FLAT 5 will feature new sculpture, painting and performative work by Bj Vogt, Brett Williams, Catie Olson and EC Brown. Guests are invited to engage the event by means of a bartering system, where offerings, refreshments, on-the-spot services may be exchanged for performance roles and artworks (masquerading as ritualistic implements).

Brett Williams (St. Louis) has utilized a shaman character and word-salad performances (influenced by Kurt Schwitters and Hugo Ball) as an investigation into the (mal)functions of communication, as a reflection upon the willful barriers of communication employed in U.S. foreign policy. For this event, Brett's speech performance will be accompanied by an Urdu translation of Joy Division's "Isolation".

Catie Olson (Chicago) will be recreating the drinking bird toys in large scale – often as disembodied heads and tailfeathers to be worn by guests. They will be “humandynamic” rather than self-propelled by thermodynamics, and an adult-sized rocking-spaceship will be available to assist in the collective repetitive movements.

Bj Vogt (St. Louis) will serve as "Finance Minister" during the bartering/performance, as an arbiter between chaotic and orderly operations – based upon his ongoing work about the conflict between scientific and religious ideologies. In his role, he will be managing a cosmology of space and participation during the shaman-centered group performance, and regulating the mediation through which guests may witness or participate.

EC Brown (Chicago) will be creating multiples to serve as currency in the bartering process. Sticklike paintings of mime/olympian hybrids, with a bioplasmic residue of wood structures will perpetrate wands. Images of the said wood structures as ectoplasmic effluvia from decease pets will decorate CDR-mix-packages offered as amulets.

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