Have you ever wanted to have your dope Atari skills projected onto the side of a respected art museum?
Well, you're in luck, because that's one of the dozens of activities available to you today (see item No. 3), the final Thursday of the Buffalo Infringement Festival. Here are today's five picks, selected from a dizzying menu of diverse options:
1) Morning music @ Infringement, various locations, noon to 5 p.m.
The Infringement schedule is music-heavy. Start off at noon with five hours of open busking outside Antique Man in Allentown, then check out a performance from I'm a Person Too outside of Allentown Music at 2 p.m. After that, there's busking throughout the Elmwood Village from 2 to 8:30 p.m. and the singer-songwriter Meria at 3 p.m. in front of Ultrahoops.
2) Gallery Opening, Rust Belt Books, 5 p.m.
Though Infringement is generally thought of as a performance-based festival, it also contains an absurd amount of visual art. A case in point is this group show at Rust Belt Books' Grant Street location, featuring "animals amuck," stencil art by Jean Claude Waters, "The Great Remembering" and "Mental Cupcakes," an art installation consisting of "many varieties of cupcakes all with a personality all their own, named after mental disorders."
3) "Barging Into the Burch' IVa: The Sound Mind," Burchfield Penney Art Center, 6 to 10 p.m.
Tonight, apparently, is the night when Buffalo's beloved Burchfield Penney Art Center finally achieves sentience, Skynet-style, with an event that promises visitors the opportunity to "cross-circuit your senses in the belly of the Burch' while stretches of the musical imagination of sound minds breathe in the outside air, and as day turns to night, can look into itself, project itself outward, infinite recursive sequences of self-awareness, fun for the whole cerebral cortex."
Among the 12 performances, acts and installations are an 8:30 p.m. set from BuffFluxus and the "Atari Soirée," in which up to two players at a time can play a classic Atari game projected onto the side of the building as the trio of David Adamczyk, Ravi Padmanabhan and Juini Booth play a musical interpretation of what is happening on the screen.
A concurrent sound-based event runs inside the center's auditorium.
4) Bourbon and Coffee, Dreamland, 6 p.m.
These poetry performances set to the coolest of cool jazz from an ever-evolving group of musicians are perfect for modern beatniks striving to recapture the vibe of that bygone era.
5) Wet Dreamland, Dreamland, 8 p.m.
This show, featuring five exhibitions/installations of a vaguely or explicitly erotic nature, was the visual art hit of last year's festival. It may be much the same this year. Check out the lineup here.
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