Peter Kubelka made the first flicker film between 1958-60, it was named Arnulf Rainer and it was a montage of black and white frames, white noise and silence. Maybe it can seem too minimalistic, or even simple, but a flicker film is just that, a film characterized by rapid alterations of contrasting frames; not only black and white frames or abstract colours, some of them include real action.
The precedents of this genre are not very clear, but it is related with Eisenstein theories of montage and some experiments with single frame montages made in the 50s.
The flickering effect generated by those rapid alterations of single frames might induce visual hallucinations, and even epileptic seizures or shocks in people with epilepsy or other neurological disorders. Oddly enough, when Kubelka made his film he was not interested in human perception, he just wanted to reduce cinema to its fundamental elements: light, darkness, sound, silence and duration.
In 1966, Tony Conrad presented his film The Flicker, another example made only from white and black frames. In this case, he was conscious of the neurological effects of this kind of films and he was trying to play with the minds of the public. He even included a warning:
Also in the 60s, Paul Sharits began his experiments with colour flickers, a characteristic in most of his films. In 1976 he made a film, Epileptic Seizure Comparison which interspersed colour flickers with real people having epileptic seizures.
You can find some of these films on the Internet, but the quality of the copies is really bad and the effect is only clear if you watch them on the appropriate conditions on a cinema screen. I am afraid that in this case video is out of question.
Most flicker films are related to structuralist cinema, a common practice among several American and European film-makers in the 60s and 70s. Structuralist films are usually based on fixed camera positions, complex montage structures and the flickering effects inherent to the intermittent nature of the cinema projection mechanism.
Nowadays the flicker effect is still widely used in artistic installations, live performances and videos, and is also a common asset in the entertainment industry: the neon signs and the stroboscopic lights from the dance clubs are good examples.
In short, we could say that a flickering light is one of the simplest ways to excite our senses.
Peter Kubelka hizo el primer flicker film (literalmente, película parpadeante) entre 1958-60, se titulaba Arnulf Rainer y era un montaje de fotogramas blancos y negros, ruido blanco y silencio. Quizás pueda parecer algo exageradamente minimalista, o incluso simple, pero un flicker film no es más que eso, una película que se caracteriza por el uso de cambios rápidos entre fotogramas contrastados; no sólo fotogramas en blanco y negro o colores abstractos, puede incluir planos de acción real.
Los precedentes de este género no están muy claros, pero se suele relacionar con las teorías del montaje de Eisenstein y algunos experimentos con montajes de fotogramas sueltos hechos en los años 50.
El efecto de parpadeo que generan esas alteraciones rápidas de fotogramas puede provocar alucinaciones visuales, e incluso ataques de epilepsia o estados de choque en las personas que sufren de epilepsia u otros desórdenes neurológicos. Curiosamente, cuando Kubelka hizo su película no estaba interesado en la percepción humana, simplemente quería reducir el cine a sus elementos básicos: la luz, la oscuridad, el sonido, el silencio y la duración. (más…)
“Querámoslo o no, hay un puente entre la arquitectura y la música basado en nuestras estructuras mentales, que son las mismas tanto en la una como en la otra” (Iannis Xenakis). Por cuarto año consecutivo presentamos en La Casa Encendida un nuevo ciclo de conciertos y conferencias que, una vez más, ayude a comprender mejor, a percibir más intensamente los nuevos lenguajes de la música. El presente programa va a poner de manifiesto los múltiples puntos de encuentro entre arquitectura y música, entre espacio y tiempo, a través de lo que los griegos, Pitágoras en particular, entendieron de forma luminosa: el número.
Para los pitagóricos son los números los principales generadores del mundo y la causa de que éste sea captado por la inteligencia de manera que se pueda determinar su razón y proporción. Únicamente a través de ellos y de su transformación sensible en la música es posible hallar armonía y orden en el cosmos y exorcizar el primigenio caos; ese desorden siempre temible y amenazador que sólo puede ser conjurado en virtud del número y de la cualidad que éste posee de introducir un principio de razón en el universo. El concepto de “arquitectos de la música” se ha atribuido a innumerables compositores del pasado, desde Ockeghem a Bach, desde Brahms y Bruckner a Schönberg, pero alcanza su máxima evidencia con los tres autores que conforman nuestra presente propuesta: “Música de la arquitectura: Varèse/Xenakis/Dusapin”. Xavier Güell
One of the most remarkable effects of the technological development associated with the recording/reproduction/transmission of the sound phenomenon is the creation of displacements in an event whose nature is essentially temporary, provoking “an infinitely delicate point in the texture of reality” (Rilke), and facilitating several situations of relocation through its schizophonic ability (Schafer), emphasized by the transience provided by the portable listening devices and the use of headphones. This system, derived from the first modern stethoscopes which allowed the location of the inside of a body in our field of hearing, transmitting the operation of an organ to another organ (Stankievech), soon was applied to the first radio receivers as a way to assure “privacy” emphasizing the tendencies of the “audite technique” to the “individuation of the listener,” generating a “personal space” (Sterne) in which later the postmodern Narcise will construct his liberation “wrapped in amplifiers, protected with headphones, self-sufficient in his prosthesis of low sounds” (Lipovetsky), being the silence and the spatialization the two main tricks that emphasize the immersive nature of this experience.
The headphones are mainly a way to generate a “vacuum”, offering an “anechoic” isolation that enables the intimate listening thanks to a double lock —always changeable using the volume control; that of not hearing while preserving what we are listening in relation to the surrounding acoustic reality. Frances Dyson explain that this provokes a physical and social split: “sound is desocialized, and the threat of an overcrowded mind, or the din of the social, is temporarily reduced”. In fact, the industry seems to be searching for an ideal self-imprisonment in the form of noise cancellation and bone conduction systems, being the later, according to Slavoj Žižek, the closer to the perception of the Lacanian Real (Žižek).
At the same time, the binaural system creates the feeling that sound is travelling freely in the interior of our cranial cavity, allowing the creation of spaces whose autonomy is reinforced when the acoustic field does not rely on the visual field and the proprioceptive functions. During the last years, we have seen different techniques, as the holophony or the HRTF Synthesis, which pursue a hyperreality based on the spatial behaviour of sound, a method used by artists as Bernhard Leitner, Keiichiro Shibuya or Ryoji Ikeda. On the contrary, the aspiration of another sound artists committed to phonography as a ecoacoustic medium, as Gordon Hempton o Walter Tilgner , is to record faithful sounds.
Dallas Simpson has a different approach, his works are a clear example of the celebration of a ‘dislocated’ listening, but also an exaltation of the act of recording sounds and the subjectivity of the microphone, something that he underlines in his binaural performances.
Finally, the simplicity and portability of the headphones provoke some interferences between the virtual acoustic space and the physical trajectory of the listener, and we can generate a whole new series of meanings superimposing and intersecting both over the territory, “recomposing it through spatio-phonic behaviours” (Thibaud), a resource used by Janet Cardiff y George Bures Miller in their Audio walks, by Cilia Erens in her Soundwalks and by Christina Kubish in her inaudible series.
Uno de los efectos más notables del desarrollo tecnológico asociado con la captación/reproducción/transmisión del acontecimiento sonoro es el de crear desplazamientos en un evento de naturaleza eminentemente temporal provocando “un punto infinitamente delicado en la textura de la realidad” (Rilke), así como el de facilitar múltiples situaciones de deslocalización mediante su capacidad esquizofónica (Schafer) especialmente acentuada por la transitoriedad que aportan los dispositivos de escucha móvil y el uso de los “cascos”. Este sistema, derivado de los primeros utensilios estetoscópicos modernos que permitían situar el interior de un cuerpo en el campo de nuestra escucha, transmitir el funcionamiento de un órgano a otro órgano (Stankievech), pronto se aplicó en los primeras receptores de radio como una forma de asegurar la “privacidad” acentuando la tendencia de las “técnicas auditivas” a la “individualización del oyente”, generando un “espacio personal” (Sterne) en el que más tarde el Narciso posmoderno construirá su liberación “envuelto en amplificadores, protegido por auriculares, autosuficiente en su prótesis de sonidos graves” (Lipovetsky), siendo el silencio y la espacialización los dos principales artificios que acentúan el carácter inmersivo de esta experiencia. (más…)
Debe haber alguna razón para que no hayamos colgado este video aún. Una de ellas puede ser que la serie sea chunga y bastante policial, aunque comparada con su compañera sobre “descubridores” se queda muy corta. En cualquier caso, ahí va.
Atención a la locución de Francisco Rabal y a la adaptación de la melodía de piano llegando al nervio auditivo (propia del Maestro Luis Cobos), y por supuesto las lecciones de salud: amiguitos no nos damos cuenta de lo peligroso que es el ruido. (más…)
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.
A quote whose certain source remains unknown while attributed to people such as Miles Davis, Elvis Costello, or Frank Zappa among others. I think I found it firstly through the tireless re-mediator Paul D. Miller (a.k.a. Dj Spooky).
It amusingly illustrates the contradictions often inherent to some critical and intellectual discourses on experiential and sensual matters, which sometimes might reveal as rather pointless or simply boring. It came back to my mind while sipping fastly a coffee in the hall of De Balie in reply to a friend heading out the conference hall who joked about the difficulties and confusion that talking ‘too much’ about sound might lead to.
The panel titled ‘The Hot Space in Music‘ was still taking place and we had just listened a while ago to the intervention of Steven Connor, who introduced that session. His name was unknown to my ears before the festival and actually resulted in another of the inspiring discoveries of this edition. Although his lecture: ‘Auscultations (Listening In) consisted in a nonstop discourse full of thoughts and words (no powerpoints, no actual audio examples, just his text, voice and gestuality) definitely it was not boring or pointless at all, but a rather poetic reflection on sound and listening.
Author of books about Joyce, Beckett, ventriloquism, skin or flies and currently preparing a book about the historical poetics of air, his presence in the program drew our attention and curiosity, making us remain in the Conference even though if the plan that afternoon was finally visiting the exhibition (the full schedule of the festival was making of it a difficult task to fulfill in the weekend).
He talked about the locus of listening, its nuances and the space(s) of sound and music, elaborating on those through tinnitus and other topics. Both dense and eloquent, it was inspiring to listen to this talk, which actually I hope to re-listen to soon. A visit to Steven´s site confirmed him as an accomplished orator, cultural critic and a prolific writer with an archive full of talks, writings and broadcasts ranging a variety of topics, many of them available as texts and in audio too. Specially interesting for us the ones classified under: ‘Seeing to Sound: On Sound, Music and Voice‘.
sound is unthinkable without space…
sound is always more than space…
sound and space never exactly coincide…
sound and space are consustantial but never exactly coexistant…
I am outisde the sound which is at the same time inside me…
music rarely happens in space, because music IS space.
Vía Mobile Sound hemos hemos sabido que la Audiovisual Culture, y el Nordic Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music ha convocado recientemente un call for papers para una conferencia internacional sobre arte sonoro y culturas aurales. En los últimos años se han dedicado seminarios a temas como el urbanismo, la voz y la tecnología. Las bases de la convocatoria, como se puede leer más abajo, son bastante amplias, con fecha límite de primero de Abril. ¡Anímense!
Sound as Art – Sound in History
Sound as Culture – Sound in Theory
Conference on sound studies
University of Aarhus, Denmark
September 23-25, 2010
Call for papers
The programme of the conference will consist of keynote lectures, plenary roundtables, thematic workshops and individual presentations. Individual presentations and entire workshops may draw inspiration from the following array of questions:
- What is the experiential framework of listening and auditive culture, and how is the world constituted (identity, locality, sociality, culture etc) through auditive practice?
- How has musical and technological sound production and perception changed through the last century and how has it contributed to everyday soundscapes, the concert hall, and the media?
- What can we know, i.e., what types of knowledge, identity and meaning are made possible through acoustic practice – are there any limits to sound taken as an experiential framework and as cognition?
- What perspectives might arise from current studies of auditory modes of relating to space, of appropriating, expressing and designing social environments?
- How does sound help define urban environments, and how might issues related to urban planning, architectural design, and noise benefit from a deeper and more complex understanding of sound?
- What are the correlations between listening and other sensory modalities, the body, sociality, materiality, technology and media (sound viewed as a cognitive paradigm isolated from actual resonating sound).
- How do auditive practices appear to be conventional or normative? How do auditive practices, in conjunction with other sensory modalities, articulate value, aesthetics, ethics and morals in culture?
- How do we further the development of academic terminologies for dealing with sound?
- How can transgressions of traditional distinctions between sound, music and art be understood in a socio-cultural perspective?
- What do the specific aesthetic aspects of sound art seek to achieve in contrast to the predominance of visuality and modes of seeing within the arts?
- How is artistic and academic education in sound competence developing?
Proposals for presentations (20/10 mins) or workshops (90 mins) must be submitted to the conference organisers/programme committee by April 1, 2010 as an email attachment (rtf/pdf/doc) to soundstudies@hum.au.dk. Please include the following information: Paper abstract and title (max. 200 words), name(s), affiliation, e-mail, and technical equipment required (PC/DVD/CD/data projector/over-head projector/etc.).
Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than May 3, 2010.
Con eso de que ayer fue el día de la mujer, y aunque yo no soy mucho de conmemoraciones, me he encontrado, vía SAM, un interesante archivo sonoro realizado por la artista Marysia Lewandowska titulado Women´s Audio Archive.
“The Women’s Audio Archive began as a series of recordings, taped by Lewandowska after leaving her home country in 1984, grown out of an interest in language as a site of cultural displacement. These recordings document public events, seminars, talks, conferences, and private conversations as valuable records of a particular time in discourse, beginning around 1983 until 1990. Lewandowska denotes this period of time as one dominated by academics and artists close to October magazine and by feminist gatherings, including the participating of Judy Chicago, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger, Yvonne Rainer, Jo Spences, Nancy Spero, Jane Weinstock, etc.”
En 1930 Walter Ruttmann utilizó las técnicas del montaje para crear un cine que negaba al espectador aquello que mejor parecía definir la esencia de este formato. Si bien Wochende (fin de semana) no alcanzó especial relevancia en la historia del Séptimo Arte, si que supuso un claro antecedente tanto de las prácticas del Fieldrecording como de la llamada Música concreta.
Pues, heredando parte de aquel interés por generar un nuevo sentido a partir de la fragmentación del medio, me he encontrado un video-juego, perdón, audio-juego llamado Papa Sangre, ya te imaginas por donde van los tiros, que promete mucho. Desde luego que también tiene una importante deuda para con el género de las radio-novelas.
Line Describing a Cone Anthony McCall Deep Spaces | Fri 25th Feb 2010 | Paradiso, Amsterdam
Reading the program of Sonic Acts I got intrigued about this 30min, B&W, silent film. Made in 1973, it is the first of McCall´s ’solid light’ film series, an exploration on the sculptural qualities of light, using simple 16mm projections. He developed these series until the late 70s, only re-starting this practice more than twenty years later, this time using digital tools. This film is now a legendary example within the field of expanded cinema.
In McCall´s words: ‘The viewer watches the film by standing with his, or her, back towards what would normally be the screen, and looking along the beam towards the projector itself. The film beings as a coherent line of light, like a laser beam, adn develops through its 30-minute duration into a complete, hollow cone of light.’
That´s what we could see in the small hall of Paradiso, a dot describing a line, slowly becoming a physical conical volume. A minimal and elegant cinematic sculpture which turned also into a playful experience for the audience, who was quite amused interacting with the emerging light volume.
After experienced the film, I am now looking forward to catch up any of McCall´s new light installations.
Vía 
