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If you know this boy, tell the police." |
26 October 2010
Noise of Emergency (hałas wyjątkowego)
20 October 2010
19 October 2010
Glow
We Glow In The Dark: A Hybrid Sculpture
We Glow In The Dark (WGITD) is an interactive public sculpture powered by solar energy and made mobile with innovative green folding technology. The goal of WGITD is to use public sculpture as a way to bring sustainable energy and opportunitites for artistic multimedia programming to diverse communities across Philadelphia. This project is made possible with support by City Of Philadelphia and Department of Human Services and Mural Arts Program.
We Glow In The Dark (WGITD) is an interactive public sculpture powered by solar energy and made mobile with innovative green folding technology. The goal of WGITD is to use public sculpture as a way to bring sustainable energy and opportunitites for artistic multimedia programming to diverse communities across Philadelphia. This project is made possible with support by City Of Philadelphia and Department of Human Services and Mural Arts Program.
14 October 2010
This is actually a response to David's DJ Shadow post down there but the comment wouldnt allow my video
I was under the impression that John Oswald's Plexure, released in 1993, was the first entire album to depend solely on other musicians' work. Plexure is about 20 minutes of mixed and mashed snippets of pop songs released between, I think, 1980-1990, or at least somewhere in that span of years. It’s pretty disorienting, but also extremely interesting, if you can stand what essentially sounds like somebody fiddling with a radio tuning knob, constantly cycling through radio stations for 20 minutes.
However, I think Oswald has been quick to distance himself from "sampling" in the traditional sense, like what is done in hip-hop. Oswald labels what he does as Plunderphonics (essay: Plunderphonics or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative) and seems to draw the distinction between Plunderphonics and sampling in that hip-hop and other sample-heavy genres, e.g. glitch, normally attempt to fit their samples into an existing peice, or a peice which will exist; either way, the sample is merely a layer among layers. To "plunder" is instead to make music exclusively out of samples, to use the sampling machine as a musical instrument in itself. To create plunderphonic music is then to use such an instrument to recreate "noise" (what we hear around us, natural or unnatural) the same way that composers (Oswald dwells on Ives in particular) create melody out of existing tone scales and public domain pieces (since many of those older composers were creating in a copyright-free era).
It seems that Oswald is aligning himself with Futurist composer Luigi Russolo, who created “music” out of assembled devices which would recreate noises such as whistling, thundering, creaking, etc, and John Cage, whose compositions using radios in the 40s and 50s (I think that’s right) preface Oswald’s own radio-derived pieces. Essentially, Oswald provides an avenue out of the copyright dilemma by asserting that A. “plundering” has been a musical tradition stretching from Bach to jazz to contemporary pop music, and B. the sampler is a unique instrument, just as are pianos, trumpets, guitars, capable of producing music that, though it may be derived entirely from other pieces, is wholly unique on its own and is thus a creation equal to any other musical or artistic creation.
I have Plexure if anybody is interested in hearing any of it, but I won’t post anything from it since I don’t want anybody unwillingly bombarded by such abrasive dissonance. I will, however, post a Girl Talk song; Girl Talk is the pseudonym for DJ Gregg Gillis, who is a contemporary mash-up artist. Mash-up, as a genre, I believe probably comes closest genre-wise to reproducing Oswald’s aims in Plunderphonics, except that mash-up, generally speaking, is party music.
The song is track number 10, I think, from Gillis' 3rd album, Night Ripper (Warning: Explicit language). The video was created by Concordia University professor Matthew Soar, for the Open Cinema Source Project.
Part of the fun of mash-up music, and Girl Talk's in particular, is also being to recognize all the samples (there's something like 200 or so,maybe more, samples spread out over 16 songs) which relates to a buzzword thats been circulating recently about the "pleasure of the known," in which culture has become so reflexive and referential that part of the cultural experience, and part of participating in society, is being able to place references (think of such fare as Mystery Science Theater 3000, Family Guy, the Simpsons, not to mention tons of poetry, etc). To be a participant and to derive pleasure from participation seems increasingly tethered to knowing sources, and being appreciate the layering of sources (a source referencing a source refering a source). Of course, this is incredibly off topic and deserves a different post entirely.
As for what David said about subdivision, I like the application to text poetry and I agree that prosody seems to be the replacement for the music that would accompany a video poem (I guess that should be reversed: music is the replacement for prosody). Or even for a video poem without music, video itself has a rhythm to it, as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky noted in his book Sculpture in Time: "The dominant, all powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame....[The expression of time]...is the very foundation of cinema...Rhythm...is not the metrical sequence of peices; what makes it is the time-thrust within the frames. Rhythm...is the main formative element of cinema....Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame." (Sculpting in Time, pgs 113-120).
Anyway, I agree that sampling, or plundering involves the subdividing of ideas in a LFT kind of way; the only quibble I have, David, is your statement that "[DJ Shadow] unit[es] others' fragments". Isnt it the other way around, though? Don't his sources, and the sources for most other musical sampling/plundering begin as united, and then the artist/sampler/Dj/plunderer fragments those compositions? At least, that really only applies to music-- not that a DJ couldnt unite out of fragments, I just dont know of any case where a DJ has done so. I think the point you made is still relevant for poets though, and maybe this is where the alikeness between a DJ and a poet ends: a poet can unite fragments or fragment unities and create poetry out of either. We're lucky to have it both ways.
As for what I was supposed to post, about the supposedly French Oulipian idea about how any word has the potential and the weight of all other words (which I think I now actually picked up from Derrida, not Oulipo) I'll get to that this weekend, since what began as a simple "Hey, here's the link" has turned into something else.
However, I think Oswald has been quick to distance himself from "sampling" in the traditional sense, like what is done in hip-hop. Oswald labels what he does as Plunderphonics (essay: Plunderphonics or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative) and seems to draw the distinction between Plunderphonics and sampling in that hip-hop and other sample-heavy genres, e.g. glitch, normally attempt to fit their samples into an existing peice, or a peice which will exist; either way, the sample is merely a layer among layers. To "plunder" is instead to make music exclusively out of samples, to use the sampling machine as a musical instrument in itself. To create plunderphonic music is then to use such an instrument to recreate "noise" (what we hear around us, natural or unnatural) the same way that composers (Oswald dwells on Ives in particular) create melody out of existing tone scales and public domain pieces (since many of those older composers were creating in a copyright-free era).
It seems that Oswald is aligning himself with Futurist composer Luigi Russolo, who created “music” out of assembled devices which would recreate noises such as whistling, thundering, creaking, etc, and John Cage, whose compositions using radios in the 40s and 50s (I think that’s right) preface Oswald’s own radio-derived pieces. Essentially, Oswald provides an avenue out of the copyright dilemma by asserting that A. “plundering” has been a musical tradition stretching from Bach to jazz to contemporary pop music, and B. the sampler is a unique instrument, just as are pianos, trumpets, guitars, capable of producing music that, though it may be derived entirely from other pieces, is wholly unique on its own and is thus a creation equal to any other musical or artistic creation.
I have Plexure if anybody is interested in hearing any of it, but I won’t post anything from it since I don’t want anybody unwillingly bombarded by such abrasive dissonance. I will, however, post a Girl Talk song; Girl Talk is the pseudonym for DJ Gregg Gillis, who is a contemporary mash-up artist. Mash-up, as a genre, I believe probably comes closest genre-wise to reproducing Oswald’s aims in Plunderphonics, except that mash-up, generally speaking, is party music.
The song is track number 10, I think, from Gillis' 3rd album, Night Ripper (Warning: Explicit language). The video was created by Concordia University professor Matthew Soar, for the Open Cinema Source Project.
Part of the fun of mash-up music, and Girl Talk's in particular, is also being to recognize all the samples (there's something like 200 or so,maybe more, samples spread out over 16 songs) which relates to a buzzword thats been circulating recently about the "pleasure of the known," in which culture has become so reflexive and referential that part of the cultural experience, and part of participating in society, is being able to place references (think of such fare as Mystery Science Theater 3000, Family Guy, the Simpsons, not to mention tons of poetry, etc). To be a participant and to derive pleasure from participation seems increasingly tethered to knowing sources, and being appreciate the layering of sources (a source referencing a source refering a source). Of course, this is incredibly off topic and deserves a different post entirely.
As for what David said about subdivision, I like the application to text poetry and I agree that prosody seems to be the replacement for the music that would accompany a video poem (I guess that should be reversed: music is the replacement for prosody). Or even for a video poem without music, video itself has a rhythm to it, as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky noted in his book Sculpture in Time: "The dominant, all powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame....[The expression of time]...is the very foundation of cinema...Rhythm...is not the metrical sequence of peices; what makes it is the time-thrust within the frames. Rhythm...is the main formative element of cinema....Rhythm in cinema is conveyed by the life of the object visibly recorded in the frame." (Sculpting in Time, pgs 113-120).
Anyway, I agree that sampling, or plundering involves the subdividing of ideas in a LFT kind of way; the only quibble I have, David, is your statement that "[DJ Shadow] unit[es] others' fragments". Isnt it the other way around, though? Don't his sources, and the sources for most other musical sampling/plundering begin as united, and then the artist/sampler/Dj/plunderer fragments those compositions? At least, that really only applies to music-- not that a DJ couldnt unite out of fragments, I just dont know of any case where a DJ has done so. I think the point you made is still relevant for poets though, and maybe this is where the alikeness between a DJ and a poet ends: a poet can unite fragments or fragment unities and create poetry out of either. We're lucky to have it both ways.
As for what I was supposed to post, about the supposedly French Oulipian idea about how any word has the potential and the weight of all other words (which I think I now actually picked up from Derrida, not Oulipo) I'll get to that this weekend, since what began as a simple "Hey, here's the link" has turned into something else.
05 October 2010
Drag
So I'm sickish. But you know. These things happen.
You know what else is happening? I'm dragging 18 18-year-olds to the museum to be with some art. i selected 15 pieces (the max) -- wildly different, hopefully intriguing to them (at least they are to me, so that's covered) for them to experience. most likely, they'll have to write about it.
so that's happening.
you know what else is happening? out of 15, only 12 will be shown. like a dozen without a baker. the other 3:
Paul Klee's "Two Trees"
You know what else is happening? I'm dragging 18 18-year-olds to the museum to be with some art. i selected 15 pieces (the max) -- wildly different, hopefully intriguing to them (at least they are to me, so that's covered) for them to experience. most likely, they'll have to write about it.
so that's happening.
you know what else is happening? out of 15, only 12 will be shown. like a dozen without a baker. the other 3:
Paul Klee's "Two Trees"
Man Ray's "What We All Lack"
and Jenny Holzer's "Truisms" are all unavailable for the class because they are currently on display.
Which, I figure, is good enough.
For now though, because I periodically become entranced by her stuff (you know, "the page! the page! the 37 story page!"), here's some:
Want more?
Here ya go (go ahead - click it!):
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