a song of resistance

i'm reading about some interesting aspects of music and politics lately - namely music and torture.

thanks to a link from the urban adverturer in rotterdam , i found out about about a great project investigating enforced listening - specifically the music of torture and resistance in auschwitz, i've also been checking out songs from sesame street used at guantanamo bay and abu graib, trying to find out if headphones are permissable in prisons and thinking about the music of resistance.

defiance through song is not new - the whole of modern pop music is basically a descendant from songs sung by slave chain gangs in america. and i suspect that it's true power comes through its collective and unifying effects, as much as the musicality and aesthetics.

but can music defy torture, or give a resounding sense of freedom, on ones own? if i was forced to sit in solitary confinement, or was being arrested, or tortured for my political beliefs, what song would i sing to raise my spirits and/or to show that i could not be beaten? would that even work?

can sound-based resistance be such a lonely, singular experience?

and what would your song of resistance be?

art and love

art is not for the faint hearted.

i think someone else said that, but i can now officially concur.

this sounds like i'm building a myth around the whole sordid thing, but, given the hearbreaking week i've had, you'll just have to deal with it.

and i never really believed the maxim 'you can't have your cake and eat it to'. maybe because i am an artist and the image of a cake, in my mind, counted as 'having' your cake, i always believed that it was just an excuse for people willing to settle. but it turns out that's not true. you can't have love and art in the same room.

i realised today that art is a lonely business. and i can understand why artists hook up with each other. it's probably easier to deal with the elephant in the room or the monkey on your back or whatever zoological metaphor you want to use for the fact that art takes all your time and your focus and your life.

it's the thing that has you living quite a strange life - the kind where you live on meagre funds, pursue the strangest kinds of travel, keep ridiculous hours and think about things in quite a perverse way sometimes.

it never turns off. you become slightly enslaved.

or perhaps that's just how i feel this week. a week in which the reality of love and life on the opposite side of the world has come to a head. the reality of having to return to a life in which my work becomes my primary relationship again.

 the thing about art is that, although it's satisfying on one level, it's not an equal partnership. in fact, it's mostly unsatisfying. it's certainly not intimate, or sexual, or tender. it constantly needs satiating, even when you're almost satisfied with the nature of what you make, there's still a sense of 'the next level'.

there are still things to be done, places to take the work, audiences to pursue and ideas to expand upon. it's always there, nagging you like a fucking fishwife wanting the dishes done.


are there any great artists who have managed to have great relationships too? in trying to find some hopeful role models, all i've been able to see is artists either in a relationship with art, or in a relationship with another artist in which the relationship is almost a creative collaboration. and, forgive me for being picky, but the last thing i want to do is be in a relationship with another artist - we're a self-absorbed and selfish bunch.


sigh.

lucky i have work to make.

performance space london

Remember the Regimes of Hardship symposium I wrote about last month?

Well, i had such a good time there that I applied for the Summer Residency and have been accepted!

Yes, that's right, from the 1st August until the 1st September, i'll be in an artist bootcamp at performance space in london.

i've had a few more stressful things to focus on here in berlin, but when i give myself time to think about it, i'm ridiculously excited.

There are opportunities for regular critique from Bean and Ben, we'll be running a weekly 12-hour research marathon (like the How To Do Things With Words that Leigh Robb and I run yearly) and there's already been an invitation to participate in a show in Finland during the residency.

o_O

I have a stack of work I want to do - some that's been in the pipeline for a while, other new works that are more 'performancey' than i've done before. I'm hoping to do something related to blood. yes.

Give Me Something To Listen To will get a showing in some form and likely some more listening marathons - especially given we'll be living a stone's throw away from the main Olympic stadium in London.

Hell yes!

There are some great artists involved and I'm really looking forward to the massive push this will give my work.

I'll also be writing a lot about it at the time, so be prepared.

Spreading HIV prevention and treatment in Africa

I'm working on a new artwork. It's probably the most un-like my practice to date and i don't even know if I can pull it off, but it's about something that's close to my heart and to that of a few people I love.


I've been doing a fair bit of research on the topic and on recent studies and breakthroughs in communication and medication.

It's actually quite refereshing to read some mainstream media acknowledging that African women are those primarily affected by AIDS and that it's time to sort out some proper preventative measures.

It's not going to be easy.



I thought this was an interesting part of the literature for a recent study: ASPIRE.

I'm not sure if this writing is dangerously stupid, or utter reverse-psychology genius.


Fuck trying to distribute through corrupt African government health systems and cutbacks by men. Give a stack of women ARV rings and tell them to NOT sell them onto other women who may or may not be at high risk of HIV/AIDS.

architectural form and political values

yesterday i officially registered as living in berlin. i had an appointment at the rathaus/town hall and on the way back, walked past this ominous-looking building: an office for health.

initially i laughed at how depressing and dry it looked and how that seemed to be the complete opposite to health. but then i realised that it's an official building and, as such, it needs to look like one.

of course it looks like that. it's a government department in the serious business of caring for the health of its citizens.


it got me wondering about current architectural form needing to reflect function, rather than reflecting coherence with the public office aesthetic. if all buildings - health, finance, town hall, social security, education all look like official buildings, are they simply read as part of the political fabric and thus a 'norm' for the values of that particular society.

and perhaps as opposed to some kind of aesthetic 'choice'.

i know, this is getting perilously close to facism and facist architecture, but it did get me wondering that
if you get to choose what your education building looks like - if it looks different to, say, the aesthetic of the treasury, then perhaps, as a society, you get to choose whether it has authority or not. it can be dismissed as 'different' from where the money sits. for example.

whereas if the treasury and the education department and the health office and the PM's office look like they're belonging to the state, then all of those departments and their inherent priorities also belong to the state.


i think i might be suggesting that all government buildings need to look authoritative. i might backflip on that soon, but i had to wonder if there's something in public architectural form being linked to the form of public values.


apologies to any architects, or architectural writers/researchers for this one - it's a thought that popped into my head.

Happy Listening!

Today is World Listening Day!  yay! started by worldlisteningproject.org, it's to celebrate all things listening.

I'll be doing a 6-hour listening marathon at the Berlin Olympic Stadium and posting the mammoth list of sounds heard somewhere secret on the streets of Berlin.



And, a special for those of you who haven't bought a Give Me Something To Listen To Drawing yet they're half price from the Etsy store, just for World Listening Day!

Happy Listening!

sundays

i don't have a monday to friday schedule, but sundays still have a feeling of their own.

they have a feeling of wistfulness about them

they sigh

they smile coyly

they run on a different time scale and the volume is lower

sundays are for hand-holding and private jokes between lovers
for musical guilty pleasures like weezer and xx
for tv guilty pleasures like ren & stimpy and raising hope
for visiting art galleries or cinemas or somewhere that slows time a little
for baking chocolate cake or banana bread
for leaving the house clothed, but without underwear and getting away with it
for calls home
for dyeing hair or painting nails
for banging nails into things
for doing crosswords, or sudoku, or solitaire or chess with friends
for staring at the ceiling a little longer

The Art of Listening

Over the last few days, I've been to a fantastic symposium called The Art of Listening - something I stumbled upon, but thankfully could capitalise on my time here and go.


(any day now peeps are gonna call me or invite when there's something like this happening... guys? please?)

I'm not going to review it all, because, well, i want to keep some of the thoughts for myself for a while. But i might, down the track, talk about the fact that the organisers (across 4 institutions) kept speaking about it as a new area of research. And that, although not a lot of visual artists were represented*, there was a sense that this area that i've been focusing my life on is an interest point for those across a stack of disciplines and that they're all conducive to one another: philosophy, architecture, history, musicology, engineering, media studies and sociology.

I'm going to mention just two things from the symposium, though:

I am now going to investigate the link between Edison Co's demonstration recitals of the Phonograph from the early 20th Century and the Steve Jobs/Apple model of business/promotion. I swear, from today's presentation of Edison Co's archives by Alexandra Hui, the similarities are uncanny.

And, I have a new brain crush on Jonathan Sterne, the Sound Studies Reader and his focus on a General History of Compression (which could also easily include Cory Arcangel's Essay on On Compression - especially the JPEG).

As you were.




image credit: reverb tests by wallace sabine for the new theatre, pinched from the soundscrapers blog

*except in a great paper on Christian Marclay by Lydia Goehr.

cursebird RIP

ok, so i just started using a new stat counter for my sites and have been checkin' out some of my keywords here.

yawn.

yes. indeed.

but the good bit is that one of the top keyword searches that brings people here is "enthusiastic porn star".

fortunately or unfortunately, not because of my sexual proclivity or proficiency, but because of this post about cursebird.

i had forgotten about that little service - the live feed of people swearing on twitter and i was a bit sad to see that it's dead. according to richard henry on twitter.

i just wanted to say rest in peace. it was a fucking cool thing for a while there.

berlin connects

despite the threat to see a gallery per day, i really haven't here. but i think i've started to get into a nice little rhythm for working. and i've had some fantastic conversations with people.

the nice thing about berlin, especially in the summer time, is that there's plenty of time for chatting, coffee and conversation AND a full day's work. it's still quite light from early until pretty late here.

i feel like i've been having two days each day. the social one and the work one.

being an expat in a place, as much as it's a bit naff sometimes, can afford some interesting connections - peeps look out for others in a way that peeps 'at home' sometimes don't.

i've met some amazing artists, video peeps, film guys, tech heads, philosophers, advertising wunderkinds and dancers here. and it's ok that all we do is talk.

i've got time for talking at the moment, before the listening work starts to kick in later.

Give Me Something To Listen To (Drawings)

For those who have been following from home, you'll know that I've been working on a new series of works: Give Me Something To Listen To.

I had the real joy of performing the work in Melbourne, Perth and Sydney before I left.
Now that I'm in Europe and the UK, I'm working on a small 'tour' of the work for the UK in the second half of this year: a few different types of places in London, Brighton, Manchester*.



Partly to raise funds (but also for something fun to do), I'm making a stack of Give Me Something To Listen To drawings. They'll all look mostly like the sign from the original booth, but each one is different, because i'm doing them all by hand!

50 of them! By hand!

OK, so maybe it's just me that gets excited by that.


So, here's the deal:

If you want to see the show in the UK, you should buy one.
If you came to the shows in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth, you should buy one.
If you didn't come to the shows in Melbourne, Sydney or Perth (but wanted to), you should buy one.
If you didn't even want to come to the shows, but know me and want a drawing, you should buy one.

If you love me, you should buy one.


The deets:

Two sizes: A3 and wide-angle (52 x 20cm)
Acrylic and marker on 200gsm watercolour paper
Hand-drawn peeps.

Postage is a little extra, although if you're in London or Berlin I can hand deliver it.
If you're in Australia, I'm sorry but I can't hand deliver them any more.

Buy them either here via paypal:

 

Or on Etsy





*and if you're somewhere other than these places and would like to host the work for an evening/afternoon, get in touch! I'll travel.

We Shall Reprogram The World, And This Language Will Be Music

Between Music and Performance Art


"The event brings together artists to collectively form a broad interdisciplinary discursive space framing the broad question music, language and performance as a generative processes"






dammit!! i need to be at this event tomorrow night and i'm currently not in london.


if you're in london, you should go.


end of story.




deets

Friday 6th July 2012, 7pm

Curated by protoPLAY

Hosted by ]performance s p a c e [ , 

Unit 6 Hamlet Industrial Estate, White Post Lane, London E9 5EN

world listening day

last year i was too caught up in the end of a residency to mark world listening day on the 18th july.

this year, that's not going to happen. i'll be doing a 6-hour listening work in berlin and transcribing the outcome of that onto wall in public. a little like the listening to berlin works i did in 2010, or those done as part of the AURA project last year, a bit like all my works lately.

i'll keep you posted, closer to the date.



and thanks to the world listening project twitter and the sound studies blog (also pushing sound studies into the red), i discovered a post by aaron trammell about transcription and embodiment of music into other forms.

he discusses the process of listening to lyrics (by The Fleshtones), transcribing them and the difficulty/slight unsatisfaction of completing that task thanks to the switch between modes of thinking.

oh how i can relate.

in my listening projects, i'm constantly transcribing the city's ambient sounds from a listening action of sensation, to the domain of language and text.

like the Fleshtones track in aaron's article, ambient sound is difficult to transcribe. although unlike music - with its cultural history of written lyrics and coded notation -  there is no language-based culture for, say, the sound of a car driving across cobblestones. the general public just hear those sounds, or respond to what they mean. very rarely to you explain those sounds, much less transcribe them.

so when i'm doing the work, i just have to write it how i hear it, without resorting to onomatopaea - switch between hearing and understanding and explaining and conveying.

which is part of the exciting thing (for me at least) about the action i undertake during those works, but also about the words that come from it:

they're as universal as possible - explaining in plain terms the what of what's being heard, almost like lyrics of the public space, but they're still quite subjective, based on my particular translation of what's being heard. the mondegreen of public space.

i can imagine aaron and i need to have a transcription battle :)







anyway, i digress, this year on world listening day, come and find me. i'll be making a monument to the noble action in public. somewhere in berlin. and i'll be doing some embodiment and transcribing. and standing around wearing headphones and writing.

it'll be just like writing down lyrics, but to the world.

Beats X Mog X HTC

This was an interesting link I came across on Monday night, thanks to digital twink Elliot Bledsoe.

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/02/digital-notes-beats-headphones-buys-a-streaming-music-service/

Yes. Beats (by Dre) is now moving and shaking. OK, so really it's HTC purchasing music infrastructure, but still, the power is coming from a headphones company.

Headphones have previously been subordinate to the tech and the music, especially if they're part of a company that has investments/arms in all three, like Sony. Headphones have always been 'peripheral', or 'accessory', not market-leading, or game-changing.

Say what you will about the actual quality of the cans, what Beats by Dre have done for the image of headphones (not to mention their 25% market share, sheesh!), fashion and the flip between music and listening - I'm a massive fan.


"Mog’s service will continue under the same name and operate as a separate company, according to Monday’s announcement. “Both Mog and Beats share a common goal of creating a more premium sound experience and emotional connection with music in the digital era,” David Hyman, Mog’s founder and chief executive, wrote in a note to subscribers."




Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.