existence shall cry, sis.

the painful thing about the residency i'm doing at collingwood housing estate is that it throws into question my purpose as an artist, in a way that none of the other recent residencies have.

i reckon i've had at least three grades of existential crisis in the last two weeks, the deepest last weekend, rescued by a fellow artist who reminded me that i actually don't get a choice over the future and what it thinks of me and my art. all i can do is be as attendant to the workliness of the work as possible (paraphrasing heidegger in his origin of a work of art).

going to too many openings, or other people's shows is too much for me when i'm in this state - i get caught up in my own sense of ridiculousness, so i have to pare it back.

having said that, i was able to check out two visual art shows and two sound art shows on the weekend and enjoyed myself immensely.

stephen palmer has a wonderful sense of putting shows together and the group show at light projects at the moment is a testament to that. the show focuses primarily on 'simulacra' and artists who replicate daily objects with such alacrity that we assume it is that item, lest we look closely, plus a light-hearted 'huzzah!' work by clare rae. in fact, her work was so unlike the others, that what it did state was 'this IS real'. which i liked.

the other exhibition is at dear patti smith - a gallery after my own heart. their brand hock show, in loving memory of amnesia is amazing - sculptural and narrative and slightly unnerving choices of symbols. i would even say feminist. it's well-crafted, well-lit and just exudes 'we are here'.

after both those shows, i attended two separate sound art gigs: one curated by nic tammens at the NGV studio, as part of his interesting collaborative residency there. we stood amongst oh-so-placed objects - attempted simulacra but to my mind were a bit, well, contrived.

clearly i was sinking in my own cynicism and i was too up-to-my-eyeballs-in-my-own-garbage to really enjoy most of the music, although it was nice to see some peeps and nic's band at the end was a great intense cello/violin/guitar distortion build and expressed my own mounting tension.

on saturday, after i had mostly dealt with my own internal combustion, i was able to really enjoy the embedded gig, presented by ben byrne and avantwhatever. all similarly toned bands (deep frenetic bass/low freq chaos

and a counterpoint of super-high pitch/frequency overlay), i enjoyed the different processes and instruments on display: upright bass, sub-bass actuators+40gal drums, jim denley's water-filled sax, trombone, accordion and alice hui-sheng cheng's vocal intensity.

the whole crew there were great and i felt really welcome at art beat - exactly the kind of art space that i believe melbourne needs a whole lot more of.

images: 
brand hock #2 (sorry, i chucked away the room sheet and can't remember the title)
new music series 001

PhD shopping

it feels like i'm shopping for a husband at the moment, because i'm doing serious research into possibly doing a PhD.

i still don't even know if it's the right thing to do, but i'm talking to peeps about it anyway.

and it's quite a strange process to feel like you're testing people for a commitment of 3-4 years.

part of me wants to research in an international university, for something different. although i do love the idea of working with some fantastic australian artists/writers.

and it has thrown me into a bit of a quandary about how to best extend my practice. through the 'research' model of academia, or through the 'development' model of studio practice and funding? i'm sure that i'm being a tad binary about that either/or, but it feels like two different very routes to take and i don't know which one serves me best - i think i'd like a little from column A and a little from column B, please.

and perhaps i'm over-thinking the whole thing and i should just have some goddamn fun.

UOW: day 6

I was pretty relaxed when i went to bed on monday night, if not with a head full of code and programming and interactivity mush (like i said, i'm totally novice and still have to bend my head in new ways about this stuff a lot). 

But do you think i slept well?? no. some squeaky noise kept going all night - woke me up enough to bother me and i got up this morning with a headache. Not a good start to the day in anyone's books.

Today's account will be in point form, in keeping with its tone:

- Schlepped to Jaycar to get aligator clips (found bonus set of wireless digital headphones to hack into - the most expensive chip i've bought so far. 

- Almost back at uni, I realised that i left my phone and sunglasses at the hotel. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

All that smugness from yesterday's sense of accomplishment: down the gurgler.

- Found missing arduino and raced into class. thankfully I presented at the end of the lesson, so had time to deal with my lacking caffeine levels.

Surprisingly, after that the day impoved.

Chatting to second years was fun - some of them are feeling so overwhelmed with electronics. 

Which i can relate to. 

I passed on some valuable information I received as a student from one Philip Wilson, who was a third-year to my second. Phil said: use second year to experiment. At no other time will you have access to the kind of material and studio that you do now. Plus you have leeway. In first year, you don't get time to do anything, third year, you have to focus on your project, but second year - go nuts. (And i did.). Actually, the second year spirit underlies a lot of my practice nowdays, so it was nice to revisit that important moment in my learning.

I had some beautiful conversations with a couple of students who were keen to chat either about coding environments, or about how to 'get out there'. it was so lovely to pass on 'how to be keen'.

During lunch i pulled apart my super-expensive transmitter, excitement plus!  i realised i must have been learning something about how circuits and electronics work 'cos i ascertain what was important and what what wasn't. I don't quite know, yet, how to make it interact with an arduino board, or control it yet, but hopefully i will. 

After talking to the second class of second years, who weren't quite as interested in what i had to say, i raced over to Bldg 25 to join the faculty of creative arts for an afternoon tea. whilst not quite as rad as CIA's morning teas, it was pretty special anyway. great cake, nice to be introduced and chatted briefly with some music teachers. yay.

Back to Innovation Campus to spend 3.5 hours not getting anywhere with my arduino. I managed to hamfist a soldering job and bust my lilypad development board. huzzah. i just wanted to set up a script so that i could test the flex sensor, and set up and if/else statement to write to digital, so that when the flex sensor flexes up to a point, the light goes on. and anything over or under that, it goes off. no luck. nada. zip. 

i gave up, ran for the train (again) and spent the rest of the trip writing up these blogs.

meh, yah, meh.

UOW: day 5

For a Monday, i had a pretty good day. 

I spent most of it on the main campus in Building 25 - i started off sorting out some problems with my computer and setting up insurance, which was very adult of me. 

-I did some other application/admin-type things;

-Uploaded the documentation from Thursday's Listening Project and

-Emailed around a call-out for participants in another one, planned for 4pm.

I caught up with Jo Law,  one of the Media Arts lecturers, and whose students i'll was booked in to talk to the next day and we sorted out what I might discuss.

Then i met Robyn Douglass, the TA in the textile studio, with whom I'd booked a textile screen-printing session. I had been trying to print the lists from Listening and Being for ages - having little success at CIA. 

And now i know why - i had too heavy a hand and too narrow a squeegee. Philosophy for life, really.

It was excellent to get a print refresh - i hadn't done any emulsion exposing for ages and my process was a little rusty. Now i feel like i could do it again really easily (and may do, if i get some time).

Mostly i printed tests, albeit nice-looking tests. Red ink on calico and curtain backing fabric, with varying degrees of success. 

The ultimate plan one day is to print some large, long scrolls of the sounds heard on listening projects - replicating old public documents, or manifestos, or creeds. That will require a much larger screen and a large-format printer, but it can be done.

documentation from Day 3

At 4pm, I started my listening project, then had a student from third-year, Jess Millman, join me. 

We listened (in stereo) for 30 minutes, to the same site I did on Thursday. It was great for me to revisit the site and note the differences in the time of day and the quality of headphones i was using as a prop. In the comparison afterwards, it was quite validated to realise we heard similar sounds (the overwhelming sound of scuffing shoes) and had similar difficulties discerning large volumes of conversation. I'll upload some documentation for that later today, hopefully.

Overall, it was a good day. I had booked into a serviced apartment for the night and perhaps because i knew that i didn't have to rush back to Sydney that night, i was a lot calmer.

I set up the apartment as a mini-studio, paid the overpriced internet connection (a future rant on that later) and did a bit of work, made dinner being as resourceful as i could (boiled pasta in a salad bowl full of boiling water in the microwave) and worked on a presentation for the students.

Annoyingly, when it came time to sit down and start working on my arduino, i realised that i left the main board back at the University! Aaargh! so annoying… especially as i've been carrying it around with me for the last 4 days, working on it on the train (and maybe trying to become one with it so that i understand it better).

I really couldn't do anything more, so i did some more research, trying to find code that might fit what i want to do: use flex sensor (input) to create sound with the wave shield (output), use lilypad accelerometer (input) with arduino shield (it included an extra 4051 chip, though), and simple code for flex sensors.

When i knew that i had enough, i did what any self-respecting girl would do in such circumstances: 

I went to the spa and sauna.

UOW: day 3

it's the beginning of day 3, and i'm on the phone to ITS again. 

i'm sure that if i've ever really hurt anyone in this life, i'll be coming back as an ITS worker in some university. surely it has got to be the shittest job in the world. i bet mark zuckerberg spent half a day working it and unleashed facebook on the world as a result (i know, i've seen the social network, it's really 'cos he didn't get laid).

whilst being amongst other artists and educators and students is great for arts practice, dealing with university admin for 25% of that time has been extremely frustrating. 

like, i want to cry.

i can see why artists prefer a studio/independent cell model to an institution model because simple things like accessing the internet are relatively easy. even on an overloaded multi-router tangled mess like the one that CIA had. 

so far i've had a very lovely time meeting loads of great artists and teachers. i've had lots of coffee and talked quite a bit. i've met up with an honours student whose work crosses over nicely with mine and all that has been great.

i've now got two workstations set up - one in the creative arts faculty, which i am using for admin garbage and sewing, when i get to it. and i've also got a tech set-up on at the digital media centre on innovation campus, for working on my arduinos. it's in a small black-box room, with amazing sound qualities, lighting, space, great flooring and access to all kinds of gadgets and media things. projector? sure!

i met glenn anderson, the UOW geek overlord who has recreated Orac from  Blake 7 with arduinos, who has kitted out these great electronics kits for everyone to use and is super nice and helpful. actually, being over at the innovation campus is very welcoming and i have a feeling i'll be spending more and more time there.

i think ideally i would like the tech setup to be amongst other students, but actually it's also nice just being around students who are there for media arts and interested in that kind of thing. and glenn and i have already compared notes for arduino shields. i might help him make a chucky-doll :)

not being able to access the internet, though, is majorly problematic.  are you seeing a pattern here? amazing equipment, friendly people, infrastructure breakdown. i think this is the main drawback of the institution.

open source programming is all online, so again my work on arduinos has stalled. argh! i want to tear my hair out. luckily, i have a multi-headed practice and can find something else to work on until the admin_sys jerks send paperwork somewhere. 

by the end of the two weeks here, i really wanted to have a prototype of a garment, that i could at least start to test at electrofringe and two listening projects.

at the moment, i have had coffee with sarah miller, brogan bunt, boni cairncross and lucas ihlein; lunch with derek kreckler, michelle elliot, mike leggett, lucas ihlein and brogan bunt; three blogposts, bookmarks on lilypads, the wave shield, planning diagrams, research notes and two workstations. 

i'm known for my impatience, so take all of this with a grain of salt. but it's something for me to bear in mind for the future.

i think i'm going to get coffee and do a listening project. hopefully the act of listening for 30 minutes in the middle of campus will help calm me down. and at least i'll have some documentation of that, and an understanding of the university that way. perhaps i should have done this on day 1.

UPDATE: i've done a listening project - it was very successful and firmly grounded me back in my practice and on the site. i'll write about that later, and will post it on the listening to the city blog later.

i now also have net access. i'm a happy camp(us)er again.

artist in residence, again.

out of one bed and into another, it seems. 

for the next two weeks i will be an artist-in-residence at the faculty of creative arts at the university of wollongong. two former perth amazing artist peeps have invited me to be here, lucas ihlein and sarah miller and i'll be working on some early prototypes of my wearable tech project.

i'll also take the opportunity to blog a little more regularly about it - because it's much closer to my regular practice than the geek was. and, as you lovely readers might remember, i use this blog as a process place. a sandbox for concept, or, for those that way inclined, as my text-based github-esque code repository. with plenty of forks.

listening garments

i have been trying to kickstart a link between listening and fashion for a while, with not so much success. probably because i'm neither a fashion designer or a sound artist. so i'm smushing things together that i have no idea about. and maybe these things just take time.

some of  you may have been familiar with my garments for listening project and some of my loose sound/listening-based fashion works. 

well, the main aim of the game is to be able to create garments that, based on the pose either switch sound on/off, switch between sounds or actually play a score based on the on/off-ness of the sound (like a pianola and binary code).

over the next two weeks i'm going to be prototyping one of those garments using arduino and some very rudimentary patterning.

listening projects

i'll also do a couple of these performances on the grounds whilst i'm here. especially as i've started reading a new listening/philosophy text which has not only reignited my focus on my act of listening, but has rekindled the place of heidegger in the act of listening (see? i wasn't just making it up)

plus, i've been able to catch up with boni cairncross who is doing her honours here and is interested in performance art and documentation. she and i have already tittered over tino sehgal's work and perhaps it will be interesting to discuss documentation of my fairly dull-looking performances with her. i may even do some more test ustreaming. although web access in universities can be a leetle restrictive, so we'll see.

i would have loved to shown you all loads of exciting things i did today, but sadly, it's been a day of administration, meeting people, struggling with zero access to the interwebs and an all-out crash on my mbp. not v. productive.

but, here's a pick of the wave shield that is balancing together, and some diagrams of the collar i'm working on.

Please don't cut ABC Arts programming

board@your.abc.net.au

To the ABC Board,

I never beg. But I’m begging you to reconsider the decision to cut ABC arts programming.

The media landscape in Australia has never looked so grim – there is so little quality, interesting, thoughtful or relevant content on most of the commercial/SBS bandwidth and the ABC makes that just a little brighter.

The arts division of ABC is such a core part of the ABC and as an artist I need it to continue. Its features, documentaries, mini-series and news support our art production and inform our audiences so that we’re not having to dumb down to Murdoch-reading standards.

When John Howard was fixing to scrap the ABC, it was the arts community who really got behind the cause – playing gigs, making works, organising articulate public argument and designing those beautiful “I <3 the ABC and I vote” stickers that harrangued the politicians.

Please. Don’t forsake Australia’s right to have intelligent, interesting and relevant content about beauty, creativity, innovation and collaboration. The encroachment of trite, mindless, commercially sullied content is already overwhelming and ABC Arts has been the last line of defence against a nation of imbeciles.

Kind Regards,

Lauren Brown



--



lauren brown
http://sheseesred.com
http://sheseesred.blogspot.com



thinker-in-residence at CIA studios || http://facebook.com/CIAStudios
artist-in-resident at AURA project ||  http://auraprojectresidents.blogspot.com
electrofringe listener-in-resident || http://electrofringe.net

instagram sycophancy

right now i'm super in love with instagram i know that for all my friends without iphones, they miss out and i miss out. yes, it's a bit annoying, but i'm still totally in love with it.

it's a brilliant sharing kinda thang and i tell you, it's like the early days of twitter where i really did have some some quiet online time with people i would like to know but don't get a chance to.

i like the fact that it's a bit hokey. and that the social side of things still needs to be sorted out. but i feel like it's the next new awesome thing.

and i feel like artists and image makers really should be bullying it more than they should.

what is it?

OK, for those who don't know, it's an iphone app that is an image-based social feed, a bit like twitter. you can take a pic from your phone and apply a stack of filters to it, give it a name, geo-tag it and upload it to the stream. other people see the stream and can 'like' your image if you want.

there's a sense of close-ness about it and it's fantastic for us arty-visual types. it reveals the visual motivations or processes for a person, and being visually motivated myself, i find that element of exchange so satisfying. 

there are a couple of artists on there who i really only know through their instagram, despite technically sharing a studio space with them. 

call to artists

frankly, i would love to see a whole lot more artists on there. not just from a 'functional' point of view of showing new works, but as an artist, i would love to see what, say, miranda july sees on a regular basis, or spiros panigirakis, or olafur eliasson. 

this is such an opportunity for artists to really grab hold of a social network and gain some cohesion or interest or involvement. 

i think it's also perfect for some of the arts organisations, especially the GLAM crew - i follow brooklyn museum on there and it's so sweet, every couple of days, to see an item that is being conserved - i got to see the Rietveld Dollhouse being restored and it was stunning.

if you were an old-fashioned, art-historian hater-type, it could be argued that it trivialises Art (note the capital), but i think a lot of people said the same thing for reading/writing about twitter. but the amount of writers i follow, and literary events i attend because of writers on twitter has grown. i hold books and heavy theory in higher esteem since finding an outlet for my text-based piffle. perhaps the same happens with instagram.

--FIXME--



it's still in the fairly early stages of being, so there are still a few pitfalls that i would like to see resolved:

- being able to organise my feed into lists - like twitter. i have a few peeps i've had to unfollow because they are prolific (which is rad) and clog up my stream (which is not).

- make the switch to multi-platform. i really miss seeing the daily perspective from a few particular people who are part of my twitter crew, but who don't have iphones (and i still manage to love them). it must be a contractual, or financial reason on instagram's part, but i just wish they could open up the doors a little. maybe they need to deal with more server space first.

- find it easier to find people. it's still a 'tunnel' based social thang - i have to find people and go to their 'who they follow' section and then follow a person. it's not quite so easy.

- share pics. this bit is particularly hard. i've taken to leaving a cc @user tag in a comment, which will notify that user that they've been mentioned in a comment, which leads them to that image. it would be much quicker to just be able to do something like RT/re-tweeting.

there's still something cute and secretive about it this way too (which the nerd/hipster in me kinda likes)


and even after all that, i'm still quite excited to see where this little app will head in the near future.
now, artist buddies get on it.

UPDATE: oh look, @topfife has posted something similar. waddyaknow.

wired for sound

i haven't had a lot of time to blog lately - i'm trying to be very good with having time to make stuff and do my own admin, as well as come to the last 4 weeks of my intense residency.

and then this weekend, i'm squeezing in a quick trip to cootamundra (from perth) to participate in a very exciting workshop at the WIRED lab with joyce hinterding and david haines (you may remember me talking about joyce's work at ISEA in 2010).

i'm stupidly excited, feel wildly unprepared, but naive enough to be open to whatever the hell i learn. i'll probably be the least sound-specific nerd there, but i'm hoping to do some new listening and have a ball anyway.

a couple of things i'm interested in are the methods for listening to a non-urban, or even a non-earth-based space, and what the experience is of listening to the past - which is what stars are, really -  (extending this idea that sounds don't disappear).


I'll try and take some decent pics too - especially because the geek-in-residence project is now heavily into HTML land and very un-photogenic. :)

see you under the stars, kids.


image credit: turner_andi from flickr

was it successful?

so, the listening and being exhibition is over and to be honest, i don't really know how to assess it. which has prompted some interesting thoughts about how to value performative/experiential works.

so, how do i know if my work was successful?

i haven't come from a performance or even a contemporary art background, so a lot of what i'm learning through my arts practice is having to stretch over from tradition image-making and art-historical language. which, naturally, doesn't quite fit.

old-fashioned parameters of quality mostly include sales, or publishing. people's opinions matter too, but seeing as i was hardly available to to hear them, it's hard to say. and i haven't put in place a formal process for getting feedback by my peers yet (more on that later).

added to that, during an exhibition, as the work gets realised, and i spent time with it, the goalposts shifted slightly. i think i would have initially felt the work successful had people interacted with it, and a few of the catalogues had been taken.

but once i decided to perform the work myself, i realised that i also wanted to research more deeply the nature of listening reflectively and that set up new parameters. and then as i listened, i thought about the work even more, and built in even more ways in which the work could be meaningful and they added another layer of 'is it working'-ness to it.

so now i'm properly confused :)

in short, i think the work worked.

and yet it still has some life in it yet - as an object, as an 'instrument', as a set for more performances, and as a means of greater research. i think this might be what's called 'setting the bar higher'.

and i think this self-critical process is also good and perhaps a mark of my own maturing -  years ago i would have been crippled by the 'not enough-ness' of it all and not coped with the greyness of achieving success.

in fact, years ago, i'm pretty sure i just would have wanted you to like it and leave it at that.
how depressing.

now i think the greatest disappointment for an artist is to have completed everything that she wanted to say.






feedback etc.
all of these thoughts and some of these questions have actually fuelled a desire to create a better format for feedback for my work. and perhaps for others like it.

i've had the pleasure of being part of the feedback, etc group that has started up in perth and i really missed it when i was in melbourne. and, i became aware that the clubs model it uses works best for static, gallery-based, exhibitions that can be observed and discussed easily in real-time. this is not so easy for works like listening and being, or even the how to do things with words event from last month.

so, tomorrow night i'm going to head up a discussion about developing a model for feedback on work of this kind. we'll start to unpack what we consider 'meaningful' for an audience, and what our own parameters are. and even ask where performative work really resides - is it in real-time, or is it in our memories?

and if any of you guys have any ideas, please, chuck them in the comment section:

how to you assess the success of an experiential or performative work - especially if you were not there at the time?


i'll post the results here (and probably cross-post on the feedback, etc site too.)

cold and icy. yes.

being back in melbourne for 10 days, it was nice to see stuff again.

like, I had to miss exhibitions* because there were clashes, too many things on at the same time. and of course quite a bit of that time was spent putting together, performing and invigilating my own show.

i feel like i haven't written about other people's shows for ages, so here are a couple of shows i saw, with a strangely icy theme:

this is before that
kiron robinson and sanja pahoki at sarah scout


it felt like the first time I have seen more than one artist per show at SS and i liked it. there was a polarity and/or synthesis that was art of the show that hasn't been before.

the simple concept of kiron's used hours/wasted hours prints were OK: coloured block prints with scratch marks - like days of labour are tantamount to prison term or gallery visitor numbers.  they're short, sharp and to the point.

however, the sentiment of the work was really not my thing -  I prefer to subscribe to the pollyanna view that 'time wasted is never wasted time'. perhaps i'm losing my cynical edge. perhaps i'm just feeling quite grateful for being able to spend all my time on my art practice at the moment.

I did really like sanja's icy photographs of frosty scando landscapes and cold, empty stares of portraits, mounted on the wall around cool, white neon text 'i have loved' 'i have been loved'

this tableau, or scene, actually, was in balance and still edgy without wanting to fall over itself. tick.

my personal tip of the iceberg would have been a sculptural ice-based work in the gallery - even just for opening night. i imagined a big block of ice melting, or even stalactites dripping down the windows. this may have been influenced by the condensation on the windows of the gallery that night, but I couldn't shake it.

kim jaeger at seventh


I may be biased because i think almost everything kim does rocks, but this little work was properly BEAUTIFUL. yes, i said beautiful.

nothing like that image above, it was a diorama created in a blacked and blanked out project space with a large-ish peep-hole at a low eye-level, to create a dramatic and mystical landscape. the landscape was filled with large, white, iceberg-like spikes, appearing to rise up out of a still, dark water. this 'grotto' was perfectly and cool-ly lit, with the scale of it just right. it was like being on a boat, making my way through the floes of scandanavia, or the dark arctic.

it was so succinct and so clear - it actually took my breath away. for real.

sadly, the show finished on sunday, so you can't go and see it anymore. but hopefully there will be images online somewhere that will come closer to doing it justice than this little blog.


*like christopher hanrahan's show at tristian koenig, the vienna show and those egon schiele's at the NGV and the shaun gladwell extravaganza at ACMI.

image credits: sanja pahoki and kiron robinson from the sarah scout site 
kim jaeger you geysir crazy from the seventh site

listening and being live

hey peeps,

here are some links to some live channels i've set up for the listening performance today (28th june).

it's the first time i've done anything like this, so please forgive tech difficulties or straight-up operator errors that may occur.

ustream:

UPDATE : I CAN'T GET USTREAM TO WORK WITH MY iOS DEVICE stay tuned..


Live streaming video by Ustream

but you can video call me

skype:lauren.listen

listening and being thoughts

my exhibition is open at bus now and i've done two small performances there. and i feel OK about it so far.



after opening night and a two-hour intense performance amongst a packed room full of artists and art-lovin' hipster-types i felt fantastic! i thought the work looked good and conveyed something of what i'm trying to say about the place of listening in public.

and then in the few days since, and after a second performance on friday - a four-hour durational task cut short due to pain and logistics - there's been the ubiquitous doubt creeping in around the edges. it's so boring -  the nagging question about whether the work says what you want, and the discovery that sometimes it says things you don't want it to.

but, here are some of the little surprises, ideas and snippets of something-or-other that have been raised in the long hours of listening to my own dialogue, some of which might be interesting to you guys. and, if you've seen the show, i'd love to get your feedback.

things about listening i considered
what am i really listening to?
am i thinking things in order to have something to listen to?
listening to oneself is a frightening concept for many. under the guise of "not understanding", many people are afraid of what the work asks them to do.


things about being i considered
if i wasn't here, at this time, doing this work, could i exist?
being didactic and direct does not necessarily achieve understanding. and neither does being loose and aloof. can art ever purport to give understanding?
is listening the action between the nothing and being?

things about art and performance i have since considered

1. tino sehgal makes work in which movement and energy (including singing/sound) changes the dynamic of a space when a person enters it, creating a situation.
i noticed that when i am sitting and listening in the space, and someone enters the space, a situation is similarly created, in a subtracted way: stillness and the sound being absorbed by me changes the dynamic and the nature of the space and their relationship to it.

invariably people quieten themselves and become aware of their own sounds.



2. a lovely elderly painter came into the gallery the other day and whilst the work reminded him of happenings from 40 years ago, his criticism was that the work was too reliant on text. we discussed the lack of imagination in audience and the academic nature of art. and he suggested that artists who were doing those happenings in sydney all those years ago, were doing them because they found it the best form of expression.

i took it to mean that i am not performing these works because it's the only way to express what needs to be said, but that i'm doing it this way because i'm responding to written work. ouch.
i can see his perspective, but i have to say it was nice, at midnight last night, sitting up in the bath and saying out loud 'no, fuck you, listening IS the only way to talk about listening. and text ISN'T a substitute - it's just the next best thing.






i've posted the list of what i heard (recall only, not direct transcription) on the listening to the city blog, which i have started updating. i'll upload some pics there too.


on tuesday 28th june, i'll be doing an 8-hour performance at the gallery, between 7am and 3pm. if you're in melbourne, you're welcome to come and join in.  i'm also going to be setting up a video stream so that you can 'come in' to the gallery, even if you're not physically there.

it will probably via skype and ustream.

keep an eye out and i'll be spamming the networks on monday with the links.



photographers:
sarah barber
jared harris

blatant self-promotion #243

for those who are heading to melbourne any time soon, i have a solo exhibition at bus gallery. listening and being is a simple installation and a series of performances about the act of listening and reflecting.

i will be doing a performance on opening night, plus on the 24th and 28th june. and it's the kind of installation that i encourage gallery-goers to interact with. it's a massive mirror that disects the space, and expect loads of ear-prints on it.

you'll see what i mean when you go there.

there'll be a little catalogue you can pick up at the gallery, but if you can't make it, and would like one - leave a comment, or email me lauren [at] sheseesred [dot] com and i'll send it to you.


here's a little reference material [heidegger warning]
and an earlier version
and a map of where the gallery is

deets

listening and being

where: bus projects
basement
673 bourke st
melbourne

when: 21 june - 9 july, 2011
opening: 21 june 6 - 8pm
gallery: wed - sat 12 - 6pm
performances: 21, 24 and 28 june

how to do things with words

last friday night, my flatmate leigh and i put on an art event in our house: how to do things with words.

it started with my whinging about not really being able to find that many places to have exhibitions in perth, to which leigh replied: "why don't you just have one here?". of course!

so, we made it a joint effort, with all the works and activities about text and art.

the evening went a little something like this:

first light, last words
a wall-work by me which now lines our Victorian hallway. a series of six painted rectangles, mostly yellows with one blue which are symbolic of what i wake up to see each morning. i have a window above the doorway that my bed faces and each morrning, when i awake in a darkened room, all i can see is the refraction of the sunlight (or cloudy light) that comes in from the front door window.

underneath these 'light' works, is a string of words. these are the last words i heard before i fall asleep in the weeks leading up to the show:



library of annotated books
a work benjamin forster and i did, in which we found and collected only books that were annotated - where people had underlined or made marks in an effort to remember, or determine important ideas or valuable points in a book. We rearranged leigh's shelves in the loungeroom and the kitchen, making them into a library. having only books that were annotated surrounded the room with meaning and important information. none of those books were superfluous or ambivalent.

both of us made further notes about the notations on the wall. benjamin created a poem within the notation, by directing the reader to sections of each book. like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, except benjamin already chose it. and it's more narrative than adventure. my notes grouped the books in which sites were described by sound, referred to texts of previous works and highlighted the meta-notation of two books. ie. notated books that contained imagery of notation (by bruce nauman and claes oldenburg).

12-hour reading club
lead by leigh, the 12-hour reading club chose somebody to read an excerpt, or a work, on the hour, every hour, for twelve hours. with general discussion session starting at 7 and our first solo reader was robert cook, who read some of roland barthes' the fashion system. i kicked off the final session at 6am on saturday morning, reading the introduction from j.l. austin's how to do things with words (see what we did there?) and in between was a variety of poetry, silliness and seriousness.

when each reading started, the room full of people was quiet, then there would be some questions from the 'audience', which would kickstart well-behaved discussion. which would then generally descend into hubub and chit chat for the rest of the hour, slowing down just in time for the next reading.

the evening was a great mix of formal, critical readings - those ones we always mean to read, but never quite have time - and hilarious pop-culutral humourous pieces, revealing more about us than we perhaps like. we had a loungeroom and kitchen full of people, with wine, chai, hot chocolate and leigh's home-made soup. it was warm and cosy and a fantastic atmosphere.

there were waves of guest who arrived too - some who came right on time at 7pm, those who filtered through after dinner at about 9, then the late-comers - the young whippersnappers who turned up at midnight. one of them, joanna, stayed all the way until the end! what a champion!

during the evening's proceedings, visitors were encouraged to create their own catalogues, using leigh's collection of vintage typewriters. few did - more interested in the active discussion and chit chat about words than creating them. similarly, we set up a print station from which people could choose a section of annotation to have transcribed and given to them. it wasn't so popular. but that's OK - the excitement and camaraderie of the evening was fabulous enough as it was anyway.




when leigh and i finally rose, after midday the next day, we chatted over a champions breakfast and were quite pleased with ourselves. we had a house full of intelligent, interested, erudite and amiable people who enjoyed each other's company and had the opportunity to think and talk about interesting things for an evening, learning how to do things with words.



NOTE: there are more images coming. i just left them at the studio, it's late and i really wanted to just post this tonight. stay tuned for illustration soon.

what is the role of 'geek' in art?

i'm making sure i ask myself these things a lot lately - so that i'm not just geeking out for the sake of it.

which leads me to analyse what is particular about geeks, that might connect with traits of artists.

geeks like conceptual fun

at cia we've set up a wiki. it has some practical extensions, like breadcrumbs. but we've also included awesomeness.

so what the fuck is awesomeness anyway? nothing but this; o_O.

but conceptually, the idea of extending an online space with awesomeness through a php extension? that is the mark of a geek.

but it is also not that far from the conceptual imbuing of meaning into artworks. hans haacke imbued history into a box by capturing air and keeping it - exhibiting the air from 1965.

it's nothing,really.

but both challenge the viewer to consider a site as more than just the objects in it.

a festival of lying beneath

so i've been having a 20-minute nap at 3:30 every day since the 3rd may.


big deal, you say. 
fair enough, i say.


but, the nap is actually a specific artwork - a response to the what lies beneath project as part of the tiny stadiums festival (which is a great festival) and finished today with a fabulous day of radness (or so i hear).


as part of their project, the students and staff from UOW Media Arts 101 designed a series of alarmtrack sounds for smartphones, inspired by trips to the steelworks at Port Kembla.


each day, i climbed up to a little 'bed' i've made on a landing in a workshop space here at cia. i slept for 20 minutes and woke up to that day's track. you'll see i've been keeping track of my response to the tracks-as-alarms in the comments here. and a few of them i've cross-posted over at their blog (just for a nice bit of rss feedback, yo).


now that the festival has come to an end, i thought i'd post the rest of my comments and some pics from the process here as a full post.


you'll see that the process hasn't been clean - it hasn't worked like clockwork. which is great, because clockwork is pretty simple. co-ordinating a nap, songs, smartphone alarms and downloads into my day isn't really. well, not as simple as clockwork.


but it has been an interesting process for a couple of reasons. 


process has become enjoyable again. i do love doing projects where i do a small thing for an extended period of time, setting up a cycle. 


sleeping is an interesting action to undertake within art. there are lots of artists that do it, and i have also, previously, but it still throws up fascinating results.


and what is the relationship between sound and sleep. we have a very different perception of sound in this altered space and alvin lucier has done some amazing works about the relationship between alpha wave brain patterns and sound.


i have been groggy every day. and each alarm fucks with my waking in a different way - some more than others. coming back down to work at my studio desk after an afternoon nap is also a strange action - my cheeks are all red and my eyes are a big blurry. instant work and sociality after sleep is not a usual process, so i end up feeling a bit discombobulated.


and there's also this great feeling of sleeping with others. no, not in that way you pervs. i mean, i know that there are a bunch of other people all doing the project - we're all sleeping and waking up to these crazy alarms. it's almost the same as watching the FA Cup final and seeing on twitter that all your mates in the UK are watching it too - there's this silly little feeling of 'hands across the globe' kinda thing. it's not absolute truth, but it's a nice feeling anyway.


and, it has also been a good opportunity to take 20 minutes to not think about art. to enforce the siesta way of thinking into my day. a much-needed meditation time, or something. a model that isn't really used in art production - we just kill ourselves, or work crazy hours and come into the studio on the weekends. but rarely do we say 'oh, i'm just going to switch off for 20 minutes'. 


well, i don't anyway. until now.


even though i've been all the way across the country from the base of the project, it has been a chance to also show the 'sharing' model of art making. i can participate in a project, without having to be on site. that time, or action replication are the only points of connection. it's something for me to think about too - in current/future projects: the place of reproduction in feeling connected to.


well done to all the media arts students who made some great alarms and to lucas for being the usual thinkin' man he is. it's been lovely to sleep with you all.






laying beneath




































responding to laying beneath

ok, so i cocked up the order a bit. i napped, but didn't really sleep. and i woke up to alex's awake to a dream instead of snookie. but that's ok, i'll fix it up tomorrow.

i'm documenting it too. and today i looked like a puppy on a sheepskin rug. i need to work on it a bit.

but, the track itself was lovely and the tick-tock-tick-tock running through it was a reminder that i was late to a very important date, but with some kind of sloppy saggy clock that was squishing time.

03 May, 2011 16:11

oh dear, it's getting worse. i didn't nap today because there was a fun workshop using displaced vision and baby monitors.

damn.

ok, i'll be back on track tomorrow. and i'll post pics. this project is starting badly, isn't it.

04 May, 2011 17:13

yay! today it worked. and the today's track kinda fucked with my sense of space a little. i went into some weird other worldliness universe as i came to - the cricket=type sprinkle sounding electronica peppered my brain a little. it was great.

06 May, 2011 18:07

wow. i needed that sleep today. i awoke to jessicah haliday's piece (which was supposed to be the day before..i'm so on this), but it was quite a lovely way to wake up. gradual filtering then quite intense electro wah wah wah. my brain felt quick speckled afterwards.

07 May, 2011 16:05

 08.05.11 i forgot to post about my wake-up, but it was so lovely. i actually wanted to keep lying there. funnily enough, i'm starting to wake up two minutes before the alarm goes off. turns out it doesn't take much to reprogram sleep in the afternoon :)

holy crap! i woke up quickly this afternoon. three sharp bangs and i was up and stopped the alarm. i didn't even listen to the rest of it (sorry jamie). and i was so flustered that i banged my head on one of the beams. excellent for waking up quickly. not so great for waking up and still feeling functional.

09 May, 2011 16:28

dammit. i didn't properly sleep this afternoon. must have something to do with the coffee i had about an hour beforehand. which is a shame, because i quite liked the tick-tock-tocking of the alarm

10 May, 2011 16:00

google erased some of my comments in their fall-out
but i keep forgetting to write down what i think about the alarms too.

13.05.11
i haven’t been to india, but i imagine the sound of clinking bells and steel cutlery in the morning to sound a little like this. waking to the sound of running water is just mean :)

14.05.11

the truck reversing noise matched strangely with some crickets that were in the building. in fact i woke up when the crickets started, thinking it was the alarm. and then the alarm kicked in. it was a confusing afternoon that one.

today's the last one was great - a slippery slope of something rolling down brought my mind rolling with it from subconscious to consciousness - like a bowling ball rolling back from the pins.

15 May, 2011 17:19