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A.C. Kaar playing as of now still unnamed "box instrument" built by him, sound design by me (his laptop is hiding inside). It's played by scrubbing, scratching, tapping, and knocking it, sound output from pignose amplifier on floor.
A.C.'s suit is so much like something a character in Fassbinder's Fox and His Friends would wear.
Taken from comments on imomus:
A: There's nothing worse than people who deliberately bore, and just think you should take them as they are, warts and all. That's the ultimate arrogance.
B: [...]There's an element of service in self-mediation that gets conveniently ignored by those sitting in the back of the room with crossed arms.
I tend to gloss over what I've been working on these days, largely due to the fact that it's required so much time that I don't have much left to write.
Yesterday (day): put the final touches on the electronics necessary to sonify the lovely box instrument developed by Kunsole's Deric Carner to be played live at the Bridge Art Fair in New York this week.
Yesterday (night): Updated the software and sounds to be used in Dot Dot Knock, a sound installation currently up at Grove Street Window space, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission as part of the Kunsole residency. The updated version will be installed tonight around 5:00
I don't talk enough about this installation. I'm really proud of it. Deric and Rebecca, the two visual artists in Kunsole, designed this amazing and ghostly tableau in the gallery space, to be viewed through the window, as though you were looking into an empty pool. The lighting works best at dusk, with the images and sculptures sort of glowing lightly. My sound installation is controlled by two large pieces of blue plexiglass anchored into the brick at the front of the building. When you knock on the slices, the sounds reactively morph and rhythhmicize. The official version:
Working with three generalized catalogs of sound, text, avant-pop compositions, and electro-percussion, Dot Dot Knock reacts to knocking in different ways. It pulls from its archive at will, depending on where one knocks and what mood it is in at the moment. Knocking on the left top slice results in chopped up text, sometimes understandable, other times not. Knocking on the bottom right hand slice produces hesitant percussive riffs. The installation sometimes stutters, occasionally lectures, once-in-a-while shouts and other times won't answer at all.
And it's very loud, very present, you can hear it blocks away! You know something's happening ahead but you're not quite sure what.
The whole project is a kind of exploration of emptiness, references that point in all directions at once but never quite hit their mark, made from semantically vertiginous alters. Come check it out!
It's been a struggle. This city, full of over-educated and under-salaried types who can quote Lacan easier than you can remember pi to the third digit.
In this place, full of braininess, why is so much of the art and music messy? Of course, there are exceptions. But the overall feel of the scene is messy. I'm fine with messy, I love messy. But sometimes I need something pointed, sharp, and cold. Is it part of the refugee effect in this city: the sharp ones have escaped their sado-masochistic educations to come here to be a little sloppy for a change? Is this sloppiness in fact an enlightened approach? A post-academic intuitiveness that can only happen after advanced studies in late 20th century French philosophy?
Maybe. I don't know.
Kunsole now in Grove Street Installation Space in San Francisco.
Knock on the blue panels and play with the sounds: make your own stories with avant-pop compositions and chants. Click through to Dot Dot Knock info.
Watch out, the wiggly ghost might jump at you!
It started at Ping Pong Gallery with Deric's opening, his intense sharp posters filling the space with strange designs from a galaxy mapped in semiotic vertigo. They were designer-ly and branded yet imbued with earnest need for self expression (Diamanda Galas). Or were they simply highly evolved self-mediation that flips intention over and over until the beginning and end are no longer in sight (Yoko Ono). Ping pong indeed!
Then Diamda Galas on YouTube with Mason and Jano.
Next Charlie Horse at the Cinch, drag queens tossing intention and self expression through the blender of self-mediation and showmanship. Crazy, confusing, and wonderful!
Then dancing to Kiss, Kiss, Kiss by Yoko Ono.
And on and on and back and forth.
A game developed by artist Wafaa Bilal, in which people hunt down Bush or experience what it's like to be an innocent civilian in the Iraq war, was shut down by officials at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Wired.com article here, youtube below.
Link via glitchslaptko.
For a city so full of people actively making sound, sound art shows are strangely unusual. I just attribute it as another anomaly in this "wacky" (how I loathe that word) city.
So I was very excited about being part of Sound Device last night. My piece was a collection of 88 small scores with instructions to record a certain type of sound with your cell phone and leave it as a "message" at a phone number. I awoke this morning to an exciting array of totally exciting sounds. And because the codec used in cell phones is really geared only for the spectrum of sound in which human voice falls, when it is used to record other sounds they turn out sounding highly processed and wonderfully weird. I can't wait to get started composing them into ringtones.
I also got to meet some people I've been wanting to talk to for a while, like PB8 and Channing Kennedy (who was wearing amazing glasses) (video).
San Francisco is a stressy little city. On the surface people here seem relaxed, but in reality there is enough low-level discontent floating under the surface to power a nuclear submarine. It's a sloppy, often misguided passive-aggression, which reveals itself at odd times. Like when somebody does that uniquely Californian ritual of affirmation/disavowal that goes something like "yeah, I think that's a good idea" while really meaning, "I hate it but out here we're not allowed to say anything that isn't yes so I'll despise your stupid idea in my heart but in the meantime, let's just keep slovenly agreeing with each other."
Don't get me wrong, I know and love passive-aggressive behavior, I pride myself in its execution. But I prefer the kind of pointed passive-aggression of the Japanese which is so cutting, so sharp, you don't even realize you've been hit until long after the fact.
Or if we're not going to have passive-aggressive behavior, I prefer the German tactic of just interacting with everyone as though your mouth is a non-lossy conduit between your soul and the outside world: truth shall be spoken regardless of the consequences! Sincere earnestness as a defense against libel. My father's family with its German ancestry was very much in that camp.
Back to San Francisco, the way sloppy communication is the norm here stresses me out. When I was living in Europe, spending long days with my headphones on, I should have been stressed with no money, a breakup with my Japanese boyfriend, and so on. But compared with the kind of weirdness that circulates in the air here, that was nothing.
People here are in a constant state of agitation with the controlling meta-power, the United States, as much as we'd like to imagine we are free from it. Combine that with the messy communication techniques of the large populous of grandchildren of the psychedelic movement, and you've got something of a little cultural petri dish here. Totally interesting! But stressy.
Ghost Collect Output is up and running. If you're in San Francisco, pick up a mini-score at Sound Device before they're gone.
Preparing to sneak out of the lab after a long day of experiments, 123 decided now was his chance.
The guard was distracted by a magazine with a feature on the upcoming Machu Picchu Film Festival.