Music by numbers

Colourful things which have caught my attention. Include music, illustration, photography, fine art, street art, green architecture, sustainability, DIY, gardening, and some inspiring stories.

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Good day for some rhythm & blues.

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Interesting video documentary on Contemporary Cantonese Art in the 1980s by Asia Art Archive available in full on their website

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Nina Simone - "Love Me or Leave Me"

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Writing on the Walls

by James A. Reeves [Source: Civic Centre and Crying In Public]

Strange how in a city of millions it’s so easy to feel phenomenally alone. Our public realm often doesn’t help. Our buildings, buses, and trains are plastered with messages telling us we’re not sexy or worthwhile unless we purchase a particular brand of pants or telephone or beer. The average American sees over 300 advertisements per day and nobody gets through this unscathed. We walk through streets advertising all-you-can-eat buffets and gym memberships. There’s a reason that military words like campaign, viral, and target are the vocabulary of marketing. Yet these are our walls and buildings. The city is our living room. It’s where we kiss, rejoice, or have a panic attack. Nothing makes a place yours like crying in it.

Imagine a public realm filled with empathy and storytelling rather than commercials and prohibitions. As a group of artists, writers, and musicians, Civic Center tries to combine art, sound, writing, and public events into interesting ways to personally connect to the city and one another. We believe in creating megaphones, soapboxes, and sanctuaries for people in ways that straddle the digital divide, soothe our digital fatigue, and give us a chance to pause and reflect. We’re inspired by the work of Mural Arts and Carl Sagan, by the writing of Don DeLillo, JG Ballard, and Joan Didion, and the optimism of Constructivism and the mischief of Dada.

We’re currently working on site-specific public art, writing, and design projects in New Orleans, Hong Kong, Spain, Indianapolis, and ghost towns in the Mojave desert. But first, let’s rewind a century to Moscow. It’s 1922 and a sense of possibility thrums through the city’s crowded streets, twinned with faith that new technologies such as radio, film, and offset printing will “enable a great leap into universal human culture.” Eye-popping posters and handbills plaster the sides of buildings and kiosks, some of them with giant disembodied heads yelling into electric red megaphones, others with exploding exclamation points. Men with typewriters for bodies. Leggy women melding into camera tripods. This is the work of Vladimir and Georgii Stenberg, two young brothers playing with a bold visual language that would change graphic design forever. “Our art is designed to stop a busy passerby in his tracks,” they said. This is our mantra. To yank someone from her daily routine; to inspire someone to look at his city with fresh eyes; to rekindle a childhood aspiration; to share a memory about a forgotten building. These are our walls. Let’s tell each other stories on them, the good and the bad. Our stories define the places we share. And they make us feel less alone, which should be the aim of all good art and writing and, perhaps one day, the design of our public spaces.

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A random idea which popped up from a conversation at work the other day!

We thought it would be pretty fun to create a small guide to Hong Kong made by locals, collecting their favourite tips about Hong Kong, aimed particularly at young people.

The idea came from a tourist map of my beloved home-town Brussels, made by local friends and volunteers at Use-it. (If you're ever in town, make sure you swing by the office, grab a coffee, a map and ask Marieke to tell you the story of Jannekepis).

There is also the Moustache Guide to Hong Kong made by two local tailors in Sheung Wan, which is a little bit around the lines of what we've got in mind.

It's just for fun, so if you're proud of your city and feel you know Hong Kong's best kept secrets, then fill it in and have a laugh. The best responses will be posted up here, and who knows it might lead to a bigger project in future!

Feel free to pass it on.

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Vik Muniz's 'Waste Land'

Here's a nice dialogue between artist Vik Muniz and recycler Tiaõ, taken from the documentary 'Waste Land' which was recently on at the Agnès b. cinema in the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The two discuss art’s subjectivity, its therapeutic qualities and the individual’s outlook.

Vik Muniz: What did you think of modern art before you went to the auction?

Tiaõ: I used to think it was crap.

Vik Muniz: Why’d you think it was crap?

Tiaõ: Because I think a lot of things aren’t really art.

Vik Muniz: Why don’t you think it’s art? Because you don’t get it?

Tiaõ: Because I don’t get it and it’s totally meaningless.

Vik Muniz: But do you think you have to get it, for it to be art?

Tiaõ: I think it has to communicate something at least. After you told me the story about… Jean-Michel Basquiat… I started liking his stuff a lot more. I began to understand his kind of sinister style. It’s a bit childish, like monsters. I started to understand it and I liked it.

Vik Muniz: But if you’re saying you liked it better after you understood it, then maybe we just don’t like things we don’t understand.

Tiaõ: Of course, you can dislike something because you haven’t tried it. For example, you were always trying to explain what you were doing. But I never understood.

Vik Muniz: Until you saw it?

Tiaõ: I only understood it when Fabio brought me up here. Then I got what you crazy people were up to. Then I really got it.

Vik Muniz: The crazy people are the ones who buy it.

Tiaõ: They’re not crazy. It’s beautiful. I’d buy it. I’ll buy it someday. I’ll buy my picture back.

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The current exhibition now showing at Saatchi Gallery is the "Hong Kong Eye", however prior to this exhibition was the "Korean Eye" which is a collection of key works by 33 contemporary Korean artists: painters, sculptors and photographers. This exhibition wants to highlight how contemporary Korean artists are exploring and bringing into play a wide diversity of new materials bound together by the use of time-established and more innovative techniques. The exhibition is presented by Standard Chartered who, as the Lead Sponsor, is committed to help and participate in the development of Korean Art, both on home ground and internationally.

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Lee Jiyen's "River Flows In You Pt. 2" is currently on display at "Womad Code: The Eye of Korean Women Artists" at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Tsim Sha Tsui.

The bird's eye view transforms anonymous pedestrians into musical notes. People in the scene, totally unaware of being watched, march up and down the stairs creating dynamic patterns that resemble musical notes. The accumulation of different times and angles articulates time-based narrative which leads the viewer to sense the hidden music in our monotonous daily routine.

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Lee Jiyen is currently being exhibited as part of "Womad Code: The Eye of Korean Woman Artists" at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Hong Kong.

Lee Dae Hyung, the curator of the show, explains that "the vertical lines symbolise the competitive hierarchy system of the urban life in Korean society. People in the scene are not allowed to move horizontally. They are not even allowed to look to their sides. Their legitimate direction of movement is either up or down to reach cloud 9. However, every attempt turns abortive. Echoes the trajectories people follow in life."

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Otto Li's "Urban Soundscapes" at Detour 2012 in Wan Chai

Sound in the urban environment is something we experience every day but never pay much attention to. This intangible “background music” captures the mood of a city and the spirit of our everyday life. However, just as fish don’t know they are in water, we often have no clear impression or recollection of the sounds we live with.

To illustrate some of Wan Chai’s "background music", Li uses a recording of a short clip of sounds in the area around the local police station. This is also represented through the soundwave visualiser, describing the same experience from a quite different perspective. By capturing the changing form of the soundwave in three frames per second and reconstructing this data with pixel blocks, Li translates intangible sound into a three dimensional touchable sculpture - a Soundscape.

When audiences enter this installation work, they experience everyday life in an alternate way. They rediscover things ignored in daily life and thus can bring back a collective memory of our public space.

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"Sanya Vibe" is the third interactive mirror in a series of Island6 works, with China Vibe and Shanghai Vibe, that plays with notions of intimacy in the digital age. In the shrouding blackness of an antique mirror from colonial era Shanghai, model Zhang Tian Yi (张天伦) sleeps with her iPhone at her side, dreaming in dimensional ambiguity, a 21st century reflection in a 1930s artifact, a Shanghainese model in the summery clothes of south China's most tropical beach town, Sanya (三亚).  Above her dozing head, traced in lipstick upon the glass, a phone number hangs and waits to be dialed. A million Chinese romances are born in China every day, based on introductions between friends, deals between parents, printed ads, and online chats. The sight in Sanya Vibe is an amalgamation of all these matchmaking mediums in an adolescent vision. When viewers call the number, they carry out the act of calling, reaching out, and initiating what can be in many ways described as intercourse. The phone explodes in vibrations. Zhang Tian Yi awakes and looks to her portal to the outside world: she reads who is calling and decides to let them in - but only as much as she desires. The phone vibrates violently in her hand and Zhang Tian Yi presses the sensations caused by the viewer up and down her entire body. The look on her face says it all: this is contact. This is intercourse. This could even be love. When it's all over, Zhang Tian Yi is rudely awakened by the abrupt halt of her phone. But, ultimately pleased, she sends a text to her callers to remind them they aren't forgotten: perhaps "phone me daddy", or "you always know exactly what to say", she is always grateful to the digitized level of love she receives. 

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"The Cat that Eats Diodes" celebrates the art collective's six-year love affair with all that resonate with electricity and life with a refreshing provocative touch. From animated goldfish to lasercut trees, the story of our world is retold in Technicolour glory through LED, video, photography and contemporary sculpture. Re-appropriating iconic scenes from Shanghai and Hong Kong, Island6 also known as Liu Dao brings together the essence of two metropolises that are impelled by technology, but inspired by life. You can check out most of their digital artworks on their website.

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At loss for an actual bike here, meanwhile the Hong Kong Bicycle Film Festival is on from 11-25th January at the Hong Kong Arts Centre will do. Yes, please! Here's a really cute short film about Spanish brand peSeta and how they came to make bicycle caps, or the love story between a bicycle and a sewing machine.

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AlunaGeorge - "Your Drums, Your Love"

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Chapters 1 and 2 at Carroll/Fletcher

The wonderful Carroll/Fletcher gallery tucked away in a quiet backstreet just off Oxford Street in central London has been organising a series of participatory discussions that use relevant, accessible texts to consider pertinent issues of our times.

The first of this series 'Chapter 1' chose to discuss David Harvey’s 2009 text Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition which analyses the events that have led to the current economic crisis and maps out the various social movements that are currently challenging capitalism.

The second, 'Chapter 2'  selected the first chapter of Theory From The South. Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving Toward Africa by Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff as a starting point. This work attempts to recontextualize global relations, and challenge our perceptions about 'developed' and 'developing' nations. In the authors' words: 

"Western enlightenment thought has, from the first, posited itself as the wellspring of universal learning ... it has regarded the non-West . . . primarily as a place of parochial wisdom, of antiquarian traditions, of exotic ways and means . . . But what if we invert the order of things? What if we posit that, in the present moment, it is the global south that affords privileged insight into the workings of the world at large?"

The gallery was co-founded by Jonathon Carroll and Steve Fletcher. It supports existing and new forms of artistic production, and works with exceptional emerging and established artists, whose practices use a diverse range of media to explore contemporary socio-political, cultural, scientific and technological themes.

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Laura Mvula — "She" shot by South African director Damian Weilers in Montagu, Western Cape. 

You can find Laura Mvula's debut EP available here.