Tag Archives: Justin Hopper

Public Record Book Launch and Happy Hour This Thursday @ Shadow Lounge!

Posted by leahdhl in Events, Performance, Pittsburgh and tagged with , ,

WHEN: Thursday, Oct. 28
                 5-7 p.m.

WHERE: Shadow Lounge

Encyclopedia Destructica and Justin Hopper will be hosting a small happy-hour party to celebrate the launch of PUBLIC RECORD – Justin’s book of poems based on text sampled from 19th-century Pittsburgh crime reports. (S. Highland & Baum Blvd. in East Liberty.)

 Many of you worked on and/or attended the gallery opening in July that marked the launch of the “new-tech” aspect to Public Record – the audio recordings and mobile-phone delivery system based on Downtown poems. 

 This book contains many of those poems, many others (based on North Side and other locations), plus all of the artworks done for that show as illustrations for the poems. 

 It’s a lovely, 100-ish page book, handmade, and costs just $15 at the launch party. (Any of you not in the area but interested, they’ll be available by post over the Interwebs after the launch this week!)

 But even if you can’t (or don’t want to!) buy a copy, come by just to have a beer and hang out for a minute. The illustrious Ben Hartlage and Stu Braun of The Turpentiners will be playing old-stylee acoustic musics, and it’ll be a nice chill start to the madness of Halloween weekend. No cover, of course; normal cash bar.

 Supported in part by a Seed Award from The Sprout Fund, and created as Old/New Media Artist-in-Residence with Deeplocal and Encyclopedia Destructica. 

Tell your friends, tell your enemies, come on out!

Walk the city streets with the haunting poetry of Public Record: Justin Hopper Brings Old and New Media Together

Posted by Admin in Art and Technology, Pittsburgh and tagged with , , ,

via POP CITY, WEDNESDAY, JULY 28, 2010

A haunting audio tour of the city’s sobering past is inhabiting the streets this summer. All you need is a cell phone to conjure the activities that took place in the shadows of 19th century Pittsburgh through a unique project called Public Record.

These were the days before plumbing, when Oliver Avenue was better known as Virgin Alley and homeless drunks raged poetic rants in the streets. Freelance writer Justin Hopper has created a multimedia art project woven from the lives of murderers such as William Kelly who stabbed another drunk at the intersection of Fifth and Sixth avenues downtown.

The technological twist is you can listen to the story as you cross the very street where it took place.

“This is a way of haunting the city itself with its own world,” explains Hopper, who also staged a visual component on the show this month on Liberty Avenue as an Old and New Media Artist-in-residence with Deeplocal and Encyclopedia Destructica…..

READ THE FULL STORY AT POP CITY