Invite Me is an open call in which I ask spaces to invite me to exhibit. Invitations Please is the advertising campaign that runs beside it: eighty-two video advertisements for my own availability.
Each film is vertical, around thirty seconds, and is me speaking to camera, answering one objection a space might have. No funds. No experience. No audience. Too far away. Not quite your theme. Every one of them ends on the same address.
The call itself stays practical. It asks for a short letter naming a space and some dates, which is what an application to a funding body needs and what an artist without invitations does not have. The films say what an advert would say about that offer. Neither is ironic about the other, and a space that writes in after seeing one gets the sober version.
It is three things at once. I do need the invitations, and the address at the end of every film is real. It is a portrait of a middle-aged emerging artist, which I have been for twenty years. And it is a parody of the conditions that make an artist advertise himself in the first place.
How they are made
The face is a studio photograph of me, driven to speak by a lip sync model. The voice is not mine. It is a stock speaker from a text to speech system, chosen because it reads like a commercial rather than like a person. The same sentences spoken by an artist in a studio are a man asking for work. In that voice they are a product being sold, and the product is me.
The address appears only once I have stopped speaking, over a held frame, and nothing is said aloud over it.
Where it runs
The films are published on YouTube and posted one at a time elsewhere. The open call is at opencall.oerum.org, and every film ends there. The two screen captures below are the call page as it is served, at desktop and at phone width.
