Jair: Artist With Flair:

His life's work is bringing diverse people together to think outside the box By Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard Published: Monday, January 16, 2006 Jair is not an easy guy to pin down. A technologically savvy artist who came to Eugene from Southern California in the 1990s to study music composition at the University of Oregon, he doesn't use his last name and won't reveal his age. When asked where he lives, he has a simple answer. "I live on planet Earth," he says. For Jair, art is life, and he prefers to let his art speak for itself. Despite the mystery surrounding his background, he has become well-known in the community, thanks to the unusual art events he organizes, which started off as multimedia music concerts and expanded into more conceptual happenings. A typical Jair production involves not only artists but also academics, community-minded activists and New Age thinkers. His latest event, Metamedia Cooperation 2, happens in the Erb Memorial Union Ballroom at the UO on Friday. Jair calls himself a "multidimensional artist/composer/producer/director/and systems architect" and refers to his latest event as an "experience" rather than a performance. He uses the word "metamedia" rather than multimedia because, he says, it implies there are connections rather than divisions between disciplines. Among the featured speakers at Friday's event are members of the UO psychology and computer science departments, along with biologists, healers, ambient musicians and traditional and digital artists from up and down the West Coast. He says the event will address the "transdisciplinary space between analog and digital ecologies." "If the analog is a continuous wave form, the digital is a sampling of the analog over time," Jair says. "We live in the analog and we're using the digital as a means of communication." Many of those who have worked with Jair admit they don't always know what he is talking about, but beyond all of the big words, he's admired for his ability to bring together people from different walks of life. So strong is Jair's aversion to compartmentalizing that discussions about art can easily lead to discussions about fractals or brain chemistry. And he has been known to pepper his conversations with phrases such as "intentionalizing the space" or "synchronicity, in the Jungian sense." "When I first met Jair, I couldn't understand a word he was saying, but I think that speaks to my own limitations," says Carole Patterson, program manager for the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, which is a co-sponsor of Friday's event. "He's a big wide open thinker ... He and I are kindred spirits in the sense that we really need to allow people to think outside the box as a way of making connections that are bigger than what our normal life proscribes." Thinking outside the box is a specialty for Jair, agrees Darrel Kau, program adviser for the UO Cultural Forum, the student-fee-funded arts group that is the main sponsor of Metamedia Cooperation 2. Kau, who used to be the programming manager at the more traditionally minded Hult Center, welcomed Jair's refreshing "anything can happen" outlook. "It was really fun to talk to him and brainstorm (about the event)," Kau says. "The thing about Jair that I really think is unique and really striking is his larger vision of a collective experience and (his ability) to take many visions and incorporate it into a product." Kau admits he doesn't know exactly how Metamedia Cooperation 2 will turn out, but, he says, the event is meant to be an open-ended experiential undertaking. If it's anything like the first Metamedia Cooperation, which took place at Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts and lasted until 2 a.m., there will be lots of heated discussion, debate and discovery, Jair says. "What I feel needs to come out of this is the same thing that happened last time," he says. "And that's to have other experiences come out of this." From the time he came to Eugene, Jair has shown himself to be skilled at creating experiences. In 2000, he staged his senior music thesis at the Hult Center, and before that, he produced multimedia concerts at the Bijou Art Cinemas and Tsunami Books. He released a CD/DVD with his musical collective, Theurgic Seed, and formed the Internet community hub Imaginify.net. He has served as an adviser to numerous groups dealing with everything from technology to business to the environment to the arts, and he continues to tour the West Coast and Colorado as a musician and lecturer. Although Jair has remained committed to a core set of values that includes bridging barriers between different disciplines, bringing artists of different backgrounds together, strengthening communities and creating new communities with the help of technology, he defies easy categorization, says Thaddeus Moore, a sound engineer who has worked with Jair on several projects, including this Friday's event. "On the surface, he's kind of on the loose hippie fringe, but he escapes that (label)," Moore says. "He's got a very interesting mind." Although Jair is happy to talk at length about what he's doing now, he is tight-lipped about his past. His silence on the subject, he insists, is not evasiveness, but a willingness to focus on the here-and-now rather than getting bogged down in the past. "We are consumed with our archives," he says. "We should be getting on with the task at hand." Jair will say he comes from mixed Japanese ancestry and was raised in Santa Barbara by a family of "professionals." As a child, he says, he wanted to be a neurosurgeon/theologian/firefighter when he grew up. After studying digital art, film and sculpture at the University of California at Santa Barbara and screenwriting at UCLA, Jair moved to Oregon. He was drawn by the ecologically friendly mind-set he found in Eugene, he says. "Santa Barbara embodies a certain ecological aesthetic, but Eugene lives it," he says. "Eugene is more real. It's more `analog.' "

Jair, who doesn't use his last name, calls himself a "multidimensional artist/composer/producer/director/systems architect." "He's a big wide open thinker," says Carole Patterson, program manager for the Downtown Initiative for the Visual Arts, which is a co-sponsor of Friday's event. Chris Pietsch The Register-Guard JAIR Occupation: Artist Why he lives here: "This is where the Oregon Country Fair is. The Oregon Country Fair is the complete embodiment of all my wildest visions." Metamedia Cooperation 2: Begins at 5 p.m. Friday, January 20, 2006 in the University of Oregon's Erb Memorial Union Ballroom, 1222 E. 13th Ave. Admission is a suggested donation of $5. For more information, go to www.imaginify.org.

 

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