Sound of Applause

[applausive]

I’m listening to these compositions based on birdsong, and they’re fantastic.

They’re also slightly sickening, in that they were composed exclusively for a line of luxury phones.

Like, it’s kind of sickening the amount of creative talent and energy that goes into absurd consumerist schemes. But also brilliantly absurd. Some of these pieces are meant to be text tones. Except they’re played by a full orchestra.

I have no idea whether I love them or hate them.

I think the only thing to do is to try to re-record them using my 3410′s shitty composition software.

[applausive]

jots and notes

I’m late -

I’m late -

For a very important date.

All I can do

is stare at the clock.

I’m sure that the tick

doesn’t match the tock.

[mxspartachris]

If you’re lonely… Work… this is work. This is hard work. Talking about work is work. Thinking is work. Words are work. Words are things, shapes. It’s hard to compose them, to put them in any kind of order. Words don’t add up. Numbers add up! Things are everywhere. Everything is something, everything has something, but not everyone has someone. It’s hard to distinguish between things, to separate things. I’m in a soup of thoughts, feelings and things, and words. Actually, it’s more like a purée… or thick and stiff, like a paté. I’m in a paté and it’s hard to move. It needs a lot of work to get out of it — or to separate it and find something in it. Thoughts, thoughts, sometimes I want to stop them, but it’s hard to stop them. It’s work. Dealing with thoughts, that’s work. Thoughts, thoughts, don’t come! Stop! Please! When you’re going to sleep and you can’t stop thinking, thoughts queueing up, that’s when you need drugs — or a notebook. I want something to ease the pain. I want to get out of my head. Smoking used to help. For a long time smoking made my life bearable. I gave up smoking because I couldn’t do it enough. I couldn’t smoke enough. It was never enough. I wanted to smoke all the time, to breathe in all the time, but I couldn’t, not in the shower, not when I was talking, not when I was eating. I wanted something I could do all the time. Not smoking, that was something I could do all the time. I am an addict in search of drugs. Maybe working is trying, and work — the result of work — is everything that one tries to do. Trying… looking for excitement, or trying to handle it and use it to get out of the paté. Trying to do things; talking. Or maybe testing is a good way of putting it: testing things out. Testing things out by putting things about, and all the time trying, hoping to be excited, wanting. Wanting is what makes me work: excitement, desire for something. Sometimes people say: ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing? That’s not art.’ I say: ‘Fuck off, assholes!’ Assholes… they are something to get excited about, something to work for. Work is a fight against loneliness, against low self esteem, against depression, and against staying in bed. Sometimes my self esteem is so low that I cannot reach it even when I’m feeling down. I want to be on my own, but I don’t want to be alone. Work is everything, I think. Everything is work. Everything that involves energy, mental or physical. So… everything, apart from being dead. Living… I don’t know how anyone can do it. How can anyone get through it? I can see why people hide. I can see why people commit suicide. If you’re lonely, If you’re sad, If you’re lovely, If you’re mad, Then this is for you.

Martin Creed, Work 470, 2005 (via mxspartachris)

[fathom-the-universe-blog]

The Physics of Music

These patterns are made with nothing but sound. They are called Chladni patterns, after the German physicist Ernst Chladni (1756–1827) who used his violin bow to vibrate a metal plate with sand on it. A pattern appears in the sand when a surface is made to vibrate at certain resonances. A plate or membrane vibrating at resonance is divided into regions vibrating in opposite directions, bounded by lines of zero vibration called nodal lines. The sand is moved around the plate and collects at the nodes on the plate. The patterns that form are highly symmetrical and beautiful.

Fathom the Universe

Image: Chladni array

[applausive]

"...terrorists are the only true artists left, because they're the only ones who are still capable of really surprising people."

Laurie Anderson, The Cultural Ambassador

[applausive]

Time

We measure it in different ways.

The wasting away of a candle. The passing of square (or not-so-square) meals. Cups of tea. Bars of our favourite song.

In Stanley, when the factory was still fully functional, the sounds of the bell mill dictated time. The first tolling of the bell would rouse its sleepy workers, and the second mark the start of the working day.

Those failing to make their way from the village to the mill before the second ring would be refused their daily wage.

What happens, then, when these structures collapse? When the factory closed its doors did the people lose routine?

I am interested in what replaced the bell and the production line in marking time for its residents. Time could not go back to its old ways in the aftermath of the industrial revolution.

Not the changing birdsong, or the phases of the moon. The industrialisation of time is irreversible.

[applausive]

There's this odd, contradictory attitude towards mental illness. It's one which glorifies the ill artist - the Van Goghs, the Dadds, the Cobains - at the same time as dismissing the ill person.

We dismiss people's very real experiences of illness when they are unable to meet our image of the tortured, but productive, individual. Once illness is not glamorous, the tearing tornado of creativity, it becomes much harder to talk about.

[applausive]

A perennial theme in accusations brought against persecuted minorities is that they indulge in disgusting secret rituals involving any or all of the following: orgiastic sex, incest, baby sacrifice, consumption of human flesh or blood, and other breaches of bodily integrity such as the collection and use of stolen body parts.

Gillian Bennett, Bodies

[applausive]

[T]here is no naturalized gendered body. All of our bodies are modified with regard to gender, whether we seek out surgery or take hormones or not. All of us engage in or have engaged in processes of gender body modification (diets, shaving, exercise regimes, clothing choices, vitamins, birth control. etc) that alter our bodies, just as we’ve all been subjected to gender related processes that altered our bodies (being fed differently because of our gender, being given or denied proper medical care because of our gender, using dangerous products that are on the market only because of their relationship to gender norms, etc). The isolating of only some of these processes for critique, while ignoring others, is a classic exercise in domination.

Dean Spade, Dress to Kill, Fight to Win

[applausive]

Also, the lecturer described the vagina as 'the ultimate portal'.

[applausive]

So today we were looking at women in folk art and popular culture. One of the interesting things in all of these representations, made by male artists, was just how powerful the women were.

These were no mild madonnas, sitting pretty and fulfilling their role as virgin and vessel. These women are fighters, castrators, capable of facing down devils no man could.

Some, such as Griet in Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Dulle Griet, wear men's clothes.

Others wear, or fight for the right to wear, the breeches their husbands would usually don.

But the wearing of men's clothing, symbolic though it is, isn't necessary to inspire fear. The men are already terrified of the women. There's this rhetoric of men going out and trying to conquer the world - by destroying and cultivating nature, charting and colonising other lands, enforcing laws upon and killing other peoples - only to return home and be conquered by their own wives. This trope endures today, in the nagging wife, the overbearing mother, the domineering mother-in-law.

Where this leads, however, is ridiculous. Girolano Cardano wrote about how banning women from letting loose in carnivals, led them to gathering in secret. When this, too, was banned, they gathered in thought. And so, the more limitations men put on women, the more they feared them. Beating the devil became dancing with him. This fear of being beaten with a broomstick became fear of women convening to fly on broomsticks.

And so they fought back against an imagined threat. The comic depictions of women taking charge are replaced by images of women being hanged, tortured, and burned in witch trials.

This seems too familiar. Weirdly, it reminds me of gamergate. All these men reacting to an imagined threat to their dominance with completely absurd, out of proportion threats of violence.

[applausive]

Structure is sound.

Confusion is noise.

Judgement is sound.

Protest is noise.

[applausive]

Internalise

This work is an audio piece, formed of recordings of instances of transphobia found on the internet. It was 6 minutes long in order to accommodate the longest recording, of Richard Littlejohn's piece on schoolteacher Lucy Meadows. It was played in the dark with the aim of encouraging the audience to focus on the purely aural stimulation.

I shared this experience of the work during my project space. Although I had played a segment of it for a handful of people previously, it was the first time I had shared it as an experience.

The range of reactions was useful.

Some could not distinguish words from the work, strove to do so, and felt frustrated that they could not hear the sound in the noise. Others felt the sound was less important than the feel of the noise. Others still could parse the words and so felt more connected with the 'subject matter'. Then some heard the words but saw that as unnecessary to experience the work.

It was clear that the work as it stood was not ideal for project space, as it was too long - I had to turn it off before it had finished - and may have been more suited to a situation in which people could come in and out when they felt they had had enough.

The issue of how opaque or transparent the work is is challenging. I am not a fan of message-driven art - I feel it is too narrow, too limiting. I would much rather produce work which provides a starting point, and allows the audience to have a very personal reaction. In this respect I think I succeeded, even if it frustrated some.

The issue itself is very personal to me, and if the work were less cacophonous it might communicate more the content of my thoughts than the feeling. I would rather not have the work become a lecture on identity politics.

This was a very difficult work for me to share with a room full of acquaintances, but overall I am glad to have done so. It was a hugely educational experience, and I may now improve upon the work and tailor it toward a group exhibition.

[applausive]

One of the difficulties of working with sound is keeping it distinct from music or other commercial sound forms.

I can listen to any of Maryanne Amacher's works that are available online, but the experience will be much more similar to listening to a commercial record than that of a fine art work.

How important this distinction is varies with different pieces. For example City Links would lose much of its matter if heard out of context.

[applausive]

for Brewster, volumetric presence is not confined to walls and the layout of cubes, but rather through clouds of sound that hover within space, as separate and distinct volumes that carry weight, mass, texture and colour; for Amacher, architecture’s boundaries, in turn, do not stop at the wall but proceed up the wall, into space and through the body, shifting the definition · of what it means to inhabit space. For in this sense, space comes actively to inhabit the body.

Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art

[applausive]

Art can be satirical, but is satire art?

Regardless, I really enjoy Lana Newstrom's invisible work. The commentators' reactions are a mix of in-jokes, anger, and disbelief:

Chris says:

Hello Lana,

I would like to inform you that your graphic named Lana7.png appears to be an exact copy of an image on one of my client’s websites titled blank.png which I uploaded five years ago. I believe this to be copyright infringement on your behalf and recommend you remove it. Nothing worse than when a web designer replicates another designer’s graphic so blatantly.

spower says:

enjoy your moment of fame – you will be shunned by the art world for years – you couldn’t find a gallery, couldn’t sell a piece – this is your 15 minutes. No one will take you seriously ever again. I am even more outraged that my tax dollars that pay for the CBC allowed them to interview you. You offend artists like me and you should be ashamed.

jad says:

You make my blood boil Lana. You are an idiot. You are a disgrace to the art society and you are the reason of global warming.

Rather than asking for money directly, Newstrom asks for proceeds to be donated to a similarly intriguing cause. The whole set-up does, if it weren't for the parodical tone of the documentary, almost feel plausible.

So does this satire count as art? What separates this parody from Duchamp's take on Mona Lisa, or other similar fine-art humour?

[applausive]

...what has said need not be said again; ... an expression does not work twice, does not live twice; that all words, once uttered, are dead and are effective only at the moment when they are uttered; that a form that has been used has no function but to urge us to look for another... This conformity which causes us to confuse sublimity, ideas, things with the forms they have assumed down through the ages and in ourselves - in our mentalities, the mentalities of snobs, fops, and aesthetes whom the public no longer understands.

Antonin Artaud