“The Search for Life in Distant Galaxies” by Rudy Lemcke

I happened upon Lemcke’s Website after Googling (as I often do) “LGBT Art.”
The guy must be related to me! Either that, or we’re channeling each other’s brainwaves. His protagonist, Ed Marker and the "The Search for Life in Distant Galaxies" (hereafter, SFLDG) Website is so similar in conceptualization to Isaac Stolzfuts that I am thunderstruck as I explore Lemcke’s personal cyber world. Lemcke uses Video, photography and written narrative to illustrate the various parts of Marker’s world. Instead, back in the early to mid 2000’s, I used digital photographic tableau and written narrative to describe Isaac’s world. Isaac’s journal develops as a specific time line, while SFLDG progresses in random bits and pieces that have no specific location in time, but rather describe elements of Ed Marker’s existence; Marker’s various domiciles, his box and its contents, Ed Marker’s library research, and so on. It is a life traced by bits and pieces of evidence, with historic ties to artists like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. Ingrid Schaffner (et al) describe a process for creating such a construct in Deep Storage: Collecting, Storing, and Archiving in Art, an Exhibition at P. S. 1, Brooklyn, N.Y. (1998), and book of the same title published in 1995. However, I haven’t seen new examples of cyber archiving recently. Perhaps I haven't been looking because it appears that Lemke and others have been producing a number of similar works.

SFLDG is apparently part of the San Francisco Queer Cultural Center’s 13th annual National Queer Arts Festival. That event took place in June during National LGBT Pride month. I will have to spend a week or two exploring all the vast system of links both within Lemcke’s project, as well as those tied to the National Queer Arts Festival.