After-School Atelier (ASA) is a semester-long program that provides NYC public high school and middle school students the opportunity to work in a studio environment and develop new media art projects under the guidance of Eyebeam's Teaching Artists. Students work on independent and collaborative projects using digital video or sound, robotics, circuitry, and/or web programming with the selected Teaching Artists, professional mentors, education staff and their peers.

ASA Spring 2006 Course Descriptions:

Benton Bainbridge's ASA Class - "VJ-U":
This is a hands-on workshop to learn the tools and techniques of the Video Jockey, including computer and standalone hardware tools for audiovisual clip production, live performance and display.

Key "VJ-U" concepts, philosophies and exercises include:

• making content ("clips") with low-cost and easily available tools
• thinking of moviemaking in musical ways
• electronic "graffiti"
• video as a medium of personal expression and dialog
• equipment errors and software bugs as opportunities for unique 'looks'
• plugging audio into video for synchronous visual FX
• getting "looks" cheaply with obsolete a/v tools found on the internet
• turning passive Media Consumers into active Video Makers

Benton-C Bainbridge is a Bronx-based artist working with video as a painterly and performable medium. Using custom digital, analog and optical systems, Benton-C seeks to capture music's human abstraction in moving images.

Benton-C Bainbridge has VJ’d, performed, screened, streamed, broadcast and installed video world wide over the wires and airwaves and in museums, galleries, planetariums, clubs, colleges and festivals including the Whitney Museum of American Art at Philip Morris (NYC), Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Hayden Planetarium (NYC), Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington, D.C.), Teatro Colón CETC (Buenos Aires), Mercat des les Flores (Barcelona), American Museum of the Moving Image (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), Boston Cyberarts Festival, Sonic Light (Amsterdam), Dallas Video Festival, Madison Square Garden (NYC), Wien Moderne (Vienna), Inventionen (Berlin), CELCIT (Managua), MTV Networks (worldwide) and Hotwired (World Wide Web).

Bainbridge co-founded the live video ensembles NNeng, The Poool, 77 Hz, Lord Knows Compost, and Stackable Thumb to compose and improvise cinema. Benton-C has collaborated with Abigail Child, Bill Etra, Beastie Boys, 99 Hooker, Hoppy Kamiyama, Johnny deKam, and Venetian Snares amongst hundreds of other artists and performers.

Currently, Benton-C Bainbridge is designing video for RGB LED displays and live spectacles on stage and TV with FUEVOZ, a company he cofounded with V Owen Bush.

Patrick Meagher's ASA Class - "Printed Matter":
In this climate where the media and publishing worlds are becoming increasingly monitored and censored, this class will be positioned as a means for finding outlets for otherwise ignored perspectives, in the form of making professional-grade books, comics, zines and printed matter from the desktop, and exploring ways of getting them into the public eye. Optimally, the class will produce a set of books and printed matter that can seamlessly infiltrate bookstore shelves and present themselves for discovery either by the general public, staff, or corporate officers. -As such, a kind of intra-corporate graffiti or critique mechanism.

1. ENVISIONING your ideas in printed form
2. PLANNING your first D.I.Y. Printed Matter Project
3. CUSTOMIZING optimal templates to suit your expression
4. COMBINING techniques & COLLABORATING with classmates
5. ASSEMBLING your text/work into order and exporting as PDF files
6. EDITING & PROOFING with classmates to finalize the final file-to-print
7. PRINTING FINAL PRINTS at eyebeam, Kinko’s and at one’s home
8. BINDING the books field trip to NYC’s first ‘instabook machine’
9. SHOWING WORK AT ‘BOOK-FAIR’ Show&Tell Exhibit! and Guerrilla DISTRIBUTION tactics!

Artist Statement: As a native New Yorker, I grew up in the genesis of the graffiti movement; was a young tagger in the days of violent competition, a graffiti writer, an art-piecer and then later/still a conceptual sticker-bomber and wheat-paster as well. Having this early experience and interest, I also possess a fairly comprehensive (art history/ street-history/ culture-jamming) understanding of the global graffiti movement. Ultimately I see the development of these subjects and techniques as part of a grassroots fomenting of a post-modern paradigm shift - a vision of digitally enabled manifestations of a ‘contemporary Aquarian age’ of enlightenment.