Semiotics of the Kitchen - Martha Rosler - 1975

From A to Z, Rosler "shows and tells" the ingredients of the housewife's day, giving us a tour that names and mimics the ordinary with movements more samurai than suburban. Rosler's slashing gesture as she forms the letters of the alphabet in the air with a knife and fork, is a rebel gesture, punching through the "system of harnessed subjectivity" from the inside out.

"I was concerned with something like the notion of 'language speaking the subject,' and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity." - Martha Rosler

“Non-material use-values are those goods produced within the housework process which have no material basis: affection, sexuality, companionship, “love,” and the like. These goods satisfy the individual’s non-material needs, which are as important for his/her reproduction as is a grilled steak or an ironed shirt….they are use-values for value.” -Leopoldina Fortunati from The Arcane of Reproduction

“To make the process of production and reproduction of labor-power function, other exchanges are also necessary. The most important of these “secondary” exchanges is that between the male worker and capital mediated by the female houseworker. This exchange and relation is required because the female houseworker’s reproduction cannot only consist of the use-values into which the wage can be transformed; it must also include the consumption of use-values which only the husband can and must produce. For although in this relation this housework is paid for by the wage, it must appear not so. Thus “love” enters the discourse, and the relation can be expressed in other non-money terms. Without love, capital would not be able to make this relation function, nor would it be able to isolate the male and female houseworker within the family.” -Leopoldina Fortunati from The Arcane of Reproduction

STELARC: meat, metal & code: the cadaver, the comatose & the chimera

Tuesday 19 February 2013

5:00-7:00pm

CRASSH

Alison Richard Building
West Road
Cambridge

The Cambridge Screen Media Group at CRASSH welcomes the performance artist, STELARC, famous for exploring the capacities and limits of the human body through art. A unique opportunity to experience his work in person!

All welcome; followed by what promises to be a truly unique Q&A.

ABSTRACT: We are increasingly expected to perform in Mixed and Augmented Realities. We are no longer merely biological bodies but increasingly accelerated by our machines and enhanced by our instruments. And we have to manage data in virtual systems. We have become extended operational systems, performing beyond the boundaries of our skin and beyond the local space we inhabit. As well as Circulating Flesh it is now an age of Fractal and Phantom Flesh.

Cost: free

Stelarc: Psycho Cyber (1996)





STELARC: THE MAN WITH THREE EARS (2009)

A Place of Play

On Saturday I will be conducting a mixed reality performance, 'A Place of Play' between the new HUMlab X at the just opened arts campus at Umeå University and in Second Life (image above). It will be at 11.30 - 11.50 and 13.30 - 13.50 and anyone is welcome to attend. To log in to Second Life download the program and teleport to the coordinates from this link http://t.co/B6g0g6gI. My short abstract from the program for the Arts Campus Open Day is:

James Barrett is a researcher and teacher in HUMlab working with digital narrative and the spatial. James’s presentation at the opening of HUMlab X will focus on the dimensions of digital space. As an avatar Jim will perform in the virtual world of Second Life while performing in the space of HUMlab X at the same time. The performance will consist of live music and a screen running Second Life.

I hope to see you in HUMlab X or in Second Life on Saturday.

Imogen Heap on Earth Day

The above images are taken from the live Web stream of the performance by Imogen Heap for Earth Day. I was impressed I must admit. The reactive gloves were the interface for Imogen's musical software. The 25 cyclists in the video (shot in the Roundhouse in London) powered the event. Nice job.

Posters from Inner City Art Actions 1995-97

Between 1995 and 2000 I was a member of Senselesss, a performance group that specialized in large playable sculptures that we would set up in in ritual situations with fire film and dance. In our lighter version we did music and poetry in cafes. The Golden Bee was a large scale installation performance in a warehouse gallery, complete with trapeze artists. The Second Last Freedom Moped to Nowhere (heavy Young Ones influence) was a smaller show with music and poetry where we performed as 7Sense. I was also a member of the Gag Poets.

To hear the sound of Senselesss listen HERE.

Voina

VOINA on Reuters tv from VIUlyanov on Vimeo.

Voina (Russian: Война = War) is a Russian performance group known for their provocative and politically charged works of performance art. Voina was founded in 2007 by philosophy students at Lomonosov Moscow State University Oleg Vorotnikov and Natalia Sokol. At the present moment the activists Oleg Vorotnikov and Leonid Nikolayev are detained by the Moscow police in connection with an anti-corruption protest, facing up to seven year prison sentences. In response to the detention, graffiti artist Banksy decided to raise money for the artists. They have also been denounced by right-wing groups like the People's Synod.

“…The most notorious Voina action was last June, when several members of the group painted a penis on the Liteiny Bridge in St Petersburg. Evading and fighting off security, the 65-meter high image was completed just before the bridge opened, as it does each evening to let ships pass through. The penis ‘erected,’ directly facing the St Petersburg headquarters of the FSB, the KGB’s successor. The group called the artwork Dick Captured by KGB.”

More: The artists who crossed the line: An art group that stages orgies, throws cats at cashiers and has Banksy as a fan has enraged the Russian authorities (The Independent)

Free Voina

Electronic Behavior Control System

EBN
Electronic Behavior Control System
Telecommunication Breakdown
TVT, 1995

Brody Condon: Twentyfivefold Manifestation

"The work of art of the future will be the construction of a passionate life." Raoul Vaneigem


Combining the fantasy Live Action Role-Playing (LARP) subculture, public sculpture, and ritualistic performance art, Twentyfivefold was a series of physically and psychologically intense live games involving 80 players which evolved over the Summer of 2008. The events were organized by the artist Brody Condon for the Sonsbeek International public sculpture exhibition in the Netherlands.

Set in a distant future where civilization as we know it had almost been lost, players from different worlds met deep in the holy forest and inhabited a 40 feet high tower "in character" for 3 days at a time while worshiping invented deities embodied by the other artworks of the exhibition.


www.sonsbeeklive.org

"Copyright law is broken. Creative consumption and modification of existing media is a totally intuitive and appropriate way to function as a cultural producer. That is not to say I function without any honor system whatsoever, I give credit where it is deserved..." Brody Condon, Rhizome interview

I Love Wooden Veil

The Wooden Veil Awaits



Wooden Veil: Gravity Problems by Hanayo

Wooden Veil is a Berlin-based art group formed in 2007. Inspired by the shared hauntedness of their respective homelands, they combine elements from forgotten and misremembered traditions to create a microcosmic world which only Wooden Veil inhabits, complete with its own symbols, clothing, food and shelters. Performances, installations and videos are characterized by an expansive wardrobe of ritual dress, and the creation of shrines, relics and talismans used to create music.

The group consists of artists Marcel Türkowsky (also a composer, founder of Snake Figures Arkestra, Cones, Uuhuu, collaborations with Datashock and Christoph Heemann), Hanayo (known for her solo work as a photographer and singer, collaborating with the likes of Christoph Schlingensief, Merzbow, Red Crayola, and Kai Althoff), Christopher Kline (Valkenburg Hermitage, †, Night Music, and Soft Peace), Dominik Noé (member of krautrock legends Lustfaust), and Jan Pfeiffer (Songs For Rocks, Soft Peace, Purple).

To understand:

Hold right hand, cupped near right ear; turn hand back and forth slightly with wrist. Bring left hand to opposite eye with the second finger pointing in the direction one is looking. With index and thumb of right hand, form an incomplete circle, space of one inch between tips; hold hand towards the earth, then move it in a curve across the heavens and back toward the horizon.

moon & hamburg wooden veil

"The music of Wooden Veil is at once chaotically ritualistic and curiously precious. From all indications it would seem that the Berlin-based collective have gone to great lengths to reach this dichotomy. Maintaining the project as a way to create a unique world that only Wooden Veil inhabits, the group's performances bring together symbols, clothing and rituals that are to be regarded a part of this world. Borne out of half-remembered traditions and etched in the fringes of culture, the music seems tribal through the eyes of a post-catastrophic modern man. Pieces of a once great culture slip in but it seems that much of their sound inhabits a forced forgetfulness, both innocently and ferociously using the remnants of instrumentation to create a new life in music. Among the pound of drums, the scorch of drones and the wail of frightened voices some beautiful moments emerge; alive but tenuously testing to see if, how and why that's possible." Raven Sings the Blues (includes two Mp3s)


WOODEN VEIL
s/t
LP/CD
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"Belonging to a world that is at once pre-millenial and post-apocalyptic, Wooden Veil’s music is the drumbeat of an ancient yet technological past channeled through the sounds of a post-human race. Masked and costumed, the players invoke a musical force as a shaman would a ghost. Collecting rhythm like wind collecting a storm, Wooden Veil gives grand form to noise – they make it an event. Drums, drones, harmonies and screams clamor in their songs, erupting now and again into a plainsong that rings just long enough for a melody to take shape, before it dissolves back into sonic entropy."
- Carson Chan, Program – Initiative for Art + Architecture, Berlin

"Playing like a semiotic mist, Wooden Veil approach their performances as handmade, patchwork quilt-like structures with emphasis on showing the lines of assembly, sewing together mythologies, traditional song, craft, ritual and acoustics."
- Steven Warwick (Heatsick, Birds of Delay)


Gloom Across the Ice

Wooden Veil on MySpace

Dream Analysis

Lindefelt, Iris Piers & So So live at Moonshake, Umeå.

A String a Continent Wide

Great Fences of Australia (video)
Many people look at fences and see not much; Jon Rose and Hollis Taylor look and see giant musical string instruments covering a continent. The strings are so long that they become the resonators as well as the triggers for the sound. On straight stretches of a simple five-wire fence, the sound travels down the wires for hundreds of meters. The music is ethereal and elemental, incorporating an extended harmonic series (the structure of all sound); the longer the wire, the more harmonics become available. The rhythms of violin bows and drum sticks uncover a fundamental sonic world. The fence music encapsulates the vastness of the place. Music of distance, boundaries and borders.

The World's First Flash Mob?

Did the the world's first Flash Mob take place in 1838 at the Cascades Female Factory ( a prison and workhouse for female convicts) in Hobart, Australia? The governor of Van Diemens Land visited the factory and attended a service in the chapel. Entertaining the governor was the Reverend William Bedford; a morals campaigner whose hypocrisy had elicited the lady's scorn. Keen to impress the governor with a fine speech, the Reverend addressed the women from an elevated dais, then:

"the three hundred women turned right around and at one impulse pulled up their clothes showing their naked posteriors which they simultaneously smacked with their hands making a loud and not very musical noise. This was the work of a moment, and although constables, warders etc. were there in plenty, yet 300 women could not well be all arrested and tried for such an offence and when all did the same act the ringleaders could not be picked out."

This cheeky behaviour 'horrified and astounded' the Governor and the male members of the party. As for the ladies in the Governor's party, it was said, in a rare moment of collusion with the Convict women, 'could not control their laughter'. From Female Factories

Tribute to Henry Chopin

"I, personally, would perfer the chaos and disorder which each of us would strive to master, in terms of his own ingenuousness, to the order imposed by the Word which everybody uses indiscriminately, always for the benefit of a capitol, of a church, of a socialism, etc...." Why I Am The Author of Sound Poetry and Free Poetry Henri Chopin, 1967

Henry Chopin died on January 3rd 2008 at the age of 85. So ended a long life crowned by achievements, if not the greater recognition that he deserved. Chopin was the guide to any of us who has cut up and pasted magnetic tape, backmasked a track or placed a contact mike on a sheet of steel to see how it sounds, recorded respiration or amplified the rhythms of the body and the environment it occupies. Like some mystic turning consciousness inward, Chopin made the body a portal to a language that circumvented established notions of time and space. Creating a music that seemed to come from beneath the skin and the upper levels of the planet's atmosphere at the same time.


HENRI CHOPIN LIVE IN FRANCE 2005

"Henri Chopin, explorer of the body's voices. For the last forty years, with his sound poetry revue OU (1964-1974), then through his participation in various international sound poetry festivals, through his personal experience in the experimental studios of radio stations in Köln, Paris, Australia, Canada or Sweden and in his concert/performances throughout Europe, Henri Chopin has consistently and unceasingly opened the ways to unexplored spaces beyond all known languages. Thanks to the systematic use of microphones, amplifiers, tape recorders, editing and mixing consoles, he has given a voice to realms beyond modern or experimental music, beyond any note system and headed for spaces without norms, categories, definitions or limits: spaces of permanent metamorphosis. But despite misleading appearances, Henri Chopin is not merely doing a new kind of music; he is not just a consequence of Pierre Schaeffer's concrete music principles and Pierre Henry's experiments in the fifties. Henri Chopin is an individual (in Stirner's sense: the ego and its own) who has always resisted absurd attempts to reduce him to part of a movement, a school, an academism; what one perceives are Henry Chopin's bio-psychical vibrations, that he himself constructed by electronically recording, then modifying, amplifying and transforming the energies of his own body. This language is beyond institutionalised language or indeed beyond any language, it precedes all idioms (sound signs, playful energy signs like those of whales and dolphins), it is a breath language, a soul language (the language of anima), the unfettered respiration of the cosmic energies we are, who belong neither to factions nor clans. The energy of live beings, whose individuality is irreducible, and impossible to break down. Solitary and strange cosmic creatures, mysterious yet showing solidarity, resonating with all those who dared breach shackles and rules, escape vile obedience, submission and compromise, reject complacency and blind allegiance to traditional or experimental academism."

Thanks to the technology he explored in his art it is never too late to appreciate Henry Chopin:

Chopin at UBUWEB

Mp3s sounds of Henry Chopin

Au Revoir Monsieur Chopin.

Liminalities On Sound

The current issue of Liminalities; A Journal of Performance volume 3, number 3 (November 2007), is an expanded special issue edited by Michael LeVan on the theme of Sound. This issue includes an audio epigraph, a monograph on Arthur Russell, a project about temporary radio memorials, an essay about Manu Chao, a recording-essay about Freud and secrets and sound, a video on an ethnographic performance about voice, a sound essay about a performance by an ex-radio reporter, an audio project about auto- (and oto-)phonography, an essay revisiting Rudolph Arnheim's text on radio, a pedagogy essay (and audio recording) about performing aural appeals, and reviews of two books on sound. Liminalities is produced on Mac systems. It looks best in open source browsers like Firefox.

Survival Research Lab Documentary

"Virtues of Negative Fascination" (Runtime: 75mins) is a documentary covering the performance activities of Survival Research Laboratories, Mark Pauline, Matt Heckert and Eric Werner, from 1985-1986. The performances are organized around the interactions of menacingly reconstructed industrial equipment, scientific devices and a wide variety of "special effects" devices which are used to develop themes of socio-political satire. The tape includes performances from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Seattle in front of a audiences of 2-3,000 people. In addition to the performances, "Virtues of Negative Fascination" features incisive interviews and illuminating non performance footage.

Ålidhem Festival

Tomorrow Saturday 26th August and Sunday 27th the area in which I live here in Umeå is holding a culture festival. From midday Saturday the Ålidhem Festival will showcase the many different traditions that live in the suburb of Ålidhem with music, dance, food, stalls and seminars. I will be giving a 30 minute talk in the Ålidhem Library (in the Ålidhem School) at 14:30 (2:30pm) on "Australia Land and People". I'll show some film sequences of contemporary Aboriginal culture, talk about the situation how I see it at the moment for Australia in terms of land, environment and indigenous cultures and play a little didgeridoo. In the evening at 20:30 (8:30) I will be playing a half hour set of sampled sounds, effects, percussion and digeridoo at the Krogen Krogen night club under Ålidhem Central Shopping Center. The overall music program at Krogen Krogen starts at 19:00 and goes until late.

Butoh of the Real

Like some strange Butoh of the real. Portraits of Canadian football fans. Fantastic!

John Cage is Everywhere

I have been bumping into John Cage everywhere lately. Here are some points:

The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (greets me every morning as the last book on the shelf near the door to my office).

John Cage and David Tudor in Concert in San Francisco, Jan. 16, 1965

Video of 4,33 performed in London recently in a concert dedicated to John Cage

John Cage performing Water Walk in January, 1960 on the popular TV show I've Got A Secret

New Radio OM

On Monday, May 14, 2007, Other Minds marks the 90th birthday of late composer Lou Harrison with the launch of the new radiOM.org website, offering free worldwide access to streaming audio and video programs that span the history of new music.

The new website makes easily accessible the expanding Other Minds Archive of 4,500 hours of recorded materials, which includes 3,500 hours of audiotape recordings from the KPFA Radio Music Department collection, highlights from past Other Minds Music Festivals, materials from the private archive of composer George Antheil, selected programs from the Cabrillo Music Festival, and other rare and unusual recordings. The archive will continue to grow as the KPFA library is digitized, and recordings from Other Minds concerts and events are added.

Digital Installation with Second Life and a Didgeridoo

Strange day today and then I noticed this:

Humaniora & IT – Stadsbiblioteket kl 18-20, Kulturnatta den 18 maj
PROGRAM

• Res tillbaka till bronsåldern med hjälp av ny teknik
• Postertorg - doktorander inom Humaniora och IT berättar om sina projekt
• Världskända Linda Bergkvists digitala konstverk (testa ritbordet själv)
• Digital installation med inslag av t ex Second Life och Didgeridoo
• Dokumentärfilmen Avatara
• Kortföreläsningar i ljusgården (15 minuter vardera med paus mellan)

I knew I was in the Culture Night festival this Friday (18th) with my HUMlab colleagues. What I had envisioned doing was an Internet remix performance; pulling in stuff off the net (sound vision and text) and arranging it in real time. The idea of being in Second Life and playing didge is appealing however. I need to talk to Magnus!