About Me
www.1313effect.com is my website for my lightshow/art/love/business, so go there and at the minumum check out the video section before you read about me, so that you understand what I am babbeling about!!!I just moved to Portland Oregon and so far I could not be happier! I am being incredibly well taken care of by the three beautiful people who got me here: Kevin, Matt, and Sarah, and all of their extended network of fantastic family as well! I came here for adventure, to be in my favorite part of the country (nature-wise), to be in my favorite part of the world cultural-wise, and to go to the city that every single person I asked about it told me I would love it! Really more than any of those reasons I came here to do everything I can to bring the lightshow up to its full potential in every possible way and so I picked this place as my base to do that from. To me it makes a perfect base because I know a lot of talented artists here already (Thank you Matt, Sarah, and Kevin), it is close to San Fran and Seattle where I hope to travel and do a lot of shows, it is good for me because I moved here from a really bad part of Detroit and though it was a good learning experience, I wan to be somewhere with a lot of life and energy so that I can be more inspired and hopefully add my own inspiration to the mix!I have been working on the lightshow (see www,1313effect.com) for 13 years and I am finally ready to put everything I have into doing this for a living. One of my most motivating goals, other than just to keep trying to work with more and more talented people and doing more and more intense shows, is to try to only do lighting for a living rather than have a side job too. This way I can give it every bit of my energy. In a certain sense, if I can do this, I will have crossed a certain line of success where everything else that happens beyond that is just gravy! At that point I will be doing the art I love without ever sacrificing any artistic integrity and will be supported by people for exactly that. Anything after that will obviously be great too because I can buy more gear and do more and more interesting things, but really that is my major fantasy right now and I am going to accomplish it! And what I really love about that idea is that even though I have a lot of issues with capitalism, most of them revolving around the dishonesty involved in marketing and the damaging waste around whatever the product is, with the light show, it is truly an attempt just to move people to deeper states of consciousness, having a lot of fun, and exploring the magic of the unknown and limitless possibilities of live interconnected energies of light, sound, painting, dancing, and anything else you can throw in. It is not perfectly clean since I buy products and use a lot of gas moving it around and so forth, but I am proud that I believe it is a very honest exchange between the people who support the show and what I am trying to give them. And I will continue to value the honest energy that exists in a live performance when it is not corrupted by the false side of capitalism that make human creativity less than what it can be. I have always only done what I loved and what gets me off rather than taking shows that don't allow me to do exactly what I want to, which is why I have not been able to make a living at it yet :), but I finally feel that I have gotten far enough with it that I can make a living doing it exactly as I want, and there is no better gift to an artist, in my mind.So here is a basic description what I do with the show:
I am a live lighting artist who does work for all kinds of performances. I have done plays, concerts, light shows, trip rooms, raves, fashion shows, art shows, rock operas, house parties, fire performers, hula hoopers, glass eaters, magic tricks, live painting, and every combination imaginable. I have designed and made a lot of my own lighting effects and almost all of the control boards I use. These custom boards are all simple switches and dimmers instead of anything computerized or programmible. What this means is that all of the changes done with these boards are created live by hand right at that moment. This makes the lights an instrument rather than an add on to a performance. Plus, with almost every lighting performance I have ever seen, when you have computerized stuff that can be programed, most of the time it is very robotic and not exactly to the beat and especially not interpretive of what is going on. If you put as much effort into the lighting and art on stage as people put into the audio, you have a far more intense experience. Think about it, humans actually are more moved by what they see than what they hear and it affects far more areas of the brain, and is generally considered to be the major and most dominant of the senses. Because of that reality, I feel that the live use of lighting used in this way, is a wide open frontier to be explored. In addition, I believe and have experienced that ringing these two areas together is not just more powerful or even twice as powerful, but can become a new thing that is greater than the sum of its parts. You can be lucky to find yourself in states of synestasia where your senses begin to cross into each other and you can open up in deeper ways because you are freer and more in the moment with the whole experience. Of course, really great live shows are also influenced by other major factors especially the mood, energy, and participation of the crowd, the artwork used on stage or in the venue, the venue itself, the way security is handled, other types of performers, intensional shifts where a lot of these things come together and move as one, different amounts of improvisation and preplanned powerful changes in the music, and on and on and on. So what I try to do with a show besides bringing the lighting up to the creative and live level of the audio, is to bring in many other elements and create an entire experience.I have many amazing backdrops which I use in one form or another at almost every show I do, that have been made for me by artist friends of mine, which are specially created to react with the lights and transform and help add another powerful layer of art to the mix. Playing off of this live during the shows, I bring out different parts of the murals and transform the piece into different images that fit what I am feeling in the music.So the reality is that I try to be far more than just a light guy in any traditional sense. I can do a really fun and interesting show with just four different colored flood lights and four dimmers to run them... or you can give me 3 days to set up and I can bring every piece of gear I own and make something I guarantee will give at least some of the people at the show, a religious experience!As far as set up, I usually am on stage with the other performers when I run lights because it allows me to vibe better off of the people doing the audio, and let's them work off me as well, which improves the show all around. I have been working on the "1313 Effect lighting Experience" for about 13 years and I am finally ready to do any type of shows at any size up to around maybe a 1500 person venue with my own gear. If I had rented lights, existing house, lights or a budget, there would be no limit.And to top it all off my old partner and co-founder of the 1313 effect will be moving to Portland to join me in a couple of months to bring the show back to its original glory, and believe me when we both run it, it is even better! Welcome home Kurt!!!!On a less lighting oriented level...I have a degree in Psychology and Philosophy. I am a huge music fan and like just about everything, especially experimental projects of any kind. I also have a serious belief that this world can be much better than it is, and look forward to this time in Portland to work on putting some of my own ideas about the world into print and see if I can contribute something useful to the world we live in... besides of course my 800 watt strobe light!! ;)My deepest interests lie in moving people to see deeper realities and to see them myself in the real hopes of bringing this world out of the danger of destroying itself and on the track of fulfilling its potential to be anything we want it to be... which it can! I love moving people in the abstract, (strobe lights and black lights), or in the very specific, (conversations about exactly what might work better), and am always trying to find ways to make the moving power of a live performance to deeper and deeper levels. I have experienced so much healing myself in this kind if environment, and I feel I have been blessed with an ability to do healing and moving things with lighting.... and so here I am! It's funny to me actually because in a sense it is really a silly thing to just flash a lot of colors and shapes to the music and make it look trippy and hallucinogenic... but bringing a already intense positive experience of a live show to a deeper lever, is a very real and non-specific way to communicate artistically to people. Since there no words and no political agenda or genres to follow or any categories (other than crazy flashy foggy and generally overwhelming) with lighting, it is a really fun and free area to explore and people can be moved by it no matter what they think or where they come from. Because I am telling you, when turn on the 800 watt strobe light, I don't care who you are... it is an intense experience!!!! (Aside of course from the few people who are prone to seizures for whom my show is probably not a good idea! No offense intended! :)
