Philadelphia, and that I forgot about that, shows there’s weird symmetry to everything. Portland was where I discovered myself as an artist and media producer while TBA played a meaningful role in that. I haven’t felt similar until the last year in Philly.

The years that I spent attending and covering the festival from 2007 to 2015 were very special to me. I don’t know what word to describe the sum total of education, mind expansion, creative inspiration, and social gratification that I derived from it, but it’s rad.

I remain in contact with Kristan a little bit via Instagram. We have reminisced on the fact that I got to experience those formative growth years, the good old years.

When I found this audio and wanted to post about it, I asked her about Philadelphia Live Arts and she pointed me to this 2013 article by Philadelphia Dance. It was basically a rebranding strategy tied to the development of a new performance venue owned by the same organization.

My understanding is that much like FringeArts is the same but has changed, Time-Based Art Festival has taken a different shape with institutional change. I am sure that during covid there were substantial adaptations to old ways. Coming up on 20 years, I would love to attend to see for myself. That said, I haven’t been to Fringe before, so it’s in the bucket for the future.

January 30, 2023

Foraging for the Soul with Zora

Episode 28 of the Not-a-Podcast Show went live on January 04 and my guest was Zora, on Twitter @Zora8Me. I called it “Foraging for the Soul” because she has an offbeat spirituality like myself, likely because we both grew up in Scientology.

I did not intend to make most of this conversation about Scientology, so there came a moment when I bluntly asked to move another direction toward current life stuff and broad spiritual discussion. I think when us Scientologists get talking about our past strange religion, those of us who left it, we can easily dwell at the social trauma that we went through.

Quite a lot of this is discussing her life in the church and going to a private Scientology school. I was in public school, so I lived a kind of split life. Both situations involved compartmentalization and social trauma. No way around trauma, I tell you.

Zora is a regular person who takes time to craft thoughtful tweets and who will follow up arguments that might ensue, but without devolving into nastiness and trolling. I believe that because she is approachable and relatable, she has somehow broken through the noise and developed a fan base.

The chat was active for this episode, so that was nice, and I picked up a handful of her followers. She is on the libertarian side of things but we hardly deal with politics.

January 30, 2023

Photography from 2022

In 2022, I became a photographer. The journey began in June and by December I was accepting money for pictures. It was necessary to volunteer without permission, give away thousands of photos until enough people saw the quality of the work to ask for it.

Sure, I dabbled with cameras before, I helped shoot documentary, but I never focused on photography with my own professional grade camera, a Panasonic G-85, until six months ago.

There are a lot of technical things I’m just starting to understand. Aperture, ISO, white balance, shutter speed, f-stop: Changing any of these can get very different results and sometimes they seem to do the same thing. Although I need to study the mechanics of all that, I have learned to adjust on the fly until I’m happy.

One of the accelerators for that learning was that the camera came with a 28-70mm Tokina AT-X lens with manual aperture, made for Nikon. The mismatched lens is trickier because modern lenses are electronic, and the camera needs data to interpret for autofocus and other computerized functions.

Eventually, I ordered a Panasonic lens, an entry level 45-150mm, but none of these photos employed it. This lens provides me pull access to the camera’s features, though it’s an entry level lens, it is electronically matched and that helps. However, all of these were taken with the Nikon lens.

Then there is editing. Rarely is a photo taken so well on a digital camera that the image can’t benefit from digital enhancements. I just use Apple photos. I have Gimp for graphic work, but I didn’t use it for these.

Please pay attention to the caption and descriptions as they provide a tiny bit of context for each image.

By the way, the excuse I gave myself to buy the camera was for product photography for Held Gear. None of that is included here. Please visit my business at heldgear.com to see those images.

These are free to download and share. I practice value for value if you find something of value in here, please spread the wealth.

January 3, 2023

Curse of Being a Creator with Nerd Nash

Glad to have a conversation with Nerd Nash, on Twitter @nerdatthecooltable, and to relate to one another on some common threads. We are about the same age and started using the internet as social media from the beginning, before such a term was used. We both have this drive to create and organize, but we find ourselves working and hustling from day to day while ideas just stack up in our heads.

Nerd has been highly effective at building an online community. His following is nearly 50K, more than most successful artists, without having really done any particular thing to become famous.

He runs a Twitter community called Gem Factory that has a knack for putting a range of underrepresented profiles into one place, but he’s also tied to the Hotep scene, which is becoming mainstream.

My following has never grown massively, and until recently, it only reflected the broader community of friends directly tied to my real offline network. Even now, as I am growing outside of this range, it stunts and reverses sometimes.

I just don’t have the craving to be internet famous. It would be nice if The Not-a-Podcast Show could amass more followers, making it easier to earn some value for value contributions. The more reach that my guests have, the more likely that my reach will grow.

The issue of imposter syndrome is analyzed in this conversation. We both suffer from that. Do I so-called deserve to have an interview show? Am I qualified? Am I posing? The rational, self-correcting approach to building a project slides quickly into self-doubt and self-abuse.

If I blame for example shadow banning on my lack of follower growth without examining the quality of my content, my strategies toward engagement, and so on, then I’m just not discovering how to get better at my work.

Many push that issue deep down by projecting themselves iconically, so I think ego fills that vacuum. For some, faking it until they make it works out. I don’t feel that Nerd or myself can do it that way.

Self-critique is a huge part of this blog. I’m laying myself out there in hopes that it relates and that personal insight becomes universal.

For this interview, I was a little bit tired. I usually begin fading around 8pm on weeknights. We went live at 8:30. Also, hadn’t done a show recently, so my intro/out was rusty. I think I spoke a little too much, but it was a good conversation. We learn a lot about Nerd, and I’m glad we did it.

The holidays are passing, so I’m looking forward to booking a handful of interviews in a row for January, to catch up on the quota.

December 29, 2022

What Makes a Socialite with Kristin

Kristen is @CallMeK1123 on Twitter, she has nearly 20K followers and it’s simply because she speaks her mind and is relatable to many people. She is an influencer in the conservative side of my online network, but more anti-establishment than MAGA.

I invited her on the show and when she asked what we’d talk about, I said we’d learn about her, but I’ve been thinking a lot about how social dynamics are changing, especially in dating and gender dynamics. We’re about the same age range, so our perspective would better line up.

She doesn’t bring her family into Twitter, so I wasn’t aware that she was married with several children. Moreover, she’s always posing gym selfies, which is a single girl thing to do, but not limited to them. Turns out she works at the gym.

Maybe I’m just looking for someone to talk to about my difficulty dating right now. I’m really in a rut, in many ways a rut of my own creation.

Kristin was born and raised in a south Louisiana Christian home, but she doesn’t have much of an accent. She lives in the area she was raised now and focuses on raising her family. Still a Christian, and living traditionally, she doesn’t project that on others and doesn’t really judge people for their path.

I assumed not only that she was single, but that she had some experience with livestreams, but this was her first one. She was nervous, and that made me nervous, plus her wifi was bogged down by family video streaming, so the show is a little bit tense, and once again, I fall back on monologue.