View current page
...more recent posts
More on the circuit bending genre. The painterly and/or sculptural aspirations of benders can be problematic, especially if the result is sci fi cliche, but the physical aspect can be engaging, too. So we're looking for good examples of circuit bent pieces that are visually, musically, performatively tight. I've posted work by Peter Blasser (aka Peter B) before; above is another piece of his (I think it's his) that I photographed at the Shinth Tour at Deitch last year. It reminds me of Eva Hesse's Metronomic Irregularity II (below) only with a sound component: actually it's as if her work looked forward to a time when sound would complete the idea.
My memories of the Blasser piece are sketchy. I don't know what the circuit board/sound-producing module thingies are. The cloth is a paint-spattered rectangle of canvas that's like a parody of a bad Pollock, but the expressionism component is relevant, particularly in light of the Hesse, which has been described as an attempt to reconstitute Pollock in the vocabulary of '60s minimalism. The sound you hear through the headphones is the sublime product of random crisscrossing connections in the circuit field: chirping robotic crickets, but with pauses and subtleties making them slightly haunted and Eno-esque. The blinking lights were their ephemeral, firefly-droid cousins. I don't know if there was any programming involved in the routing of the signals, or if it was solely a product of hardwiring parts. I guess I don't really care. More detail about the piece would be appreciated.
UPDATE: via cory, a momus-sponsored page devoted to Peter Blasser's old band the Gongs. the mp3 doesn't work but great photo. also link to CD (don't know about availability).
The Democratic Leadership Council--the pro-corporate, pro-war wing of the Democrats that helped bring us Bill Clinton, has been busy lately trying to disassociate itself from Michael Moore and the rest of us who oppose Bush's wars. Of course the antiwar position is the sane position and the idea of US Empire Forever basically nuts, but for the sake of argument let's say we and Moore are extremists. The Republicans won in 2004 by embracing their extremist elements (and cheating): the corporate hotel porno-pushers cynically worked hand in hand with religious fundamentalists. The Democratic corporatists repeatedly fail because they can't do that. This is probably because the Moore wing's critique of the overall corporate program is more devastatingly effective than the fundies', who don't have such a critique because they haven't figured out who their real enemies are--they think gays and abortion are the problem.
And for trolls who think we're endorsing Stalin here, "corporate" or "corporatists" refers to crony capitalists, missile mongers, and sundry multinationals gaming the system against the greater interests of the larger number of US citizens, as well as exploiting labor at home and abroad. And not everything about the DLC is bad--check out this anti-Bush statement by its policy director Ed Kilgore.