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How I Spent My (Techno) Summer
Below is the music I made in June, July, and August (and early Sept.) of this year. This is roughly a CD's worth of tunes (approximately 54 minutes). I guess I consider this techno, because I like old school techno, but it's produced for bookshelf speakers or headphones, not necessarily the dance floor. It's not "art" music--it hews pretty close to certain genre conventions and isn't "deconstructing" anything. Except, I suppose, I'm not that interested in typical song composition dynamics where you always have to have a verse, chorus, bridge, break, and reprise. Simplest is best unless you absolutely have to use those dynamics. In any case, the music's not "electronica"--I hate that late '90s marketing word. If that buzzword refers to anything it's a hybrid of electronic dance and Les Baxter/Esquivel-style lounge exotica, and I'm definitely not doing that. "Home computer techno?" That doesn't quite get there either, because the sound is bit fuller than what I think of as the typical "amateur," or pardon me, Garageband sound. Oh, I give up.
Addendum: I also don't like the term "IDM," agreeing with Simon Reynolds that the use of "intelligent" to describe music you make or like is inherently wankerific. I want the music to be dumber, not smarter.
"808 Straight" [mp3 removed]
"Algebra 2 Trig (Beats)" [mp3 removed]
"Anthropos Essentia" [4.8 MB .mp3]
"Amiable Floater" [mp3 removed]
"Aruba '85" [3.1 MB .mp3]
"Bass-o-matic" [mp3 removed]
"Everyone Fights, No One Quits" [mp3 removed]
"Heartbleet" [3.6 MB .mp3]
"Hey" [mp3 removed]
"Hiphop Snares" [mp3 removed]
"More Marching Morons" [mp3 removed]
"Mutator OD Bass (Long Version)" [4.8 MB .mp3]
"Our Rulers From Space" [mp3 removed]
"Pitch Sequences" [mp3 removed]
"Pop Mechanix" [mp3 removed]
"Rubber Elephants" [mp3 removed]
"Sacred Machines Homage" [mp3 removed]
"Teleclysm" [3.3 MB .mp3]
Oskar Fischinger is the late, great abstract animated filmmaker who started his career in Germany and wound up in Hollywood, influencing Disney's Fantasia and countless other works. His style could be described as Art Deco psychedelia, both trippy and very precise. Note to the Fischinger estate. You are not very smart for telling YouTube to remove Motion Study No. 1 from its database. See, there's this thing called "resolution," spelled R-E-S-O-L-U-T-I-O-N. When videos are copied in "low resolution" and presented in "smaller screen sizes" they are not exact copies. What they do is "whet the appetites" of "potential consumers" who will "buy" your videos, thus bringing you "money." This gosh darn consarned newfangled technology thing can really be your friend if you let it.
I ordered the Fischinger videotapes several years ago from Jack Rutberg Fine Arts, to my continuing delight. Rutberg is still offering them for sale, but now some of the works on the tapes are available on DVD from the Center for Visual Music. Here are the contents of that DVD. I have noted with asterisks which films are on the Rutberg tapes. Looks like 3 films are on the DVD that haven't been available before. That's worth 30 bucks, since you're also getting the other films at slightly better quality.
*Also on The Films of Oskar Fischinger Volume 1 (VHS), along with Muratti Gets in the Act and Study No. 8
Spirals
Study no. 6
Study no. 7*
Kreise*
Allegretto*
Radio Dynamics
Motion Painting No. 1*
Wax Experiments**
Spiritual Constructions*
Walking from Munich to Berlin**
**Also on The Films of Oskar Fischinger Volume 2 (VHS), along with Muratti Privat, Study No. 5, Study No. 9, Study No. 12, Composition in Blue, American March, Organic Fragment, Mutoscope Reels, and Muntz TV
According to the Fischinger website, CVM also released a VHS tape in 2004 with the following films: Spirals, Spiritual Constructions, Study 6, Liebesspiel, Radio Dynamics, and Motion Painting No. 1. Liebesspiel is the only piece that is neither on the Rutberg tapes or the DVD.
More Sketch and Swap. I just screen-captured the one above, by some random genius, after I submitted my image of a grandma stepping on a pompadoured guy's head.
It's Mario, of course, with a tiny cap, broad shoulders, and bull neck, kind of like those superhero Marios that popped up about a year ago.
Sally McKay recommended this site where you make a drawing and it disappears into a database and in exchange you get to watch a clip of someone else making a drawing that also disappeared into the database. I flouted the process by capturing my drawing and coloring it in in MSPaint.
LoVid has redesigned their website. I added it to my side links since I plan to go back many times to absorb what's there. They are an exemplar of how to combine so-called new media with so-called traditional art. Completely loose and funky but relentlessly creative and productive, it's as if they don't have time to get hung up on what categories they are or are not falling into. I will probably update this post or do subsequent posts as I look at their site and thoughts occur to me.
Graffitist Dex, from a fund-raising party for the Area space, San Juan, Puerto Rico, via the Miami and Puerto Rico-based online magazine Rotund World. I confess I had deleted the unsolicited email plugging the magazine and then woke up this morning thinking about that graffiti design. Also from Rotund, the two views below of Hector Madera Gonzalez's "Optical Borderline" at Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, San Juan. According to the accompanying article by Rotund editor Joel Weinstein, the installation is a meditation on Puerto Rican residential grillwork. It's interesting to see the Jim Isermann-style wallpapered gallery applied to tropes other than the indigenous US post-Populuxe and post-psychedelic designs, and the neon and accompanying bland video documentation seem to be good additions, based on the photos, at least. (Accents omitted from a's and e's since I'm not sure how well RSS will read them.)
My pieces Vortex 1 and Vortex 2, the title card information for which I posted here, will be in a show opening Friday night, September 8, in Mobile, AL. Here's the Press-Register article about the exhibit:
High concept : Space 301 opens high-tech multimedia show Friday
Sunday, September 03, 2006
By THOMAS B. HARRISON
Arts Editor
Our bold new millennium has brought a sense of impermanence at once terrifying and exhilarating.
New technologies make it possible for artists, writers and musicians to exist in a parallel universe, one foot in the corporeal (physical) world, the other in cyberspace. Sometimes simultaneously.
Hard to imagine a visual arts event with greater contemporary resonance than "Art and Place I: Place as Muse," which opens Friday and runs through Oct. 29 at Space 301 in downtown Mobile.
"This show is innovative on so many levels," says Barclay McConnell, curator for Space 301. "I think it will be very exciting, especially for anyone interested in the (seemingly infinite) creative possibilities of digital technologies and the World Wide Web.
"There will be video-game art and art films including a stop-animation DVD of an artist's homepage as it evolved over several years. [preview .mov from Paul Slocum here]
"Contemporary artists are really pushing the boundaries in terms of medium -- moving away from the traditional such as drawing and painting into using video, computers and the Web in new and unusual ways."
McConnell says "Art and Place" is "full of new media" and has a fascinating concept. This show also marks the debut of guest curator Clayton V. Colvin, creator of the StealthArts Web site and an adjunct instructor at the University of Alabama and UAB in Birmingham.
Based in Birmingham, StealthArts is an "evolving space focused on contemporary art," according to the Web site: www.stealtharts.com. Viewing is by appointment.
"Clayton is a respected and very intelligent young curator bringing something entirely new to Mobile," says McConnell.
In his curatorial statement, Colvin writes:
"As a culture, our concept of place is in flux. We can mean a physical location, a virtual location on the World Wide Web, or a fictional location in a narrative or fantasy. Regardless, we are talking about an environment; a space."
Colvin hopes this exhibition will explore how artists are creating works using place as subject or muse.
"The relationship of individual to location is interestingly entangled with personal experience and identity," he writes.
"A person's relationship to the land can define their character. Its presence may be subconscious, surfacing in quiet thoughts of nostalgia for the pastoral, or in loud symbols of hysterical nationalism.
"It is difficult to imagine an identity without a place, be that a destination in the future, a place of the present, or point of origin."
Colvin selected 20 artists to investigate "how (or if) this relationship changes as the concept of place becomes a synthesis of the virtual and the concrete."
The artists examine the issue by exploring telecommunications and the Internet, globalization, homelessness, journalism, personal memory, hallucination, tourism, genocide, natural disasters and video games, according to Colvin.
Colvin says he is keenly interested in artists who deal with topical issues in both an old-school way through painting and sculpture, as well as artists whose work exists primarily in MySpace pages and jpeg files.
"You have online friends and then real-life friends also," he says. Colvin says he met many of these artists in the 1990s, a convenient point of reference for anyone trying to make sense of the ever-changing concept of "place." Net-art came of age in the '90s and is now being revisited, he says.
He says the diverse range of artwork here is "very contemporary with what artists are doing right now," but as one would expect, it is not a regional exhibition. Some of the artists live and work in the South; others are from New York City, Los Angeles, Texas, Nebraska. One lives in London.
That's a worldwide web of artwork.
Memphis artist Hamlett Dobbins takes a traditional approach by capturing a moment in time, says Colvin. His oil-on-linen panels are titled with the initials of the person with whom he shared those moments, "so for him it's about personal memory."
Paul Slocum of Dallas contributed a stop-animation of his homepage; New York artist Tom Moody's "Vortex 1" was created from inkjet on paper.
Birmingham photographer Ryan Russell (ryanrussell.net), who graduated from UAB in graphic design, shoots photos of rock bands and travels a lot, and his work reflects a life in transit.
His "Photograph From a Delta Airplane" provides the postcard image for the exhibition.
One of the more intriguing artists in the show is Jason Varone (www.varonearts.org) of Brooklyn, N.Y., who attended NYU with Colvin and whose work focuses on telecommunications. "Topology of Technology" is a mixed-media DVD.
Colvin hopes visitors to Space 301 will have a chance to experience these varying perspectives and walk away with new ideas and insights.
"Hopefully it'll strengthen whatever relationship (the viewers) already have to place," he says.
An excerpt from Hubris, a new book about the Iraq war by David Corn and Michael Isikoff:
After the invasion, Dick Cheney's aides desperately sifted through raw intelligence nuggets in search of any evidence that would justify the war. On one occasion they sent the WMD hunters in Iraq a satellite photo that they suspected showed a hiding place for WMDs. But it was only an overhead photo of a watering hole for cows.Mark A, who sent this excerpt, comments: "Mad cow disease. Methane gas bombs. These are WMDs."
Also, I love "after the invasion." Could we somehow put to rest the notion that Cheney is a super-competent bureaucrat? The press still believes this, just as it keeps repeating that the equivocating politician John McCain is a "straight talker." Cheney is a paranoid controller and a vain SOB, but he is not competent. He's a bungler.