(Bring Your Own Beamer) is one of these post-internet media projects bringing net-conceived art out into the streets of the real world. It was launched by Dutch-Brazilian artist Rafaël Rozendaal in 2010 and since then has cropped up all over the world, mostly because the project lives on Tumblr and the rules are just: - find a space - invite many artists - ask them to bring their projectors Pretty simple in theory, but hard to do well in practice. That's where Beijing-based artists/curators Michelle Proksell (Muted Rainbow) and Solveig Suess (Concrete Flux) have stepped in. Over the last few months they've worked out an arrangement with Dashilar Projects to take over a series of hutong spaces next Saturday, so that checked box number one. They marshaled their personal networks and dug into the CAFA enrollment lists to put together a group of 30 participating artists. Check two. And they asked them all to bring their own projectors. That's a partial check; not everyone is using a projector. There will be flashlights, artificial rainbows, "huge rocks," lasers, smoke, mirrors... Well, I'll let those two explain: ***

: I'm Michelle Proksell, I'm American, I guess from Texas and New York City the most. I'm a musician, I do some writing, photography, some video work, performance, and curating. Solveig Suess: I'm Solveig Suess, I'm half Swiss, half Chinese, grew up moving around all over the place. I'm a freelance graphic designer here but I do a lot of self-initiated, research-led projects, and co-founded Concrete Flux, which is an online magazine on urban spaces in China.

: I think we met at the Big Dirty... MP: Yeah, we did, we met on the Big Dirty, it was these bike rides. They're still kind of happening but last summer was the peak of it, it was Thursday nights and a group of people would meet and bike around. We met a lot of this group that we have now through that. SS: And then we kept seeing each other through HomeShop and other projects. MP: And then with this [BYOB] project, I knew I wanted to do it about a year ago, and I was talking with people who were associated with Dashilar, like Luma Lu originally, wanting to use the space. And then at some point Solveig and I had a conversation and she was really interested in helping figure it out, and she knew Neil from Dashilar [Projects], so that was the first connection to move forward. SS: Yeah, I knew BYOB, I knew it was happening in other places. For example, in Glasgow, where I was previously. And a lot of my friends from class were taking part in it when I was at Glasgow School of Art, our class seemed to be the ones who did mostly movies and video, projections, and that was a medium that I really liked playing around with anyway. So when I heard it from Michelle I thought it seemed cool, especially these small interventions within such an interesting space. MP: Since I moved to Beijing over a year ago I had wanted to work on a curatorial project dealing with exhibitions in hutong spaces, so I was drawn to Dashilar initially. I was interested in their factory at first, but it wasn't available. So then when they presented the hutong as an option it was like, "Holy shit, yes!" The project almost became more interesting somehow, because the theme, "Rendering," happened to be very applicable to the spaces we were now going to be working with.

: I know [BYOB founder] Rafaël [Rozendaal], because my background is in new media, digital, and internet-based exhibition work. So I know this early crowd of digital/online users. I didn't know Rafaël personally, but I knew of him through the chain of all these people. But he's so absent from the process. He gives you access to the Tumblr to be able to share and post, but at this point he's absent from most of the process. SS: Which is great. MP: It is, because what happens is that now in all these different countries, people are translating the concept of BYOB within the context of their city. For instance, this will be a particularly unique version of BYOB because the hutong itself is so specific to China, and these types of hutong are so specific to Beijing. Aesthetically the documentation will have the potential for quite a viral presence online. But yeah, we just emailed him and told him what we were doing and he gave us access to the Tumblr, and that's pretty much it. SS: I'm really excited about the people we're bringing to this BYOB. A lot of CAFA students, it's interesting for them to experiment with this space as well.

: I guess we just shot out emails, and then one thing led to another. For example, for the CAFA students, it was just a friend of mine who introduced me to this guy Sandy Ding [丁昕], he's a professor at CAFA. He brought us to his basement studio. MP: We did a studio visit and we were like, "Do you have any of your students' work?" SS: He just showed us one after another, and we were like, "OK, cool, this one, this one, this one..." MP: I don't think we would have had any students involved if Sandy hadn't been a direct contact to them. We've gotten a few artists that found us through an article on Vice's [Creators Project] blog, but only two of them we're actually working with.

: When I work on projects of any kind, I do this word search thing where I start looking up synonyms for words… I was thinking about the concept of projection, so I was reading about the history of projection, of projectors, how they're made, how they're built, and at some point I got into the realm of "rendering" and started reading more about different forms of rendering. Because rendering also begins in early drawing, to "render" an image in early times means to draw an image. It has a history in art before technology. And then I started looking at the definition of rendering, it means so many things in English, like to echo, to translate, to transform, to become new, to transliterate, etc. It felt like a broad enough theme that people could interpret it in so many different ways. SS: Even without a projector, without a video, it could be something a bit more basic, having something to do with light or drawing.

: Yeah, this is definitely Concrete Flux and Solveig's masterminding… SS: Well, honestly it was that. I was toying around with this 3D rendering program that I had and when it was making the film it would have these boxes where it slowly developed the image. I just used that and created these very basic lines from that, and used those as building blocks. Eventually, within the space we're going to have markers of each venue by putting those big blocks outside of the buildings.

: My friend Gao Ling does a lot of fashion, but she's also quite a feminist in her fine art work, and she does a lot of very spontaneous, playful projects. I guess she isn't normally doing film. And she's actually not doing a film, she's doing a shadow play projection with a flashlight. MP: And then Simon [Kentgens], a Dutch artist, he's building his own projectors from a magnifying glass. SS: It's like BYOB: Build Your Own Beamer. [laughs] MP: Yeah, right now he's in the process of trying to fix it so it rotates and it creates this kind of celestial… SS: It looks like a moon almost. It's just a magnifying glass and a flashlight. MP: Ophelia [Chan]'s got one where she's doing this infinite rendering piece, where she has a TV screen with a video camera on it, and then a hidden camera on top, so if you walk in front of the projector, it's picking up that, feeding it back to the TV, which is picking it up, feeding it back… it's like constant, real-time rendering. SS: I'm also not going to do any projections, actually. MP: Yeah, she's dealing with lasers and a fog machine. [laughs] SS: Well, let's see how it goes… Yeah, I guess it's a comment on these posters about the Cyber Security Day, and I'm creating this laser installation that hopefully will pull out a phrase from that poster. MP: And then Theo from Double Luckiness, which is an online net collective based mostly in China, he's taking over the courtyard. Originally he was going to create a wifi garden, but that requires daytime, so now it's turning it into a jungle. He's producing this projected scene and then bringing in all these plants from this jungle atmosphere, at least that's the word he's using. And then Sandy is doing this crazy meditation piece with sound sensors… SS: And these huge rocks. MP: The sound reacts to your movement with these giant rocks from the mountains… And then we have another artist, Esther [Kokmeijer], who's going to produce a rainbow with a mist machine. And then Chris [Blackmore] is doing some sound performance with video footage his friend from Canada made. SS: It's really cool because we have three spots basically. One's a bit more of a hutong spot, which is quite chaotic, but then there's also the microHutong, which is quite new and has these interesting, huge windows with rooms behind them. So this microHutong is going to be filled with people who are playing with shadows, and rainbows, and textures, so that's going to be quite mellow. SS: And where we are is this old publishing house. MP: The front is a floating hashtag on the ceiling, and then a hashtag performance. I'm doing vocals for it with a live VJ, and I'll have a small, tripped out mirrors and sound installation. In the back it's this weird meditative space it's evolving into. SS: We'll see, we don't want to give out too much.

: Definitely documentation. We're having quite a few people help us with that because we would like to spread it around as much virally as possible. And for ourselves, our own projects, further project opportunities and stuff like that. I'm talking to Tina Blakeney and Margot Hamer from Redscale Studios, I'm probably going to help them produce BYOB Shanghai later this year. SS: I hope this inspires other people to keep doing these random interventions, you know? These short-term, small projects. MP: For me, longer term, on a personal basis, I wanted to work in the hutongs in this way, and since meeting with one of these artists, Rose, and Ophelia, now the three of us are talking about starting a curatorial collective just dealing with exhibitions in hutongs. So that was something that has emerged personally from this process. SS: It seems like with Dashilar Projects, they were so open with us using their spaces. I think the only thing is that people need to approach them to do things. So I look forward to seeing more events happen down there.

: I think they're really busy on their own stuff, but yeah, I'm surprised they don't really have much… MP: You have to have a lot of self-initiative. Dashilar, we have to approach them for every step we need to take. But they're very accessible, very accommodating, and very timely. There's no complaints as far as the process of working with them, it's been very good.

: It's just a way to put the names to pieces. We're not going to have the names in the spaces, so its just a documentation of whose is which. But we don't want to lead people around, I think they should just wander… MP: It's directing them to the street, and all of these spaces are quite close so it'll be very easy to find one from another. It's more self-initiating. *** Check out BYOB Beijing on Saturday, June 28 at Dashilar. It runs from 7:30-11:30pm, organizers say to turn up before 10 because afterwards the sound gets turned down...