I AM PIA!

I just finished reading Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and I can confidently say that it is the best book I have read since Jose Saramago’s Blindness last year. Hedges describes his experiences as a veteran war correspondent in places such as Central America, the Balkans, Iraq, Palestine and Sudan with what one may describe as a “wealth of knowledge and experience” but what seems to me also a weight or burden as he evokes such sadness. The depth to which he plunges in attempting to portray the agony and wrath the human race has generated in an act we repeat throughout our history on earth with such clarity is truly enlightening. I will look forward to reading his other works soon.

Technorati Tags:
books, war

Rhizome posted a video demo of an iPod running Pure Data ported to iPod Linux. An interesting piece of progress in the exploration of iPod as instrument. It is forseable that one may be able to use the iPod soon as a tool for audio performance.

Last weekend I participated in the Pod-War at the Cricketers. Each contestant is given 20 minutes to perform a ’set’ using their iPod only. My play list contained:

Heartbeats. . . The Knife. . . Deep Cuts

Go Bang. . . Dinosaur L. . . 24-24 Music

Give Me Back My Love. . . Boyz in Shock. . . Choice

Frequency 7. . . Visage. . . Mind of a Toy

Beat Box Diversion 1 (extended version). . . Art Of Noise. . . Beat Box (Diversion One)

There weren’t many people dancing and on playing the last song I chose to worn my friend that it was a particularly nerdy track indicating that the floor may finally completely clear out. It would seem on cue, that a man approached to confirm that I was indeed playing “Beat Box Diversion”. He was wearing a particularly baggy black t-shirt with some black jeans and a fuzzy long mop of hair. His intonation was coated in an over excitement that threw a couple of accidental pieces of stray saliva our way. He was infact a nerd.

It will indeed be exciting to be able to play with your audio collection at parties and clubs where mixers and effects are not available. The pod wars I notice to bring in a nice variety of different music tastes and seem to be an effective and reasonably creative social pass time in a drinking environment.

Technorati Tags:
music, ipod

Saw this beautiful bit of video about a man who repairs electrical cabling at great heights that was posted on boing boing today. It is apparently originally from an imax film about helicopters called “Straight Up: Helicopters in Action” It included some historical references to a man by the name of Michael Faraday a scientist from the early 1800s who contributed to the fields of electromagnetism and chemistry. Well worth having a look at.

link to video

link to boing boing reference

Technorati Tags:
video, electricity

Performance group Conductor are presently thick in their residency at First Draft Gallery. I also noticed that they have a tumblelog (link) with some stuff they are working on now. Their show opens on the 6th of June. Should be a good one. They are showing some of the video work I did with them a while ago. I am looking forward to seeing the new machines they are inventing.

(Photo by Olivia Simmons)

link for their bit on First Draft

link for the video stuff I did for them (I really ought to put a quicktime up… workin on it)

Technorati Tags:
shows, art, performance, sound, video, residency

He Said She Said on Tuesday 24th April at Kudos Gallery link

Conservative times on Wednesday 25th April at First Draft Gallery Kelly Doley’s Matress Paintings entitled link

Technorati Tags:
shows

Wade Marynowski’s work Autonomous improvisation v1 is presently installed at Artspace. It is a three channnel video instalation that is controlled by an intelligently prepared pianola. The video is comprised of stock piles of performance footage of many of our great local audio performers including Toy Death, Toe Cutter, Lucas Abella, Singing Sadie, Robin Fox, Gail Priest, Milica Stefanovic, Clayton Thomas and many many more. To me, it was mostly just great to see all these people, some of whom I have watched perform live many times. It really excentuated a community that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the larger more recognised art world.

The pianola indipendently performs with the video by randomly motorised key sequences that seem to trigger changes in the video playback. As keys go down on the piano the video changes it’s place in the playback loop. I sat for a good 20 minutes waiting for the loop to finish only to realise there was no such thing. The duration and combination of video segments are decided by a network of computers with some sort of algorithm. Some criticised the piano’s significance and felt that is was too much. I wondered if it was a way of coming to terms with the problems of authorship in the work. Maybe it was Wade trying to arbitrarily jam with everyone.

All that aside it would be a great work to promote this pocket of local art that often gets avoided for it’s weirdness. It really is possible to get a good snippet of a large range of artist’s work without feeling trapped for a whole arduace performance which is why I know many don’t attend experimental audio performance nights in Sydney.

The work will be at Artspace until the 19th of May link

Technorati Tags:
performance, sound, art, video

Recently I have been noticing different uses of oral history and I would like to pay my respects. About six months ago Amy Goodman spent an hour with Dave Isay on Democracy Now! to talk about a project he runs called Story Corps. Using “Story Booths”, small recording booths that are installed in different public locations around America StoryCorps attempts to capture the public’s story. The booth acts much like a private confessional that people can use to record their personal thoughts and experiences. A person can book a session for a minimal donation for a 40 minute period. The idea is to bring someone along that can be a subject and to ask them questions. At the end of the 40 minutes your story has been recorded for the StoryCorps archive which is online and part of the archive in the Library of Congress and you are given the recording to take home on a CD. So far StoryCorps has collected over 10,000 stories. They have a booth in New York’s Grand Central Station and also some traveling booths. They included a range of different segments from their archive on Democracy Now which were all beautiful to listen to.

this is a link to a tv interview on abc

this is a link to a transcript of the interview on democracy now

A book that I bought last year and have not yet read that was edited by Sam Bahour and Staughton and Alice Lynd called Home Land: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians This is a collection of oral histories recorded from Palestinians in America and also in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The book attempts to offer a variety of personal stories to present a truthful history of the Palestinian people.

On Rhizome this week a project appeared called Migration Audio Archive This project is a web-based archive of 100 audio accounts of migration. This particularly interested me coming from a ‘migrant family’ and also the project being German which is where my mother migrated from.

The idea of preserving audio recordings of oral histories strikes me now as something very important. The experience of listening to someone physically telling their story has an element of intimacy that the written word cannot contain but most importantly the opportunity of unedited, unfiltered intentions seems essential when looking for truth.

I also went looking for something more local and found the Oral History Association of Australia

Technorati Tags:
history, recording, oral history, migration

Alex Davies
Shannon O’Neill
Nick Mariette
Sumugan Sivanesan and Sam Smith
Ben Byrne

Lanfranchis Memorial Discotheque 2/144 Cleveland St Chippendale
Entry by $8/$6 donation

This should be a good one. Nick Mariette did a great presentation for Dorkbot-Syd February which should be up on that website as soon as we finish the podcast audio.

link

Technorati Tags:
shows, sound, improvisation

Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) has made a very funny website to promote her new book called “No One Belongs Here More Than You” using a whiteboard marker and the top of her fridge and then the top of her stove.

I had no idea but Miranda July has done a number of interesting projects involving the public participation and the internet. One of the projects is a collaborative work with Harrell Fletcher called LEARNING TO LOVE YOU MORE. This involves a series of about 60 different assignments written for the public to perform. When you complete an assignment you hand in a report including documentation and your report is posted on the website and also may be exhibited. Assignments include (No. 2)”Make a neighbourhood field recording” (No. 10) Make a flier of you day” (No. 35) “Ask your family to describe what you do.” “Like a recipe, meditation practice, or familiar song, the prescriptive nature of these assignments is intended to guide people towards their own experience.”(link)

How will I know Her is a website containing portraits of people holding up portraits of people they are separated from for reasons beyond their control. The works were also exhibited in Germany.

These are all wonderful examples of how artists can use the internet as an exhibition space and appeal effectively for public involvement from all over the world. The results are beautiful.

Technorati Tags:
art, websites, performance, public participation

I just need to let people know that this here is the best damn green tea I have ever had! Yamamotoyama available at all good Asian grocery stores. The roasted brown rice really makes it.

Technorati Tags:
tea