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Calling All Steppers and Frithians ! … Music+film-heads !

The XLterrestrials are looking for people who would like to travel into an experimental + tactical time tunnel project with us…

The film and soundtrack “Step Across The Border” will be 30! years old in 2020… ( How the F* did that happen ? )

We’ve decided to utilize this milestone project + related encounters to reconnect with that special experienced tribe of outsider art-worlders … ( or however you like to define your own DIY-lives, scars and stripes, alien nations and/or stateless ninjadom, etc. ) … and share some tales + perspective + plans … and to reconnect with some art-nomad explorers + makers we’ve lost touch with over the years.

And investigate the dramaticly shifting dark landscapes of what has changed and changing in cities like the Btropolis, San Francisco and others … and their impacts on art livelihoods … and our ways of being, surviving, resisting, and reclaiming.

To contextualize those pioneering forms of expression then and now. Now that we are all a VERY ENDANGERED SPECIES ? …

We could and should probably say : All planetary life is currently in a deep crisis ! And ask: Must art+culture be now committed to the questions of “what is to be done ?!” … And actually doing it !?

So here we are, an initially celebratory 30-years looking back… but taking it to another level … to examine the new emerging arts + praxis scenarios, situations, strategies … in the new age of gold-rush networks… here constructed for tactical-scaling ! And de-scaling ! And/or small-scale subversion !

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Below is glimpse of the tales + analysis + dialogue + reactions to come…

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( The Babylon marquee, Jan. 2019 )

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The times they are a changeling…

Back in 1990, Step Across The Border was for the XLterrestrials and a few other music+film-head comrades a monumental and magical occurrence tapping into some prepared and/or improvised electric-playground outside the Spectacle + Stacheldraht loops of the corporate mass media-pumped channels and occupied territories. We were outsider kids with an extra-effort for that rebellious, escapist and anti-authoritarian edge, but still very susceptible to the way the music + culture industries pumped out their usual products and that whole Hollywood brain-drilling mess. In other words, still very much finding our ways, half-in and half-out ( the problematic Halber-mensch). And depending on who you were hanging with you might pretend which half was The Real You at any given moment… in order to belong, detach, flirt, impress, antagonize, keep-yur-job, ditch-the-jobs, reject, self-destruct, liberate … and alienate. In short, totally Schizo !

Alien Nations became our specialty. And “most alien” in our book, usually won a prize. We were fortunate to have had enough orientation + maneuverability + mentors to have overfed ourselves with the obligatory subcultures: indy record+book shops, underground zines + comics + cinemas, odd venues + galeries, etc… that when something with such impressive aesthetic + genre-mutating investigations came along like a Frith, we felt giddy. Like we had stumbled across some precious, smuggled contraband.

to be cont.

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CONTACT US: And tell us some of your journeys + impacts while taking the Big Deep Steps Across The Borders … ( And ask us if you have any questions about how to proceed. )

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Apologies for putting the guys on top, to start these conversations… this is definitely not meant to be a male-dominant think-pond … Btw, we were extremely grateful for the 2 jamming filmmakers ( in pic 2 – Nicolas + Werner ) introducing us in the 90s to the explosive sounds of Iva Bittova, here below… and many others… and spreading the multi-kulti-collaborative muses !

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