Last month a bunch of us went to this event called Ret.Inevitable in this warehouse under the Brooklyn Bridge. A few of us didn’t have tickets, figuring it’d be pretty easy to get them when we were there… well that turned out to be a big mistake. Ticket buyers (such as myself) got into this line which didn’t move for over 45 minutes, so we ended up heading back to the city and eating fish at Seaport, which was actually alright.

Fortunately smart people who bought tickets at Other Music like Eddie got inside and told the rest of us about the event.

The New York City arts organization Creative Time put on a huge crowd luring opening night for “Creative Time in the Anchorage 98” at the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage with Ret.Inevitable on June 16th.

Overhearing that they sold all their tickets, hundreds of people without tickets were waiting on extremely slow and long lines into the event hoping that the event would cram more people in as the night went by.

The event touted as “A Playground of Cinema, Space, and Sound” was exactly that. The amazing Anchorage space underneath the Brooklyn side of the Brooklyn Bridge was filled with film and video projections in 7 cavernous rooms by the likes of film and videomakers like Spike Jonze, Atom Egoyan, Tomato, The Attik Design, and Nick Phillip.

7 different areas of the Anchorage (each seperately sponsored by companies and organizations like Virgin Records, New Line Cinemas, Sundance Channel) presented different types of work; the entrance area consisted of 18 monitors hung low facing up showing short video works by people like Mike Mills and Iara Lee.

Another large presentation area had 3 large screens showing live video mixing accompanied by DJs. One of the many interesting acts to perform here was the Icelandic art/music collective Gus Gus who put on a nice trip-hoppy DJ set and interesting visuals to match. The X-Ecutioners, scratch happy turntablists, went on long afterwards putting on a set of mixing and scratching to a Kung Fu film which soon began to fall apart unfortunately. Lots of other acts such as local video group panOptic provided great projected visuals.

Another space pretty much presented the ’97 ResFest over again with a few small additions; one space had film works projects up onto the ceiling which was probably over 6 stories high – forcing everyone to lie on the ground. The architectural duo of Diller and Scofio had a very interesting installation piece which projected corporate identity logos morphing from one to the next onto the ground for people to stare at and step on. Techno artist Moby was spotted with a few people as well (my only celebrity spotting for the night). As the night went on, the Anchorage space continued to allow more people in and the huge space became very crowded.

The overload of visuals, the colliding noises from films and DJs, and huge space drenched in red light and light from the film and video projections, the amount of people mingling and staring at screens, and the sheer scale of everything made this event impressive.