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

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.

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

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

nothing but the humming of wires in the wind

there's something in this..

[from john wyndham's day of the triffids]

sound out

transience has afforded me some thinking time about public transport.

i've been spending a bit of time on it lately and noticing the difference between transport in melbourne and those systems that i experienced in berlin, london and dubai.

i noticed, particularly, how loud our trains were. and i don't mean to run, but the human noise level on them. people talk much, much louder, teenagers actually shout and scream at each other on them, so many people have mobile phone conversations on them and there is a general din about them.

and which probably explains why we have far more people with headphones on trains that i ever noticed in any of those cities*

i've managed to come up with two quick, simplistic reasons for that so far, separate from a cynical view on the commercial influence of personal music devices:

design

most of the trains in berlin and london have large sections of train with a central aisle in which many people stand and people sit flanking that aisle. people face strangers and sit next to each other. conversations between compatriots are rarely conducted across the divide, and so the conversations are far more hushed. added to this, the sound of train the underground perhaps drowns out a possibility of discussion, and certainly of mobile phone discussion.

whereas most trains in melbourne have small series of facing banks of seats and a central aisle. in peak hour, people stand in the central aisle, but don't interrupt the flow of cross-conversation. generally it's actually quieter at peak hour, because there are more strangers sitting opposite each other, but even still, it's pretty chatty. 

given that only 4 stations are underground (and thus have access to networks except vodafone), the amount of mobile chatter is also way more than i became used to.

culture

teenagers still act appallingly in berlin and london (i watched a boy spit on strangers into the window of a train as it was taking off in berlin), but they don't seem to be quite so loud as our obnoxious youngsters, which indicates that culturally, there is an etiquette around noise in public.

even shouting across streets in berlin and dubai was rare. i think this culture of australians as loudmouths comes from our sense of space. we have a large soundspace, born from our stereotypical access to space (which gives me the shits). we're rarely walking/sitting/being in confined spaces with millions of other people - we walk so far apart that we have to yell. we can't possible sit so close together that we almost touch - which leads to practically yelling at each other from across a train.

melbourne's population is growing like mad at the moment - it will be interesting to see in 5 year's time if this changes the way we relate to each other on an auditory level. will we evolve to communicate closer together, or will we grip tightly to our sense of entitlement at space and continue to yell over a chasm of public space?

*i haven't done controlled experiments, but for those who may critically object, suggesting that perhaps i don't have evidence, you're probably right. but i suggest you read my blog more and remember that i have spent the last 3 years obsessed with how people wear headphones in public. so there.

image credit: sinan229 from flickr

rush gush

right now, i think i would LOVE to be geoffrey rush's personal assistant. or daughter. or some other kind of close friend that has proud gushing rites. prompted by seeing this gorgeous nerdboyfriend pic (in a play adaption of a favourite book: diary of a madmen), my rush crush has just hit peak.

his depiction of lionel logue in the king's speech has been fauned over elsewhere in the media, but i just have to remind you all, for those who have seen it, how brilliant he was.

he was brilliant. the end.

[there will be more on that movie later in the program of course, relating to sound in public, natch]

and of course him as barbosa in the pirates/caribbean trilogy and shine were both excellent. not to mention numerous other amazing films and theatre productions.

but it was a recent imdb iphone app entry that really endeared me to him. it spoke of his breakdown (i think in 1996) and giving up acting for a few years, distressed about his lack of success on stage and film. after 2000 he came back stronger, clearer and has since made all those fantastic films/plays that we know him for.

i was reminded that success isn't always for the young and that even the greats have points of intense doubt and retreat. it also reminded me that true artistic greatness can never really be lost. mr rush picked himself off, dusted himself off and started all over again.

thank goodness for that.

music in berlin

for most of my time in berlin, i've been doing a whole lot of listening. mostly to the ambient sounds of the public realm. usually 'outside'.

but, i've also made sure that i'm taking in as much music-based experience as i can whilst i'm here. the relationship that germans and berliners have to music is particularly interesting to me. especially as it's like a super-extended-remix version of the relationship melbournians have to music.

there is such a wide variety of stuff going on, so it's been a great chance to just dip in and out of all kinds of styles, venues and times. i could, if i wanted to, spend every night of the week going to see electro-acoustic performances. or dance to techno. or see a classical performance. or go see a rock gig. thankfully i have neither the time nor the money to do so, otherwise i'd never sleep, eat, or do what i came here to do.

but, it's been great to sample in small doses.

last week i went to a choir/orchestral performance of giuseppe verdi's requiem - part of it, the dies irae, is surely in every tim burton movie ever made. well, it was the 90-minute whole piece. all fire and brimstone and judgment day. counter reformation-styles, in a protestant church. awesome.

a few weeks ago i went to peaches' 'operantomime' peaches does herself - celebrating 10 years of her career and all the love sex gender-bending fuck-you rock-out that comes with it. it was pretty goddamm spectactular, that's for sure.

last night peter newman and i stood at schieslischer's tor u-bahn and listened to two members of  krautrock/90s slacker band, camera, absolutely kill it in the entrance to the station on a practice amp and a hollow wooden stool, with marakas on the 'kick'. it was fucking amazing, genuine and reminded me of the brilliant BBC documentary on krautrock (thanks stan!)

this week i'm off to a couple of experimental performances in my local 'hood, one of which i think will feature chris abrahams, home-town pride, and some raw composition work at ausland - a venue i haven't been to yet, but hosts some brilliant gigs.

every weekend i go dancing until at least 4am. it's pretty rad. and the relationship berliners have to dancing in a club is awesome - there's not commandeering of the dancefloor here, kids. everyone faces the front and you dance. if you're with friends, you dance beside each other, and if you're there alone, that's cool - we'll all dance with you. it's such a great public action.

and, boys here dance. pretty well, and even when it's as ugly as sin, they're doing it with committment - it's awesome. there's no sense that a guy is just approximating dancing so that he can get in a girl's pants - there's hardly any direct sleeze on the dancefloor, but it's all hot as. it's fantastic.

and there's this weird music/dance style that i've called the Berlin Skip. there's probably a proper name for it, but that's what i call it. the music is a little bit soca/a little salsa - i think it's called 'gypsy sound' and everyone dances essentially the same to it. i liked it when i first heard it and danced for a couple of hours, but now it's just too repetitive and i can't do it anymore. i need a little more variety in my dancefloor action, thanks :)

speaking of which, i've been to berghain a few times (it's massive, they dance all night, it's all about the freaks in there). although last weekend i got rejected! weird! but in a way, completely fun and part of the crazy/random/i-do-what-i-want ethos of the place that i actually really value.

interestingly, i haven't been to see a band play a straight-up rock/punk gig since i've been here. which is kind of hilarious, given my previous intensity towards the genre. to be honest, all the flyers i've seen are for pretty big american bands i have no interest in seeing, and i haven't quite plugged into the kind of venue that hosts great bands from germany. i'm sure it's out there, but i've been so enamoured with the electronic music goodness, that i figure that i'll just head to the tote when i get home to make up for it :)

before i leave, i need to go to the opera, a couple of baroque/romantic performances, and if i can, get to a stockhausen performance too.

i don't have a whole lot of music in my own collection that screams BERLIN, but the couple that do at the moment are on high rotation - black cab from melbourne, who obviously recorded their album call signs in or after time in berlin - there are multiple references to the city in their songs and the church bells they sample ring outside my apartment at 12 and 6 daily. listening to this album really adds to both the city and the album - it's like i'm really IN both of them.

the debut album from beak> does something similar - with the dark, electro-romantic-atmos feel about it, it's a perfect soundtrack to the elemental darkness, cold and wind that is enveloping berlin at the moment.

blatant self-promotion #242

ok, so this is simultaneously exciting and embarassing.


you know those blogs that just on about about the stuff they're doing? without saying anything really interesting? this is quickly turning into one of them, isn't it. i'm so sorry, dear regular reader. i promise that, after this, i will spend the rest of the year sitting in cafes reading interesting articles on the state of the world, and watching it all go by so that i can impart interesting, quirky or ridiculous ideas about me and the rest of humanity.


and in the mean time, come to this show!


actually, it's been quite an exciting process being involved in this exhibition. as you may recall, i popped into the gallery not so long ago - really intrigued by what they were up to, and have since been in pretty regular contact with matthew and sonja, the crazy-intelligent directors.


after quite a bit of intense discussion about the history, language and misdirection of site-specificity*, they have been gracious or foolish enough to invite me to make a work to include in their latest show. 


the work i'm making has been a bit of a dissection of a dissection of ideas about site-specific artists. it's also probably the least visual/aesthetic of all the work i've made to date - sitting deeper in concept and imagination. location in all its complexities.


it has felt like the equivalent of making an audio work that has been implanted in your memory, without you ever having heard it, and then forcing you to unhear it.

a lot of the ideas and the unravelling happens on paper: the role of artists in relation to site/space/history, the role of the critic in it all, how important language is, placing art within the fabric of society/public/political realm (as opposed to the decoration of it) and the nature of perception - visual/audio and imagination.


the other artists in the show really are making some fantastic works, so if you're in berlin, it'd be great to see you there.


deets:


what: site-specificity
when: 13. november 2010 from 7pm 
where: essays and observations 
maxstraße 1 - 13347 berlin


opening times until 18. december: 
saturdays from 2-7pm and by appointment






----


* some references for those not able to come along:


richard serra
miwon kwon
bruce smith/hark!

blatant self-promotion #241

tomorrow night (wed. 3 november), i'm in a group show in berlin, within the studio i've been at for the last 2 months.


if you're in berlin (or you can send a proxy), come along, it will be ace to see you.


i only have a couple of works in the show, but i realised during the selection process that i've made a STACK of work about sound and specifically listening in public, even in the last 6 weeks. maybe i should find a space for a more comprehensive show.


anyways, here are the deets:


Wednesday 3 November
19:00 - 23:00
one night only

Rooftop Studios
5th Floor
Chodowieckistraße 35
10405 Berlin

innere stimme

on monday night i went to the last few hours of a beautiful, simple and powerful performance at veneklasen/werner gallery near checkpoint charlie. directed by olaf nicolai, it was part of an ongoing project series devised between the gallery and soundfair. 

within robert schurrman's opus 20, there is a line of compositional notation between the treble and the bass lines, entitled innere stimme. the pianist, with both hands occupied, cannot play the piece, but it is intended to be an internal, underlying and (silent) aspect of the work itself. nicolai's work was a 30 hour endurance ongoing performance of this piece in which four performers interpreted the 'secret track' across the three large gallery rooms. 

the work was the kind of work that makes me cry: it was so engaging, so powerful in its execution - the acoustics in the gallery were fucking divine, and could be enjoyed at a variety of levels: from pure entertainment to deep spiritual connections as the harmony and dischord of the performers often connected to hymns and historical or religious music. there was a period where the male performer resembled something from a guido reni work of st. sebastian - except our performer, sartorially speaking, classic hipster/barley replete with arse hanging out the back of skinny jeans. it was perfect.

perceived personalities - given that i stayed for a while and perhaps it's the habit of audience (especially in a performative context), i found myself ascribing personalities to each of the singers. based on their dynamics, their interaction with the space, their movements, body language and their dress: The Opera Singer, The Hipster Grandad (his voice at time reminded me of my Grandad, who has a beautiful bass voice and who i remember singing whilst shaving), Billie Holiday and The Playful One.

dynamics -  given that there were four performers and only three rooms, there was an inevitable interaction between the peformers. i'm not sure how it had been for the previous 27 hours, but it was fascinating to watch. some just didn't and couldn't interact with each other (anymore), either their musical styles were two different, their personalities clashed or both. it was interesting to watch one performer enter a room and see the other either match or reduce their 'output'. you could read a stack of power-based dynamics into the experience. volume and resonance became tools for domination, as did dischordance, repetition and something i'm calling amusicality. i made that word up, but i'll explain it in a bit.

acoustics - interaction with the space: each of the performers used the track and their vocals to interact with the space in different ways. each had quite different vocal styles, so their interaction with acoustics was quite different. the more operatic singers (The Opera Singer and The Hipster) played with resonance, a lot. Billie Holiday didn't really interact with the space itself at all, maintaining a 'performer' stance the whole time - constructed poses, chanteuse facial expressions and the kind of style expected on a stage, in front of a mike. If i'm perfectly honest, she gave me the shits. I can't explain why. The Playful One probably gave everyone else the shits but i enjoyed watching her the most - she used a huge variety of vocal/sound to really investigate both space and the work. There were times where she literally sang the piece into and across a  corner to see what the space sounded like. She sang to the floor, sang like a spanish housewife, sang like a child, sang at the top, middle and back of her voice - she whispered and made completely amusical sounds (that's what i meant earlier). She really played with as many variables as possible. Maybe out of boredom, but i found it fascinating. And enjoyable - she kind of fucked with the rest of the more-serious voices going on, whilst still being able to sing harmoniously if it was called for.

i had intended to go in for an hour and ended up staying for almost three times that, because the work was so rich, especially for me, with my specific focus on sound/public/private/spatial thang, it was a valhalla. in fact, it's the kind of work that i wish that i made myself and i realised i have a long way to go before then.

I have one criticism of the work, which is actually its ending. in her biography, marina abramovic speaks about controlling the end of the peformance - either clearing the gallery before she brakes the illusion, or making the ending a specific part of the peformance. either way, it being considered. i tried it last week, to the best i could, and i found it worked. the nicolai piece didn't end. in all the promotion, the work was intended to finish at midnight and we all waited for either the gallery staff to signal the end, or the performers, or the artist - something. but, it just petered out, some of the performers stopping, others going on for ages afterwards. no closure; no opportunity for the audience to give a round of applause or celebrate the work. i think these things are important. and after all that, i left feeling a sense of unfinished. maybe i'm too critical.

this aside, the work was stunning, and has stayed with me for an age. i imagine that it will for a while longer.

listening to the history of listening

yesterday sarah mosca and i went on a mission to teufelsberg in berlin - to the old NSA listening station. a proper structure for sound/listening in the public realm.





and oh my god, it was fucking amazing.



we had a string of excellent luck: the weather was great, we found our way ok, dodged fences, security and ticket inspectors.



we were like two of the famous five off on ad adventure. we even had a packed lunch - a thoroughly modern version of 'slices of ham and lashings of ginger beer'.



the station was unbelievable - visually and acoustically.



sarah and i did an impromptu quasi-performance of sorts, fucking around with the zany acousitcs of the listening dome - something that both blixa bargeld and alice hui-sheng chang would have been proud of.



i then tried to squeeze in a quick listening project of the lift shaft before die sicherheit arrived. fingers crossed i can go back soonish.

here's wikipedia's history of the place, just to put it into perspective.

sound appropriating space

last night i was an interesting night for thinking about the use of sound to appropriate space.

it started with a series of performances for listening spaces, as part of the sound art program at ars electronica. of course i missed the first set trying to find something to eat without meat in it. which i'm still cross about - it included a perfomance of luigi nono's la fabrica illuminata, which i only just heard about last week (thanks huw!).

but, after that i saw/experienced some brilliant works - two by arvo pärt that took place in a room where there is a water-based sound-wave visualisation work. both works, at either end of a long warehouse space, influenced the play of light onto a wall from the shimmering water. the light and water articulated the acoustic resonance of the music in terms of the space - it was perfect. for the first work i watched the performers and the space, for the second, just the space.

after that, we all went outside to listen to another work, in the 'public' space. it was amazing and shocking for me to see immediately that being 'outside' in 'public', all prior codes of music listening etiquette went out the window. people were walking around, drinking beer and eating, i was tweeting about it, people were talking, facing all kinds of directions and there was hardly any 'attention'. there was no 'performer' as such, although the context was still within the frame of this series of sound perfomances.

i always knew that the place of the stage/frame and black box/white box was to bring people to attention, but i had never seen it contrasted and enacted so quickly. it was amazing.

next, we were in the sound space - part of the tabakfabrik that has been singled out as an amazing resonant space and within which a lot of minimal sound works have been played over the last few days - because of the amazing acoustics and reverb. rubert huber with franz hautzinger played a sound field, which i mainly experienced by lying on my back and staring up at the ceiling, letting the composition envelope me.

i noticed how people listening throughout these performances, and it was interesting to note the dynamics in this last spatial work. the traditional dynamic between performer/audience was rendered useless by the end and again, it was about the work and how it was experienced.

it started off with a stack of people facing the centre, where the instruments were. after half way (during which i had been lying down the whole time), i noticed that people who couldn't "not-watch" had left, and the rest had found positions lying down on the floor, propped up against the wall, relaxing into their chairs and assuming positions more conducive to a non-visual attention.

right up my alley.

in fact, people were so relaxed that the last 5 minutes of a performance included a new bass-line: from a snoring member of the audience, which reverbed throughout the building. me and a couple of peeps almost wet ourselves repressing our laughter.

then, as a compliment, or adjunct to that on the way home, i was walking home through the empty streets of linz when a pair of drunks came walking down the hill, singing. i could hear them from about 500 metres away and it was such a beautiful sight - arm in arm, walking and singing some english pop song together. as we got closer, they didn't even stop singing - we just waved at each other and they carried on belting out this tune, which carried through the whole city. i could hear them for about 500m after we passed too - i giggled my arse off the whole time.

i loved it! they were using the empty city as a perfect acoustic stage, again not for the audience/performance dynamic but for the work itself.

image thanks to rubra from flickr. i will upload my pics a bit later