LVHRD, Dewars, and Dueling Architects

Last night, my friend, Alyssa, and I went to an event that Kristin had told me about when I met her on Sunday. (She also posted about it on the Winger, here). LVHRD (live hard without the vowels), an arts organization whose mission is to bring together progressive artists, holds events throughout the city in which different kinds of artists compete against each other. The materials to be used in the competition and the location of it are not disclosed until the day of the event and are then relayed to participants via text-message. They’ve previously held competitions between dancers, visual artists, and fashion desingers, but last night’s duel was the ‘Battle of the Architects.’ A duo of female architects from two firms were given a limited amount of time in which to plan and design a layout, then build a model of it. The main material to be used was — cheese, which female registrants to the event were told in the text message to bring. I had a Media Bistro panel discussion to attend immediately before, so Alyssa bought our cheese — Alyssa rocks!

After letting the architects go at it for three hours (oh, by the way, the competitors are separated by a big screen so they can’t see what the other is up to), we voted by text message for our favorite.

Field Operations (above) was the winning team. I think everyone liked them mainly because they wore dresses made of material that they used in building their model — so throughout the competition they ended up cutting off large portions of each other’s costumes (the one with the more geometric design ended up with a rather short skirt). Interesting schtick. Below is the other team, Balmori Associates:

The LVHRD people all had cameras and video recorders and were going around snapping pictures, which they’d then post on the giant screen behind the action. In the very top picture above, if you look hard at the screen, you can see Kristin. They got two silly ones of me — one where I look like I’m on something serious while talking to Tony Schultz from the Winger, and another where I’m at the front of the crowd at the stage looking a little too excited about getting a shot of one of the models.

So, as I just mentioned, Tony was there too, and Alyssa and I spent a lot of time chatting with him. Found out that I totally got his bio wrong in my last post — oops! But, he said he rather liked my reinvention of him, so didn’t correct me 🙂 Anyway, he’s really a PHYSICS grad student at CUNY (which explains why 99% of what he says is way over my head!) and teaches at Sarah Lawrence — go here for his real bio.

Scariest thing about the night was that Dewars had hosted the event, so there was a free Dewars bar. Alyssa and I each got a cup of Scotch and gingerale. Alyssa was practically on the floor after finishing about 2/3 of hers, but somehow I downed my whole glass without feeling a thing — extremely weird since I am usually a complete lightweight… Either the bartender must have taken one look at my face and thought I couldn’t handle much alcohol, so went heavy on the soda, or else I am becoming a lush 🙂