WHAT IS MONEY?
4 Hour Life-Performance Sculpture
by Tim Tsang and Friends
Saturday, March 29, 2025

Who is Joseph Beuys? 

Joseph Beuys is a very very interesting artist. He was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. He was drafted as a Hitler youth in 1936 at the age of 15, and served in the German Air Force, and on March 16, 1944, Beuys’ plane crashed on the Crimean Front and was rescued by Tartar tribesmen, who “wrapped his broken body in animal fat and felt and nursed him back to health” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys)   

Who is Tim Tsang?
Tim Tsang is an artist who scripts friendly spaces that encourage critical thinking, contemplation, and radical immanence in the contexts of exhibitions, academic conferences, events, games, and concerts. Often through over-identification and over-exposure toward the social, these spaces activate poetic explorations, re-framings, reflections and expansions of interactive creative processes.

His work has been shown at Automata (Los Angeles), Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Kaaitheater (Brussels), Human Resources (Los Angeles), School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Galerija Reflektor (Užice, Serbia), Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland) and Museum of Contemporary Art on the Moon (MOCAM). Tim holds a B.M. in Music from Berklee College of Music, and an M.F.A. in Music and Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts. He served as the Creative Technologist at Automata during and through the pandemic, experimenting with ways of using technology to connect different communities on a human level.

////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Who are the Friends? :)

(Cedric Tai) (CA)

Alan S. Tofighi

Patrick Behnke

(Sam Friedland) (MA)

(Kathryn Schaffer) (IL)

Marguerite Brown

Kyle Bellucci Johanson

Patrick Michael Ballard

| | | | |

Cedric Tai, born in Detroit (1985), has an Art Education degree and BFA from Michigan State University (2007), and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art (2013). Tai is an un-disciplinary artist and educator whose work focuses on neurodivergent experience, labor and politics.

Awards: 2009 Kresge Artist Fellowship, 2015 Knight Foundation Challenge Grant, 2016 Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, The Brutus Fund at Yucca Valley Art Material, CA

Selected Solo / 2-person Exhibitions include: Kumasi J. Barnett/Cedric Tai, Roy G Biv, Columbus, OH (2008), "Concept Structure Torture Survival Title", New City Space, Glasgow (2011), "Indirectly Yours", Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow (2013), "We Need More ________!", Re:View Contemporary (2014), "Amateur Strategies", UCLA (2016), "50 Bad Artworks", Casa Lü, Mexico City (2020), and "Glass Material Library", Santa Fe Art Institute (2022).

She is represented by Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit and he currently works, writes and volunteers between Los Angeles, Detroit and Glasgow. Recent collaborative projects include: Bar-Fund, The Best Friends Learning Gang, and theDetroiter.com, and Rev School. Ongoing passion projects include 'Over Over Over' (Detroit/Glasgow), SolidarityClub.org, MakeBrixels.com, and AnyonesIdea.com

| | | | |

Alan S. Tofighi is an Interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Southern California. Utilizing a background in research, performance, sound, and video; Tofighi’s work deals with analyses of the dispersion, obfuscation, and formation of information to renegotiate narratives of history & power in the present. Tofighi utilizes the infiltration of legal parameters, social structures, myth, (dis)information, and extensive research of these cells as they shift from fringe culture to central in their infiltration/engineering of dominant culture. They have shown work and/or performed at REDCAT, Blum & Poe, The Box, Human Resources, The Roxy, The Horse Dublin, LACE, The Bob Baker Marionette Theater, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive, MOTOR, and many other sites/spaces throughout the world and internet.

As a performer/composer Tofighi’s music utilizes formal methodologies and histories to create works not beholden to either. Just intonation, otoacoustics, and performance, are deployed but conceptual grounding is central. Tofighi has performed with FaUSt, Juliettes with Dylan Lusetisch, Trio Ampliphonic, Scott Benzel’s V.I.T.R.I.O.L., CE/Safeteam with Isaac Aronson and Fernando Orellana, and various free Improv units since 2007.

Tofighi has also maintained AST Electronics since 2014 providing customized, circuitry and rapid development for artists & musicians and the AST Accursed Shared system, a cybernetic analogue computer designed to generate music systems via 16 non-standard forms of indeterminacy.

Tofighi received a BFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (BFA 16) an MFA in Art and Technology with a minor in Integrated Media from the California Institute of the Arts (MFA 18).

| | | | |

Kathryn Schaffer (http://kathrynschaffer.com) is a disaffected former physicist and disgruntled former art school professor.  In response to the urgency of the climate and biodiversity crises, she and her partner gutted their mid-career retirement funds in 2020 to invest money and time into deconverting 20 acres of degraded Illinois agricultural land into habitat for endangered bumblebees.  She now works full-time on caring for this land, eking out a cash-poor but resource-rich lifestyle involving solar panels, foraging weeds to eat for dinner, and avoiding most of mainstream culture.  She has an academic record most recently in the area of interdisciplinary applications of quantum physics, and will soon be publishing a book on the physics of light aimed at artists.  However, her main priority in 2025 is figuring out how to protect a type of rare salamander that lives in the roadside ditch by her house, where its habitat may be threatened by an upcoming bridge project.

| | | | |

Patrick Behnke is a viola player, composer, and improviser working in acoustic, digital, and intermedia forms. He was raised in the metropolitan Detroit, Michigan area, and currently lives and works near Los Angeles. Patrick is an avid collaborator in creative music, and holds his formative years improvising on viola in Detroit creative music communities as an integral piece in his artistic outlook. He performs as a founding member of the internationally active performer-composer ensemble the Desert Quill Quartet, and in the Apt Heavens duo.

Patrick has appeared in ensembles and solo at venues in Los Angeles (2220 Arts, Zebulon Cafe, Thymele Arts, Coaxial, SASSAS, Noon to Midnight at Disney Hall), Mexico City (National Autonomous University of Mexico, Zunzun), Ontario, Canada The Westben Fall Festival, Detroit (Trinosophes, SpreadArt at Detroit Contemporary, Sidewalk Festival, Detroit Bureau of Sound), New York (Scholes Street Studio), Chicago (Slate Arts), Boston (Washington Street Art Center) and Toronto, Canada (Anzac Club).

Patrick’s magnetic tape and graphical score installation with Lina Andonovska, ‘Interweaving’, was installed at NGallery in Athens, Greece in October 2020, with support from the Goethe Institute of Germany’s Virtual Residencies. Patrick’s compositions have been premiered by the Contemporary Choral Collective of Los Angeles (C3LA), the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, and the Desert Quill Quartet. He has appeared as a support viola player for Persian Classical luminaries Homayoun Shajarian and Sohrab Pournazeri at Los Angeles’ Microsoft Theater, and for Cheick Hamala Diabate at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, and fiddled for the Scottish Country Dance Association of Ann Arbor, Michigan (AACTMAD).

Patrick appears in recordings released on the Timebend, pfMENTUM, Edition Wandelweiser, Preference Records, Unknown Tone, Caoba, and New Branch labels. Patrick’s music has appeared in compilations on Unheard Records.

Patrick currently teaches viola and violin as a faculty member of the Los Angeles Music and Art School, at Harmony Project LA and Harmony Project Long Beach, and in a private studio in Pasadena California. Patrick is a member of the Music Teachers’ Association of California.

| | | | |

Sam Friedland is an intermedia artist and performer/improviser of experimental music. They consider themself an outstrumentalist, using percussion and electronics to draw attention to the extra- and infra-musical qualities of performance. Sam's current areas of interest include memory, play, disability, and the fluidity of sensory experience.

| | | | |

Marguerite Brown is an American composer and multi-instrumentalist who explores new mediums, forms, and performance practices with an emphasis on unorthodox approaches to tuning and temperament. In her compositions, algorithms often provide a framework for indeterminate parameters to unfold, where freedom of performer interpretation can contribute to a shared sense of vision.

She received first place in the 6th International Microtonal Guitar Competition (composition category) with her piece Solo (Daisy) which she performed on a guitar refretted in an original 11-limit just intonation tuning system. Marguerite was also awarded the Mivos/Kanter String Quartet Prize in 2022 for her string quartet in just intonation titled chroai: tetrachords, which Mivos Quartet performed frequently during their 2022 - 2023 season. She is currently composing a new work for the cimbalom and violin duo Lamnth as part of their 2024 LamnthLab commission, which the duo will premiere during their 2025 - 26 season.

Marguerite’s work has been performed at KM28 (Berlin), The Composers Conference (New Hampshire), Underscore Festival (Atlanta), Espacios Sonoros Electroacoustic Festival (Argentina), ClarinetFest (Denver), La Chapelle Theater (Canada), Center for New Music (San Francisco), REDCAT Theater (Los Angeles), Indexical (Santa Cruz), Wayward Music Series (Seattle), among others.

Marguerite has a BM in music composition from Cornish College of the Arts, MA from the University of California Santa Cruz, and is currently a PhD student in music composition at the University of California San Diego.

| | | | |

Kyle Bellucci Johanson works in performance-architecture, situating objects, language, and media to visualize and critique power structures and instigate imaginary futures. From 2018-2022 he founded and directed table, a project space in Chicago dedicated to situating artist’s practices through exhibition, discursive meals, and publication. Recent exhibitions include council_st, Los Angeles; Feiertag, Kassel; Chicago Architecture Biennial; Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Chicago; and Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador. He has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago, the City University of New York, the New York Academy of Art, and presently works at The Cooper Union.

Kyle holds a BA in Art and Reconciliation Studies from Bethel University and studied peace and conflict at the University of Ulster in Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland. He completed an MFA at California Institute of the Arts and was a founding fellow of at land’s edge, an artist-led, autonomous, free school focused on intergenerational mentorship and engaged programming in community-run spaces across east and south Los Angeles. Kyle was a 2022-23 participant of the Whitney Independent Study Program.

| | | | |

Patrick Michael Ballard is a Los Angeles based artist and fool-magician that primarily orchestrates secrets and surprises in immersive theater and interactive sculpture games. His most recent works incite opportunities for autopoetic game-setting and rule-making around absurdist narrativized rituals where objects can be explored and haunted by different communities and creative practitioners. His works are conceived as enactments of Azguyenquynan!—phantasmagorical LARPing events where suddenly immersive over-states fade at the edges of the forming worlds abound as tiny anthropomorphic ducks transform from hand puppets to miniature timegods, T-shirts become spirits that graft the taste of the audience into wakes for dead drawings, historic monuments become cukoo-clocks that birth giant, beaked chorales, and a crack in the wall speaks green light to quell the violence implicit in the misplacement of puzzle pieces. Participants are invited to wander into the Interworveled, past the edges of orientation, through the active transmutation and shifting scale of the “event”.

These orchestrated events have taken the form of an interactive, immersive theatrical escape room (Return to FOREVERHOUSE), a set of experimental stand-up comedy (I SO SORE FOR EVER THING), a 2-minute micro-opera performed every-hour-on-the-hour inside of a public sculpture mounted to the front of the historic Gamble House in Pasadena (The Swirling Mess Below the Sleeping Porch…), a set of unusual pedagogical gifts as an invitation to participate in a life-long collaboration (Weird Alms) and most recently, an ongoing, collaborative paratheatrical ritual-game that revolves around an ever growing pantheon of props 12 years in the making (Fool’s Window). Throughout his works, Patrick experiments with themes of immersion, the ethics of materiality in fantasy, how the interface shapes our mythosphere, psychosphere, and cognisphere, and the role of the individual in collective storytelling. Patrick received a BFA in Sculpture from CSU Long Beach in 2011, and an MFA in Art from California Institute of the Arts in 2014. In addition to his work as an artist, Patrick currently acts as the artistic director to the Auschwitz Study Foundation, a freelance creative director, and is an intermittent guest curator of the nomadic Jan Weenix Gallery.