A reconstruction [RECON] of John Cage’s infamous 4’33″ (silence) using 68 amateur and professional performances sourced from YouTube. In this film (and others) I am interested specifically in the idea of folk art. Although the term “folk” when applied to art and music has been reduced to a genre in recent times, it was originally used to talk about songs and artforms that belonged to the people (to the volk). For instance, before the music industry territorialized folk as a “genre” of music (to help with categorizing music into sellable units) folk music referred to songs which “ordinary” or “everyday” people would sit around and sing together (at parties, at celebrations, etc.). What interests me is that particular avant-garde works which up until a few years ago would never have been seen by the general population have suddenly become “folk” works – they are being remade and revisioned by large numbers of people, many of them who do not claim to be “artists.” In a sense these works deterritorialize the category of “high-art” and reclaim these works for the people (as “folk” art).
- Viernes 10 de Septiembre 2010 – Victor Gama
- Jueves 16 de Septiembre 2010 – David Fenech, Ghédalia Tazartès & Jac Berrocal
- Viernes 17 de Septiembre 2010 – Maggie Nicols & Phil Minton
- Jueves 23 de Septiembre 2010 – Roberto Mallo, Miguel A. García
- Viernes 24 de Septiembre 2010 – Francisco López
Vuelve una de las citas más importantes, en cuanto a media art se refiere, de Europa y del mundo mundial. Y vuelve a proponer un espacio de reflexión acorde con su tiempo: “REPAIR – Ready to pull the lifeline”. Algo así como “Reparación, preparado para tirar del cabo de salvamento”. Personalmente me gusta la idea de repensar, reinventar, pero discrepo un poco del tono “entusiasta/veloz”. Leyendo el texto de Ars Electronica 2010 da una sensación de urgencia que es propia del paradigma desarrollista que se supone que nos ha llevado a esta misma situación. Y bueno seguro que hay muchas otras críticas posibles, pero en todo caso, REPAIR seguirá siendo una buena oportunidad, del 2 al 11 de septiembre, para conocer las propuestas, debates, performances, actuaciones de la gente más puntera. Permaneceremos a la escucha.
There’s no time left for warnings. We’re in it up to our necks right now—in the climate crisis, Surveillance Society, the bankruptcy of the financial sector … We’ve passed the points of no return. The dramatic consequences are looming on the horizon today. And there’s no excuse for our lethargy since we already possess ideas, tools and techniques to initiate a change of course. We just have to take action! Roll up our sleeves and get to work on a job that can no longer be avoided. We have to mend our ways and get things moving in the right direction.
In search of ways out of this mess we’ve gotten into, the 2010 Festival for Art, Technology and Society turns to the pioneers of our age. Not the adventurers who’ve sailed forth because they wanted to find out what awaits them on the other side, but rather the visionaries who are bringing expertise as well as a great deal of creativity and idealism to bear in their work on an alternative future. repair is the title of a festival designed to pursue the paths opened up by these trailblazers and to show why it’s imperative for us to follow their lead …
I wanted to bring to the surface that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape.
Ken Jacobs has described his films using those words and, according to Antonio Weinrichter, it is a Greenbergian definition of the medium. The identity of the form. Anyway, the way in which he thinks the form in pieces as Capitalism Slavery or Disorient Express is not lyric, as in Malcolm Le Grice films, is forceful and exhausting.
This search of the identity of form comes from primitivism; recovering old films and analysing them using exhaustive repetitions. From just one image, or a short shot, and using the loop —an inherent element to the cinema projector— the shot is transfigured into something that originally it did not represented. Another examples, as Letter to Jane: An Investigation About a Stillby Jean-Luc Godard, use one frame as an excuse for a linguistic interpretation of its meaning, but the repetition of Jacobs transforms the image first in significant and then in matter.
The narrative, the linguistic and even the iconic are called into question as agents which define the identity of the audiovisual, generating another analysis and issues related to the medium and the historic importance of the matter. When the image of slavery is transformed into matter, its political power is in question. If the audiovisual does not belong to narrative or to political art, and even of that Greenergian definition either to the art gallery, where does it belongs to? Where it comes from?
To answer that, I think that the performances of Jacobs are enlightening. Following a primitive attitude even more radical that the use of found footage, Ken Jacobs uses for his Nervous Magic Lantern Performancesmagic lanterns. The Magic Lantern was introduced by Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit monk that did something which changed the way in which we understand images. He inverted the camera obscura system, which receive images from the outside and sends them to the inside of the device, taking images from the inside to the outside and thus inventing the projection. Images are not longer a passive reflection of the reality, are an active entity that form part of the reality and transform it. Etienne-Gaspard Robertson used this device in 1798 in Belgium taking it far from the mere projection of stills and moving images, using several projectors, smoke and immersive sound. The history told that he used what we now call sensory immersion, provoking faints in the spectators and even an investigation under the suspicion of using “real ghosts”.
Jacobs take images into a primeval state previous to celluloid: the light. An image without meaning and without matter is obviously light. He takes image to its luminous essence, putting it at the same level as sound. In the book Listening to noise and silence, Salomé Voegelin states that sound is not the relationship between the sound event or phenomenon and what I listen, is the thing in itself. We must do an active listening of the whatness of sound in art. She bases her idea in a quote by Merleau Ponty which states that we do not see the tiles of the swimming pool, but the water which is among them. I do not see the slaves, I see the light that compose them. In the same way, the destruction of the meaning of the image and the use of the magic lantern produce, in a conceptual sense at first and using a historic reflection after, a transformation of the image in light, in a way that we can know it through the experimentation of its whatness.
Quería sacar a la superficie la multiritmica colisión o competencia de áreas de fuerza bidimensionales de luz y de oscuridad, que luchan borde contra borde por adquirir la identidad de una forma
Ken Jacobs hablaba así de su cine en lo que según Antonio Weinrichter es una definición greenbergiana del medio. La identidad de la forma. Pero la manera de pensar la forma en obras como Capitalism Slavery oDisorient Express no es lírica como la de Malcolm Le Grice, es contundente y extenuante.
Esta búsqueda de la identidad de la forma parte del primitivismo, recuperando metraje antiguo y analizándolo en su repetición de manera exhaustiva. A partir de una sola imagen o de una toma muy corta, y mediante un elemento inherente al cinematógrafo como es el loop, la toma se transforma en algo más allá de lo que representaba. Pero mientras otros ejemplos como Letter to Jane de J.L. Godard usan una sola imagen como principio para una interpretación lingüística de su significado, la repetición de Jacobs convierte la imagen primero en significante y luego en materia. (more…)
A principios de este agosto nos llegaba la noticia sobre la inauguración de SoundFjord, presentada como la primera galería de Reino Unido dedicada al arte sonoro. Desde la inauguración se han sucedido allí Immersound y la exposición Stillness.Subtropical / Stillness.Oceanic de Yann Novak.
La galería está regentada por Adam Asnan, Anne Duffau, France Jobin, Simon Whetham y Yann Novak y se presenta como un espacio de exhibición, archivo, promoción y producción. Además de ello tiene una sección abierta a propuestas y colaboraciones.
Pues bien, Nellie LeFey nos recuerda que el 12 de septiembre se celebra en la SoundFjord de Londres el primer evento dedicado exclusivamente a la escucha.
SoundFjord’s first purely listening event. Bring your ears to the gallery to explore the world of sound is all its facets and guises. Congruous to his exhibition, Stillness, this month’s event is curated by Yann Novak who will focus on artists from the celebrated US label, Dragon’s Eye Re…cordings.
In the future, a variety of international artists, label owners and curators will be invited to curate listening nights once a month.
Imaginamos que algo cabreado por eso de haber perdido el monopolio sobre iPhone en España, César Alierta, Presidente Ejecutivo de Telefónica S.A. explica sus planes de futuro y su peculiar visión de internet con joyas como la ya célebre frase “La inteligencia está en la red, y las redes son nuestras”. No tiene desperdicio.
Does it make any sense to describe the experience of the first visitors of the Chauvet cave as an “history”? Perhaps the answer to that problematic question is the same if we replace the whole multimedia Palaeolithic complex (the bisons and its acoustic reverberations, the shadows cast by the flickering light of the torches and the echoes which modulated the chant of our ancestors…) with any recent immersive audiovisual installation.
Certainly, it makes little sense to seek a logical continuity (“narrative” is another word that we are tempted to use here) among the different rooms, —or “environments”— of a cave like Chauvet. It is also often argued that immersive art works are characterized by rejecting not only narrative, but also any representative or documentary effort. Thus, in a wonderful article on experimental film by Peter Gidal quoted by Blanca Rego in a recent post, it was stated that:
An avant-garde film defined by its development towards increased materialism and materialist function does not represent, or document, anything. The film produces certain relations between segments, between what the camera is aimed at and the way that ‘image’ is presented.
These words, published in 1976, show a sheer structuralist tone typical of that time. Perhaps today would be more productive to think that when we face a materialist film work, or the Dreamachine, or any of the “intimate listenings” annotated by Juan Gil López, they are not only activating our perceptual system, but also telling us a story.
In this sense, cinema is a perceptional mechanism, not a representational mechanism, writesJosé Luis Espejo. We witnessed (as did Peter Gidal) that desire, but we fear that it points towards something impossible. Here is a question that could be used as a subtitle for a History of Western Art: “How to escape representation?.
In the text quoted before, José Luis Espejo points out that in the synaesthetic feeling provoked (or at least desired) by these immersive works “we understand something that can not be verbalize”. Maybe identifying the verbalizable with the narrative has spark off some of the problems noted here. And maybe that’s why the appeal to the Chauvet multimedia complex (or to any performance by Hugo Ball, or —without forgetting the references to shamanism— to this sequence of Star Wars) allows us to remember the strength of the narrative —that is, of the representation of time— even in the absence of the verbalizable (or, at least, of the clearly semantic).
Possibly, this desire to escape from the semantic, to transcend the margins of representation, has to do with the aspiration, so genuinely human, to escape from time, from our temporality, from that other frame —existential, in this case— that lead us to death.
We do not have much space to refer to the other typical form of combating time: memory, but we can remember how the end of the trailer of “Last Year at Marienbad” described the film by Resnais and Robbe-Grillet as “better than stereoscopic cinema”… Another example of immersive art?
¿Tiene sentido calificar lo que experimentaban los primeros visitantes de la cueva de Chauvet como “una historia”? Tal vez la respuesta a esa problemática pregunta sea la misma si sustituimos ese conjunto multimedial paleolítico (los bisontes y sus reverberaciones acústicas, las sombras producidas por la parpadeante luz de las antorchas y los ecos que modulaban el canto de nuestros ancestros…) por cualquier instalación audiovisual inmersiva de los últimos años.
Ciertamente, no tiene mucho sentido buscar una continuidad lógica (“narrativa” es la otra palabra que estamos tentados de emplear aquí) entre las diferentes estancias —o “ambientes”— de una cueva como la de Chauvet. También suele afirmarse que las obras de arte inmersivas se caracterizan por rechazar no ya la narratividad, sino cualquier afán representativo o documental. Así, en un magnífico artículo sobre cine experimental de Peter Gidal citado por Blanca Rego en un texto reciente, se afirmaba que
Una película de vanguardia que se defina por el desarrollo de un materialismo cada vez mayor, así como de una función materialista, no representa ni documenta nada. La película produce ciertas relaciones entre segmentos, entre aquello a lo que se dirige la cámara y la manera en que la imagen es presentada.
Estas palabras, publicadas en 1976, acusan un tono acendradamente estructuralista, muy propio de la época. Pero quizá hoy puede resultarnos más productivo pensar que al enfrentarnos con un trabajo de cine materialista, o con la Dreamachine, o con cualquiera de las “escuchas íntimas” glosadas por Juan-Gil López, no sólo se está activando nuestro sistema perceptivo, sino que también se nos está contando una historia.
“Lo que nos ocupa es la creación de obras que [...] hacen del medio cinematográfico un mecanismo de percepción, no de representación”, escribeJosé Luis Espejo. Nosotros atestiguamos (como lo hacía Peter Gidal) ese deseo, pero nos tememos que apunta hacia algo imposible. He aquí la pregunta que podría servir como subtítulo para una Historia del Arte occidental: “¿Cómo escapar de la representación?”.
En el texto antes citado, José Luis Espejo señala que en la sensación sinestésica provocada (o, cuando menos, ansiada) por estas realizaciones inmersivas “se entiende algo no verbalizable”. Quizás la identificación de lo verbalizable con lo narrativo haya provocado algunos de los problemas que aquí estemos notando. Y tal vez por ello la apelación al conjunto multimedial de Chauvet (o a cualquier performance de Hugo Ball, o —sin abandonar las referencias al chamanismo— a esta otra secuencia de Star Wars) nos permita recordar la pujanza de lo narrativo —esto es, de la representación del tiempo— incluso en ausencia de lo verbalizable (o, cuando menos, de lo claramente semántico).
Posiblemente ese deseo de huir de lo semántico, de trascender los márgenes de la representación, tenga que ver con la aspiración, tan genuinamente humana, de escapar del tiempo, de nuestra temporalidad, de ese otro marco —existencial, en este caso— que nos aboca a la muerte.
No nos queda apenas espacio para referirnos a la otra forma típica de combatir el paso del tiempo: la memoria. Pero sí podemos recordar cómo el final del tráiler de “El año pasado en Marienbad” describía la película de Resnais y Robbe-Grillet como “mejor que con el cine en relieve”… ¿otro ejemplo de arte inmersivo?
Obra realizada por Isao Hashimoto en la que se muestra una sonificación de las detonaciones nucleares llevadas a a cabo por diferentes gobiernos entre 1945 y 1998. Una interesante manera de convertir una Timeline en una partitura/composición. Además tiene cierto sabor añejo a “Guerra fría” que me hace pensar en “Juegos de Guerra”, aquella película del 83 en la que te querían convencer de que con un telefono y un modem podías poner en jaque la estabilidad internacional.
This piece of work is a bird’s eye view of the history by scaling down a month length of time into one second. No letter is used for equal messaging to all viewers without language barrier. The blinking light, sound and the numbers on the world map show when, where and how many experiments each country have conducted. I created this work for the means of an interface to the people who are yet to know of the extremely grave, but present problem of the world
FKL and TempoReale invite you to submit scientific and musical contributions related to the theme of soundscape to the fifth symposium of Forum Klanglandschaft to be held in Florence (Italy), 20 – 22 May 2011.
The conference is held in cooperation between the two institutions, together with the contemporary art center EX3, and offers the opportunity to present, in the conference, papers, sound-works, installations and videos.
The title “keep an ear on …” suggests, as the specific theme for this edition, the need to pay attention to and also to control what we all hear, both from the point of view of the danger of noise pollution, and from the one of the aesthetic quality of our sound environment.
