kunsole is
"Ten years too early and twenty years too late."
-A.C. Kaar
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February 29, 2008
February 27, 2008
working on a song
I'm working on a song for Kunsole called "Bathing With Obama". It's about a dream I had where he and I were sharing a bath, talking politics. You know, as people do. The whole thing was very matter-of-fact, it all seemed quite normal except that his big tough bodyguards were all standing around the bathtub.
February 21, 2008
and even more from rotterdam
February 20, 2008
sun
I have this love/hate relationship with sunshine. San Francisco often gets bathed in this extreme sunshine that wilts everything that it touches. I bought industrial style blinds to keep that particular kind of light out of my apartment, it renders my Mac's monitor an incomprehensible grid of faded pixels.
But then other days, when my work is done, there's nothing I love more than trekking out to a park and perch myself on the top of the hill for some serious sunbathing. And on days like today, after what seems like weeks of overcast rain and dreariness the sun is a visceral reminder that change is always present.
February 19, 2008
R.I.P. alain robbe-grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet has passed on.
February 17, 2008
three pieces platform for art and sound, february 26th
T H R E E P I E C E S
Platform for Art and Sound
Join us for a quarterly studio presentation of three two new pieces of
sound, image or movement from local and visiting artists.
Next Event: February 26, 2008, 7-9 p.m.
1112 Larkin St. (@ Sutter) #307
genericfun.com/3pieces
+1 415 298 1663
NOTE: Doors Close at 7:30 p.m., Space limited, FREE
Featuring: Joshua Churchill and Richard Garet
Joshua Churchill
(( sound and light performance/installation ))
Joshua Churchill is a San Francisco based cross-disciplinary artist that works primarily with sound and light in the context of site-specific installations and experimental music performances and recordings. His approach to performance/recording work, which involves live processing and layering of generated and found sounds, and often shares similarities in his approach to installation work, including treatment of space, the utilization of found materials, particularly sound, and the pairing of reactive lighting elements to sound. Through his work, Churchill challenges the expectations of the audience and the passive role that is traditionally assigned to them by immersing them within it and compelling them to become critically aware of their relationship to their surroundings.
Joshua Churchill also performs and records solo noise work under the moniker T/R, and participates in a number of ongoing collaborative projects. He has exhibited and/or performed at Chapel of the Chimes (Oakland), Triple Base Gallery (San Francisco), The Recombinant Media Compound (San Francisco), 7hz (San Francisco), National Showa Kinen Park (Tokyo), Loop-Line (Tokyo), Yerba Buena Center For the Arts (San Francisco), New Media Scotland, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Post Gallery (Los Angeles), and Galeria Ze Dos Bois (Lisbon, Portugal).
www.joshuachurchill.com
myspace.com/jshchrchllm
Richard Garet Painting by Numbers / Comp 6_2
Richard Garet is a sound artist, a video artist, and a painter. he is interested in the phenomena found and produced in aural and visual time-based media, in nature's processes, and human beings' relationship with both artificial and natural environments. garet explores the it-referential, communicational, and sensory characteristics of the various media he utilizes. additionally, he focuses on the investigation of aural and visual spatial-contexts, relational structures, process, materiality, and form. even though garet's work suits the standard gallery setting, many of his other activities as an artist explore the various practices of experimental sound and video performance. all of these modes are additional ways in which garet's work exposes the audience to visual and physical acoustic sensory perception.
I began the Painting by Number Series as a means of exploring the possibilities of digital video's ability to handle color, motion, digital errors, and light. I continued by turning this outcome into moving image color field compositions. My methods were focused on the possibilities and phenomenology of light as material, pushing the boundaries of the media's digital permutations, and in software processing. All the works in this series also engage in emphasizing the media, the process, and the sensory gaps between the eye and the mind.
www.richardgaret.com
February 14, 2008
sound-based music: where we're at now
It's funny, for someone who calls himself a sound artist, I really don't talk much about sound-based music on my blog. I sometimes feel slightly guilty about it, as though I am a traitor to my cause. Please don't be fooled, I care more than ever about these things, but after grad and post-grad thinking about music/sound/art (in whatever combinatorial nomenclature one cares to use) I think I became a little exhausted of talking about it.
But a book I've been reading lately is the freshest thing I've seen in a while. Understanding the Art of Sound Organization by Leigh Landy (which I first saw last year at PQM in Berlin) is just an amazing work that proposes an unforgiving and clearheaded perspective on where we're really at now in sound-based music, from microsound glitch to noise and most points in between, especially taking into account the strange, sometimes brilliant, but often really rather sad epoch that is known simply as "20th Century Music." I can't recommend this book enough, as a strong and invigorating approach to understanding the current state of things, without sentimentality nor nostalgia.
February 13, 2008
more from rotterdam
o-f-f-i-c-e via manystuff.org via instantcontemporary.org via a real-life conversation which isn't tagged and has no link.
petit_paradis: "47. jim enjoys visiting art galleries and museums alone."
A blog I like very much, petit_paradis has a post about the fashion photographer Benjamin Huseby today. petit_paradis comes from Holland and is highly recommended, a little spot for eye candy and sexy cute things.
petit_paradis: "47. jim enjoys visiting art galleries and museums alone."
lazy train
I often take a train up and down the Peninsula, next to the water, from San Francisco to Silicon Valley. If I miss the early train, I have to catch the lazy train. It makes all sorts of stops here and there, sometimes just pausing to enjoy the scenery, it seems. Apparently no one has anywhere to be at this time of day. Oh, I forgot, if you don't have a car, then of course you don't have anywhere important to be. Silly me to think otherwise.
February 9, 2008
normalizing to your culture
In the link from my post the other day, Yoko Tawada discusses why she is fascinated by the former German Democratic Republic, how it was a fantasy place for her before and still is, even more so because it no longer exists. It is a place that has actually disappeared. When comparing herself to writers from the GDR, she says, "Unfortunately I can't write like them because Japan still exists!"
This inspired to try a mental exercise: imagine a world in which one's home country, in my case the United States, no longer exists. I don't suggest this as a referendum on American foreign policy, anyone who reads this blog or knows me has a clear idea of my feelings on those issues. But just imagining one's country of birth no longer existing is a disorienting exercise. It immediately makes one realize the huge role their country plays in their total make-up as a person.
Realizing this is OK, but the thing I fear the most is completely re-normalizing to this culture in America, of no longer seeing how truly strange it is here. It hasn't happened yet, I don't think.
February 4, 2008
interview with yoko tawada in world literature today
religion in the west is nothing but self-indulgence, according to martin amis
Martin Amis, in conversation with Philip Dodd on Nightwaves (BBC3), describes Islam as lacking curiosity and religion as simply self-indulgence. When Dodd counters with the example of Messiaen, a devout Catholic and one of the greatest composers of the 20th century, Amis doesn't back down, describing his belief as a quirk and not deserving of respect.
That sort of hardline on religion had its time and place but in this postmodern world it seems clunky, ugly and irrelevant. I can't help but think that Eagleton was on to something when attacking Amis as being close to a bigot. When anyone displays such strong feelings about another's personal belief, as Amis does, it seems to bely their own insecurities and warped ideas about their sense of power. Otherwise, why would they care?
"[...] conspiracy theories are a way to deal with the impenetrable complexity and connectivity of politics and other factors."
Notes from a talk called Techno-Historical Collusions: The Making Of A Trojan Horse, given by Eva Horn at the current Transmediale in Berlin. The theme of this year's Transmediale being "Conspire."
Notes found at We Make Money Not Art. The talk referred to the History Commons, a site which promotes cooperative research on many subjects, one of the largest being the attacks of 9/11.
February 2, 2008
it's rainy and cold outside, i'm staying in!
