Andrea is a San Francisco native and Flux Factory family member, arriving in New York City for graduate school after receiving her BA at University of California at Santa Cruz. The daughter of two parents involved in the arts, she continued the family tradition with a major in literature and design, then attended New York University in order to receive her MFA in Design for Theater and Film in 1998. Now a freelance designer, as well as an Associate with the design group Creative Production Resources (CPR), Andrea has spent the past five years working hard to build both her business and her home in Brooklyn. Her work can be seen nationally at numerous theaters and film festivals, including the independent film Beautiful World, Pittsburgh Playhouse’s Gulliver’s Travels, the Connely Theater’s Candida, and Marin Theatre Company’s acclaimed Bleacher Bums. Though most of her work centers around the New York City area, productions often take her to other states and occassionaly other countries, an aspect that she finds very pleasurable, as exposure to new ideas and environments often inspires projects back home. Costume Design is her primary focus, and her goals include Broadway and international theater, and opera projects, but scenic painting, illustration, and fashion design have all played a role in rounding out her experience, and she even occasionally finds time to work on her own canvases for both pleasure and sale. This love of painting and the visual arts has motivated Andrea to also work with an entirely different sort of client – the public school children of Brooklyn, organizing art lessons and mural workshops that are free to any Brooklyn school child, providing supplies and instruction at her own cost. She is working with Flux Factory to make these classes available to more children, and to a wider breadth of age groups.

Flux Factory has provided a valuable forum of information and support for Andrea, not only because of the many friends who reside there (and the cable TV), but also because of the events, such as the weekly salons. These provide oppurtunity for exchange of ideas and exploration of studies outside of her own, as well as a supportive venue to which one can introduce a work- in-progress without feeling overwhelmed or vulnerable. The feedback for such new proposals or projects can go a long way towards gaining direction and understanding of one’s own ideas. In addition to the Salon evenings, Flux has also been a space for work and recreation, and a venue to utilize in getting what you need to get done, done. Be it the computer scanner, the dark room, or just a bit of space, everyone here is welcome to turn whatever Flux can offer to an advantage.

There can only be one Alice-Mary, and everybody loves her for it.. everybody.

Austin Grossman born in Concord, Massachusetts in 1969, and grew up in the suburbs near Boston. He attended Harvard University, where he first became interested in writing fiction and drama, publishing in the Harvard Advocate, and writing and directing theatrical works.

After graduating from Harvard, he began writing and designing computer games at Looking Glass Technologies in Cambridge, MA, and contributed to several games that are now considered cult classics, including Ultima Underworld II and System Shock. He also earned his M.A. in Performance Studies at New York University.

Grossman’s work recalls the stories of Kafka and Borges, but he also draws images from his background in white suburban geekdom. He re-fashions popular narratives from genres like fantasy, science fiction, and superhero comic books, keeping the entertainment value of the stories but looking for the depth and strange resonance inside them.

His solo theatrical show, The Genius, premiers in December 2000 at HERE. He is currently working on a novel, and a nonfiction book about computer games, Crystal Castles.

A North Jersey native, Dana Gramp sought a higher education at Caldwell College, the University of Massachusetts, and finally at Smith College where she received a BA in Feminist Studies and Studio Art in May, 2001.

Shortly after moving to New York in September of 2001, she happened upon the Flux Factory and now acts as manager of the Flux Darkroom facilities. Dana also wields her administrative talents at the Jack Tilton / Anna Kustera Gallery in Soho where she works as registrar and assistant to Jack Tilton.

                              

Myla Goldberg grew up in Maryland, escaping the suburbs as soon as possible to attend Oberlin College. After graduating in 1993 with an English degree, she spent a year in Prague writing and teaching English to former Communist ministers before moving to Brooklyn, New York, where she has been living ever since. Her short stories have appeared in the anthology, “Virgin Fiction,” as well as in the literary journals, “Ecclectic Literary Forum” and “American Writing.” Her first novel, “Bee Season,” was published by Doubleday in May and is in its seventh printing. Myla is also a musician. For over a year, she has been performing with Stefany Anne “Shuff” Golberg in The Galerkin Method. Myla is an enthusiastic attendee and occasional contributor to Flux Thursdays. She is currently at work on her next novel, which is set during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

From Bee Season:
A lot of time is spent raising and lowering the mike stand between contestants who have hit puberty and those still waiting to grow. Eliza wishes that those who didn’t know their words would just guess instead of stalling until they’re asked to start spelling by the judges. In the time it takes some spellers to get started, Eliza has spelled their word a few times, fought the temptation to just take off her tights, and repeatedly sung through the theme from Star Wars, which, for some reason, she is unable to get out of her head.
Without realizing it, she has developed a routine. Three turns before her own, she blocks out the sounds of the bee and closes her eyes. Since she was very small, Eliza has thought of the inside of her head as a movie theater, providing herself with an explanation for the origin of bad dreams. Nightmares are rationalized away with the private assurance that she has accidentally stepped into an R-rated movie and needs only return herself to the G-rated theater to remedy the situation. Using the mental movie theater construct, Eliza pictures the inside of her head as a huge blank screen upon which each word will be projected.
It doesn’t occur to her to be self-conscious about closing her eyes at the microphone. How else is she to see her word? Not having observed the others’ faces, she is unaware that most spell with their eyes open after a brief period of face-clenched concentration indigenous to constipation and jazz solos. Eliza opens her eyes only after uttering the last letter, the word inside her head as real as her nose and just as unmistakable. She has no fear of the ding. It’s not meant for her.
By Round 7, the words have gotten serious. Eliza has a moment’s hesitation with CREPUSCULE, but when she closes her eyes a second time, the word is there, waiting. After she spells it correctly, she spots her father in the audience when he is the only one standing during the applause. She considers waving, but decides that it is too uncool. She tries a droll wink, but is unable to manage the eyelid coordination and looks instead like she has gotten something stuck in her eye.
Though they haven’t spoken, Eliza has developed an affection for the speller next to her, an intense and careful girl whose numbered placard lies at an upward tilt because of her boobs. When the girl is eliminated with SANSEVIERIA, Eliza feels a loss. After the girl is gone, Eliza avoids touching her empty chair.
Although Miriam is glad to be sitting here, a parent among parents, she cannot help but feel there is somewhere else she should be. Miriam knows this feeling well. It is rare not to feel the amorphous pull of some nameless, important task requiring her attention. She considers herself at her best when doing three things at once. The book she has brought lessens her sense of urgency, but Saul and Aaron are paying such single-minded attention to the bee that she feels guilty whenever she starts to read.
She is startled by the sight of Eliza onstage. Though certainly cognizant of their biological connection, Miriam has grown to view Eliza as not quite her child. She had always assumed any daughter of hers would excel in school, distinguishing herself early and often from the rabble of her peers. Eliza’s utter failure to do so, along with her apparent disinterest in cerebral pursuits, placed her beyond the ken of Miriam’s experience. Miriam came to consider Eliza a gosling born into a family of ducks, loved and accepted, but always and forever a goose. Miriam has never expressed this thought to Saul, but can tell he senses it and duly disapproves. She begrudges him his disapprobation, feeling he is equally at fault for so obviously favoring Aaron, leaving her the child to whom she has the least to say.
Eliza’s performance onstage shatters Miriam’s private metaphor. It is not that Eliza is spelling the words correctly. It is that when Eliza stands at the mike, concentrating on the word she has been given, she looks exactly like Miriam when she was a girl, so absorbed in a book that not even a burning building could distract her. There is pain in this recognition. Because Miriam knows that such powers of concentration come from years of being alone, of needing to focus so strongly on one thing because there is nothing else. By keeping her distance, Miriam realizes too late that she has made her daughter more like her than she ever intended.

participating in:

PATERSON
JUNE 2 – JULY 14, 2007

Alita Edgar is a recent graduate of the Historic Preservation program in the Graduate Center for Urban Planning and the Environment at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. She is also a member of Ars Subterranea, a creative preservation group, and has a special interest in shrinking cities and the fate of New Orleans.

http://keyring.wordpress.com/

and as ex-fluxer:

She was found at a very young age clutching a pinwheel underneath the Log Flume at the South Carolina State Fair. Since then she has become a magician’s assistant at the Coney Island Sideshows, a trapeze apprentice and roustabout for the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus, a connectrix /media pundit, and a resident of the Flux Factory, where she does a lot of decorating, arguing and event planning. She also lends her various talents (editing, costume-designing, press-releasing, accomplicing) to worthy institutions such as the New York Press, the Madagascar Institute, the Daredevil Opera Company, and Dark Passage.

She is mostly interested in finding and cultivating allies, and fostering collaboration among artists, performers, creators, inventors & the many fascinating people she often finds or spies on from afar.

Helen is totally awesome and cool. From birth to the dawn of Adulthood the vast prairies, of Southern Alberta Canada, were her home. From this sparcely populated and artistically lacking area, she has made her way to New York City. On her way she stopped in the notorious city, Provo Utah for 5 years. Here, she studied and worked, at Brigham Young University, to receive her Bachelors degree in Commercial Photography.
View her work: http://www.helenphotography.com

Helen has been known to sing like an angel, while she plays songs she has written on her guitar, which was found in a dumpster. She also occasionally designs and makes functional things like dressers, pencil holders and wall coverings out of cardboard.