Tom Tenney

Wall of Lies

In fall of 2020, in the weeks before the presidential election, I collaborated with visual artist Phil Buehler on the “Wall of Lies,” a 50-foot by 10-foot outdoor mural with the 20,000+ lies told by Donald Trump while in office, documented and fact-checked by The Washington Post. The piece was orginally shown in Bushwick, Brooklyn, …

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Routledge Companion to Remix Studies

Crises of Meaning in Communities of Creative Appropriation – A Case Study of the 2010 RE/Mixed Media Festival

I was asked The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies to contribute a chapter about my experiences and observations as director of the RE/Mixed Media Festival, which I produced every year from 2010-2014. My chapter documents a crisis of legitimation between industry and artist, but also one of meaning within the remix community itself. The book …

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The New Black Box

The new black box has global reach

The following article was originally published in the East Villager News In 1961, Ellen Stewart revolutionized the New York performance scene when she opened Café La MaMa in the basement of an East Ninth Street tenement. The African-American fashion designer-cum-impresario imagined the new space as an alternative to popular Off-Off Broadway venues like Caffe Cino …

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Radical Vaudeville: Surf Reality is Still Making Waves

The following review was originally published on June 3, 2013 in Theater Pizzazz! New York is a city that recycles itself, and those who have lived here long enough have become accustomed to the life cycles of landscapes, buildings, businesses, and cultural institutions.  New York is in a constant state of metamorphosis; it’s just how this …

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Brick Theater Festival Brooklyn

Brick Up Your Ears

The following article originally appeared in The Villager on June 6, 2013 The Brick Theater produces a lot of festivals – it’s kind of their thing.  But festivals at the Williamsburg experimental venue aren’t your garden-variety observance of artist or genre; they’ve become the theatre’s way of exploring aesthetic and cultural intersections.  Sure, some of the dozens …

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Kid Lucky beatryming outside in NYC

Rhyme Machine

The following article originally appeared in The Villager on May 9, 2013 In a 1913 letter to the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella, Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo declared, “The variety of noises is infinite…today we have perhaps a thousand different machines, and can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able …

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Johann Huizinga

(It Will) Never Work: A critique of the Situationists’ appropriation of Johan Huizinga’s theory of play

The Situationist International (1957-1972), or SI, was an intellectual avant-garde collective that used Homo Ludens, a text written in 1938 by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, as a key source informing much of their writing and key tenets of their philosophy. In this paper, I will first look at key elements of Huizinga’s theory of play …

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class reunion

Reunion

This piece, created for the Deep Wireless Festival, is an audio document my trip back to Boston for my high school reunion.  I recorded several hours of the trip before, during, and after the reunion, and what emerged from the piece was a personal reflection on friendship and aging. As always, please listen with a …

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Insane Faces

Off the Grid

Profiles of three of my favorite art stars: Don Eng, John King, and Walter Gambin – ‘outsider’ artists for whom performance serves as a way to navigate their lives.  Special thanks to Reverend Jen for providing some miraculous VO which pulled everything together for me.   As always, I recommend listening with a good set of …

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