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La Alquimia de los Sueños / The Alchemy of Dreams

Remedios Varo: A study in surrealist sound, scent, taste, and tale

[ January 30, 2012 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

The Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) depicted surreal visions in which the mythological and the quotidian intertwined in enchanting ways. She created fascinating documentation of her explorations of the terrestrial and the otherworldly, a place where sight and sound, scent and taste, sense and fantasy collaborated and contrasted toward a tantalizingly ephemeral end.

This month I had the pleasure of concluding work on a project with Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick that celebrated various facets of Varos’ work and life. Titled La Alquimia de los Sueños (which translates as The Alchemy of Dreams), it was commissioned by the gallery Frey Norris in San Francisco to coincide with an extraordinary Varo exhibit running there through February 25. The project took the form of a dinner, a kind of meal-as-art, held at Engine 43 in San Francisco’s Excelsior neighborhood. There were six courses, each associated with a different magical spell and drawing on the surrealist recipes that Varo had created with her close friend, Leonora Carrington. There’s a January 29 story about the event at nytimes.com (“Break Brick, Break Bread, Break the Mold”).

I. The Sound of Dreams

As for my role, among other things I had the pleasure of interviewing Mexico-born sound artist and musician Guillermo Galindo, who lives in San Francisco, about his participation in the project. As seen up top, in a pair of photos by Andria Lo, he performed at the dinner — not only his own mix of sounds, but also deep shuddering bass lines that drew from Varo’s interest in resonance and vibration. What follows is an excerpt of the full interview, “The Sound of Dreams,” which can be read at engine43.org:

Weidenbaum: Regarding the relationship between Tarot and the collective unconscious, can you talk a bit about specifically the role of sound in dreams?

Galindo: I have found that for most people it is difficult to remember the sound, or sounds, of their dreams. Most people, including me, have an easier time remembering music: music that accompanies the dream, music that is played by someone or, in my case, composition ideas that appear by themselves or performed by myself or someone else. As in real life, dream components have sounds: an explosion, someone walking in high heels, the sound of the rain etc. Having said this, I do think that sounds have their own significance in dreams — a significance not necessarily attached to the visual or narrative elements of a specific dream. In other words, I believe that sounds in dreams do have their own specific symbology.

Weidenbaum: Are there parallels between food and sound you’d like to discuss?

Galindo: I had a Chinese music student who, in order to reconnect to her homeland memories, recorded the sound of herself cooking of Chinese dishes, which she would cook one day each month. Then she would present random photographs of the dishes with the audio of the cooking sounds. Different foods have different textures of sound when one cooks them. This provides information about their physical nature and about the chemical reaction that they have when mixed over the fire with other elements. I think that the purest and most enjoyable “food” sound is the sound of water. I think that the sound of the water falling into a glass is a vital element when enjoying a good drink of water, not to mention the “clink” of the wine glasses, the sound of silverware, or the sound of clay, wooden, or ceramic plates and bowls.

And this is a screenshot that Galindo provided to me of the software setup he utilized when playing live, in addition to a pair of Kaoss Pads and at least four iPods. (It is of higher quality than the casual camera shot I posted on Twitter the night of the event.)

Here, from a post-event summary, is a list of the sounds he developed for each of the courses:

0. XECATL (simulated gigantic ice flutes) independent white noise frequency bands oscillating randomly in chaos.

1. Introduction of 50 Hz.low frequency modulated by 260 Hz. and 2.5 Hz. LFO simultaneously resulting in sudden architectural shaking.

2. Harmonic content evolving from Erik Satie’s Gnossienne #1 as if reproduced by echoing crystal feathers.

3. Multiplication of Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater as if sang by a bleeding heart.

4. Intermittent triple drone in Eb and recurring patchy electric glitches emanating from pure electricity controlled by light boxes. Agustin Lara’s Veracruz emerges from the minuscule speaker of a transistor radio.

5. Modulated low frequency enters the 20 Hz realm as if entering subsonic levels. Low frequency joins polyrhythmic mass reaching a climax buildup made of electronic glitches and samples of heavy metal distorted guitars doubled with baritone sax reaching 120 bpm plus tempos. The sonic storm breaks into total silence.

II. A Brief Fiction

In addition, I served as managing editor on the project, working with the various participants on their written contributions. And I wrote a short story, “Sitting for a Dream,” that is an imaginary scenario inspired by the fact that Mexico City cardiologist Dr. Ignacio Chávez commissioned what yielded the 1957 Varo portrait “Retrato del doctor Ignacio Chávez.” This is an excerpt from the story:

She took his hand in hers and silently led him through several chambers, each its own little world. One was dark and painted like a jungle. Another was covered, walls and ceiling, in billowing cotton tarps that filtered the daylight. He entered the final chamber by himself. Varo stood on the far side, directly opposite the doorway through which he had just walked. She, too, wore a lab coat, her hair pulled back. The room was almost empty. In the center there was a medium-size wooden frame suspended from the ceiling by pulleys. On either side facing the frame was a single chair. He walked toward the frame, and as he approached, so did Varo. He realized she was mimicking him, but not in a rude way. If anything, it was flattering to be the subject of such attention. He walked toward the closer of the two chairs. She approached the other, copying his gait, adjusting her posture to match his.

When they reached their chairs, they both sat down, looking at each other through the frame, as if at a painting. She gave him a little smile, which he acknowledged by removing his hat. In turn, she pulled from her coat pocket a deck of cards. She selected one card, seemingly at random, and turned it toward him. It showed an old sage with a stick, and below it, in English, was written “The Hermit.” She then pulled another card, this one in Spanish. It read “El Corazon.” It was his turn to smile. He recognized it from the lotería. The next card was “La Pera,” and he recalled the tree from the ill-fated mural she had proposed. She saw the recognition in his face, and her shoulders relaxed. Then his shoulders relaxed. Somehow, he found himself now imitating her, unintentionally but naturally. Varo reached under her chair and lifted a small goblet. Taking the hint, Dr. Chavez did the same. Again, he found himself mimicking her — how simply she had cast her spell.

This is the painting that inspired the story, which is readable in full at engine43.org:

III. Notes on Scent

One especially fascinating element of the event was smell. Each course was accompanied by a scent developed by Mirjana Blankenship (of captainblankenship.com), and these scents built one upon the previous as the evening proceeded. The terms for these elements of a collective scent, I learned from Blankenship, are musical: they are “notes.” The deepest is the “base” note, and then there are “heart” and “top” notes above, and they all “decay” over time, much as a struck chord might. The explanation reminded me of an essay by Brian Eno from the magazine Details back in 1992 (“Scents and Sensibility”), in which he described the parallels and intersections between his experiments in smell and sound. Blankenship’s scents (presented in the elegant bottles shown below) were not to be experienced in their own olfactory anechoic chamber. Quite the contrary, they were selected and constructed to mix with the scents inherent in the meal, including the rich smoke that emanated from the hearth in which meat was roasted, and the burnt sugar that resulted from pistachio pralines made on site just moments before they were served (see the very bottom of this post). By intending to mingle rather than command attention, Blankenship’s scents were like the famed “furniture music” of Erik Satie that is understood as a strong precursor of ambient music — sounds that Galindo included in his performance.

More on the exhibit and the gallery at freynorris.com. There’s a wide range of coverage of the La Alquimia de los Sueños event at engine43.org.

I previously participated in A Sors, a project the duo developed, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative.

(Photos by Andria Lo of andrialo.com.)

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Best of 2011: The 10 (or 12) Best Commercial Ambient/Electronic Albums

[ December 30, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

This is the first in a series of best-of lists to be published for 2011. There will also be lists of best free/netlabel music, best movie scores, and best iOS sound apps. And for the record, so to speak, the word “best” is used in the colloquial sense: It simply means my favorites of the year.

There has likely been less commercial music discussed on Disquiet.com in 2011 than in any previous year since the site’s launch, almost exactly 15 years ago, in December 1996. This relative absence wasn’t intentional. It doesn’t even particularly reflect my daily listening habits. But it does, in retrospect, reflect my imagination. I listen to enormous amounts of commercially released music, much that is sent to me for promotional purposes, much that I hear online, and much that I myself purchase. My email inbox is overrun with inbound, unsolicited, but often welcome, invitations to listen to the commercial music for free (un-commercially, as it were, though in the end, the whole act of promotion is itself a commercial enterprise).

Yet still, there is something about a commercial record that felt inherently stolid in 2011 — not all commercial records, and not the music specifically. The music can be dynamic, adventurous, but the enterprise can still feel rote or calculated or misguided, or some combination thereof.

I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, and interacting with, the music than emanates from generative sound apps (those based in Internet browsers, and those that come in the form of mobile-device apps). I spent a lot of time listening to, and thinking about, the music that emerges from various outposts of the “free music” movement/phenomenon (from netlabels in particular, and also general Creative Commons work, as well as work that is released for free with no apparent tie to or, perhaps, even knowledge of either of those philosophically informed communities). I spent a lot of time listening to commercially released music, but rarely this year did I think about it with the energy that I did my other listening.

All of which is in no way intended to diminish the 10 (or 12) commercial recordings listed below. Nor is it my sense that following list could easily be swapped out with two or even four more lists of fascinating sets of 10 albums from the past year. These were selected because any other such lists would still have some sense of absence. The music here touches on a variety of approaches, which is part of what makes it feel whole. There is voice-infused music, and sound art, and something not too distantly related to dance music, and noise, and elegant ambience, and contemporary classical, and remixes — and more. There are small-scale recordings, and recordings for which institutional financial support was necessary. In two cases two albums are listed, because they are by the same artists and were released this year and feel of a piece with each other. (And it at least one of the two cases, they were subsequently packaged together by the releasing record label.)

All of which is to say, in a year when I didn’t write about much commercial music, when it came time to list my 10 favorites, the list expanded to 12. They are listed here in alphabetical order by musician. Yes, “musician,” singular. One thing that struck me when I completed this list is that all these albums are, with the exception of the ECM remix collection, solo records.

Julianna Barwick‘s The Magic Place (Asthmatic Kitty): Julianna Barwick is a choir of one. She makes music in which layer upon layer of her singing, vaguely druid in its tonal quality, form slow cascades of seemingly wordless invention. The effect is both meditative and cathartic. Other elements make themselves heard, including a minimalist piano that sounds like Harold Budd at work on one of Tom Waits’ detuned barroom favorites. This is music that could all to easily lapse into treacle, but it shows restraint, not in its ambition, but in its affect. … More on Barwick at juliannabarwick.com. Listen to the album in full at juliannabarwick.bandcamp.com. More on the record at asthmatickitty.com. There’s also a collection of remixes, Matrimony Remixes, which I cannot recommend; the beats just make all the songs sound like the closing music to a Disney animated film.
 
Jefferson Friedman‘s Quartets (New Amsterdam): The collection contains two complete string quartets and a pair of remixes. The quartets (which date from 1999 and 2005) are alternately fierce and pastoral, and they distinguish themselves with the extent to which the instrumentalists are treated as equal partners, and the extent to which the arrangement is the music: theme and melody rarely stand out above the musical interplay. They are performed here by the Chiara String Quartet, for whom they were composed. The Matmos remixes are some of the duo’s strongest recent work, especially the closing track, “Floor Plan Mix,” which achieves a spectral quality in its distillation of the source material. … More on the musicians at jeffersonfriedman.com, chiaraquartet.net, and brainwashed.com/matmos. Listen to the album in full at chiarastringquartet.bandcamp.com. More on the album at newamsterdamrecords.com.
 
Grouper‘s A I A : Dream Loss and A I A : Alien Observer (Yellow Electric): Between their titles and approach, these are at least companion collections and more like parts of a whole (think how with the final two thirds of the Star Wars or the Lisbeth Salander trilogies, neither half is particularly satisfying without the other). Grouper is Liz Harris, and her two 2011 full-length releases, though available separately, deserve consideration as a whole, not simply because their titles and covers suggest them as halves of a pair, or entries in a series, but because they similarly eke songs, or song-like formations, from quiet accumulations of vocals and supporting sounds. There is a lot of freak folk, or “drone folk,” out there in drone world. These recordings are closer to “drone singer-songwriter.” … Both albums are sample-able at the boomkat.com music retailer, among other places: Alien, Dream.

Tim Hecker‘s Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky): Hecker took source recordings he made of a pipe organ in Iceland and then went to work on them. Each glitch is a synapse-firing crisis of faith. Each echo maps the architecture of the place. Each mass of synthesized material fills the empty church in your mind. The cover shows a piano being pushed off the edge of the building, which makes for a colorful (or, in this case, black-and-white) polemic. There is tension in this music for certain, but it’s more likely to instill in experimental musicians the desire to explore pipe organs than to dispose of them. … More on Hecker at sunblind.net. The music is sample-able at boomkat.com, among other retailers.
 
Jacaszek‘s Glimmer (Ghostly): In traditional terms, this is the prettiest album on this list. It is built from harpsichords and string sections and other classical instruments, which in combination lend it a storybook quality. It’s less fragile than it is dainty, but the daintiness is undergirded with filmic tension, like something out of the Quay Brothers at their most romantic yet mischievous. And the “traditional” instrumentation is just part of the sound design, mixed in with all manner of knocking and general acoustic haze. … More on the album at ghostly.com, where it is also available for streaming. More on the composer at the somewhat out of date
jacaszek.com.

Eli Keszler‘s Cold Pin (Pan): Based on a massive sound-art installation by Keszler, the album comes in two parts: a recording of his invention (“14 strings ranging in length from 25 to 3 feet are strung across a 15 x 40 curved wall, with motors attacking the strings, connected by micro-controllers, pick-ups and rca cables”) and a recording of Keszler performing freely improvised jazz alongside the sculpture with Geoff Mullen, Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son, and Benjamin Nelson. The artwork is impressive, and the album is a model for documenting site-specific installations. … More on the album (including sound and video) at pan-act.com. More on Keszler at elikeszler.com.
 
Israel Martinez‘s El Hombre Que Se Sofoca (Sub Rosa): Six tracks of resplendent noise. The pieces range from deep washes of grey haze to jittery and anxious scattered samples. Melodic and cinematic washes give way to harsh deadspace. The impact is true to the title’s depiction of suffocation. A major album by the Mexican sound artist and musician, who is also a co-founder of the adventurous record label Abolipop. … More on the album, including two sound samples, at the record label’s website. More on Martinez at israelm.com and abolipop.com.
 
Andy Stott‘s We Stay Together and Passed Me By (Modern Love). Two albums of closely related yet disparate takes on club music. At its essence, this is the most minimal of minimal techno, but it seems more interested in exploring aridity than dankness, a rare and particularly welcome variation in this arena. … Listen to Together and Passed at their respective Soundcloud set pages.
 
Amon Tobin‘s ISAM (Ninja Tune). It was almost as tempting to list this album under “best scores of 2011″ as it was to list Kid Koala’s own recent Ninja Tune release (a soundtrack for a graphic novel he wrote and drew) simply as a commercial album. ISAM, in essence, is a recording of the music to Tobin’s audio-visual concert performance of the same name. It is brash and moving and, more than anything he has done previously, free of riffs intended and required to signal affiliation with a particular techno genre. … More on Tobin and the release, including streaming music and video and a free download, at amontobinisam.com.
 
Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer‘s Re: ECM (ECM): The repeated use of the “re” prefix on this album — every one of the 17 tracks on its two halves — suggests that someone at the company still thinks of remixing as a purely post-production undertaking, rather than part of the artistic process. But still, it is a good thing that the estimable ECM label let DJs Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer wander through its back catalog, unearth samples, and render from them sonic tapestries. The music, with its constant presence of dust formations, has the texture of affectionate archival research. (It’s very close in spirit to Bill Laswell’s Panthalassa stroll through Miles Davis’ work.) … Discussion and music at youtube.com. More on the record at ecmrecords.com

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Dark Side of a Pixel Moon

[ November 4, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

The artist Paolo Salvagione, whom I have assisted on a variety of projects this past year, has an exhibit opening this evening in Oakland, California, at the gallery Aggregate Space (aggregatespace.com), as part of the Art Murmur event (oaklandartmurmur.org). His Missing Window installation (shown at the bottom of this post) will be on view, as will a new series of works collectively titled Blackwork. I wrote an essay for Blackwork, as I have for other recent Salvagione projects.

This is an example of Blackwork, in which voids are cut with lasers into blocks of thick paper, according to patterns developed in CAD software:

Shown up top is the printed essay, as designed by our friend Brian Scott of Boon Design (boondesign.com). The “10.6μm” on the front of the piece refers to the wavelength of the laser that cut the paper.

And this is the text of the essay:

“Dark Side of a Pixel Moon”

The tightly packed layers of black card stock could, from a distance, be mistaken for sample swatches, or perhaps acoustical tiling. Upon approach, however, the deep impressions in them become apparent, and in turn they make a deep impression. There are angular indents, and sharp holes, and conical excavations. These are quizzical things, enticing geometries that seem at once iconic and whimsical. The impressions suggest some form of impact introduced them to the thick paper. The step-like quality of the indents imply the ravages of motion, arcade asteroids hitting the dark side of a pixel moon.

The various cavities were, it turns out, cut by a laser. The sheets of card stock were sliced one at a time, and then stacked to reveal the shapes — not the other way around, despite what the eye perceives. Then again, the paths were first traced in CAD software — sketched, then refined, then turned into instructions for the laser-cutter. In effect, the hypothetical space, though not the card stock itself, was stamped by a kind of virtual die.

A vacuum inside darkness, a void inside a shadow — each piece embodies a double negative. The emptiness of pure black space is given shape when something is cut from it. This double inversion fuels the viewer’s sense of disorientation. The artist acknowledges the disorientation by suggesting the works have no specified top, bottom, or sides — that they can be displayed on a wall in any alignment, or flat on a horizontal surface for that matter. However they are displayed, their sense of scale goes in and out, undulating like the naked speaker cones whose tar-paper material they resemble — as well as that of a field camera’s crinkling bellows. They veer in the mind’s retina from macro to micro, from architectural to textural, from lunar landing to Petri dish, and then back again, and again.

Regardless of scale, these laser-cut steps, these playful 8-bit Bezier curves, invite the eye to travel along, to walk amid geologic artifacts in imaginary landscapes.

Here are two previous essays I wrote to accompany work by Salvagione: “Where the Sky Begins” and “Addressing the Competition.” I also served as Euphonic Coordinator (i.e., Music Supervisor) for a video documenting his “An Excuse to Respond” exhibit.

This is a photo of Missing Window, which is also part of the Aggregate Space exhibit:

More on Paolo Salvagione’s work at salvagione.com, which recently launched, thanks to the efforts of Boon (boondesign.com) and futureprüf.com.

More on the exhibit via Salvagione’s facebook.com account. There will be a closing event on December 3. The Aggregate Space gallery is at 801 West Grand Avenue in Oakland, California. Its hours are Fridays from 5:00pm to 8:00pm and Saturdays from 1:00pm to 4:00pm.

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GAFFTA/Eyebeam Sound Research Meetup Report

[ August 7, 2011 / Department: field notes / Leave a comment ]

Concrete Evidence: GAFFTA’s space below the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco

First, many thanks to Cullen Miller and everyone at GAFFTA (gaffta.org), here in San Francisco, for hosting this past Wednesday night’s sonic-arts discussion session. Billed as “Eyebeam / GAFFTA Sound Research Meetup,” it was a collaboration with the Manhattan-based organization Eyebeam (eyebeam.org) to provide people involved in sound an opportunity to discuss their work.

In addition to myself, the presenters were Roddy Schrock, a sound artist and musician who also works at Eyebeam, and Shane Myrbeck, an experimental musician whose day job is as an acoustic consultant at the San Francisco branch of Arup, more on which in a moment. The moderator was Luc Meier of swissnexsanfrancisco.org. Because the world is small, Schrock has in fact contributed to two Disquiet.com remix projects (the very first, Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet, and one of the most recent, Anander Mol, Anander Veig), and Arup developed the winning plan for a projected Eyebeam museum (long before Arup hired Myrbeck or Eyebeam hired Schrock).

The event was held at GAFFTA, which has two floors at the base of the building that houses the Warfield theater on Market Street. We three each gave a 15-minute presentation, and then Meier moderated an extended discussion, which included excellent questions and commentary from a clearly engaged audience. (“Audience” is arguably an imprecise term, because the level of knowledge in the seats facing the panel clearly equalled, and in some cases perhaps exceeded, that of the panel — an optimal situation very much to GAFFTA’s credit.)

Schrock talked about Eyebeam’s creative mission (providing disparate hybrids of creative individuals with the funding and resources to pursue their artistic goals) and he focused on an exciting project: Eyebeam is looking into producing a book that would serve as a compendium of “best practices” guidelines for the creation and installation of sound art.

Myrbeck gave an overview of Arup’s endeavors, and of some of his own artwork. The company is a global, 10,000-person firm combining engineering, design, and planning, and it has a strong acoustic consultancy across the many cities where it maintains offices. Myrbeck oversees its San Francisco SoundLab (“an immersive, full-sphere ambisonic sound studio used for composition and acoustic simulation”). Among Myrbeck’s own recent artwork discussed was “Sent Forth,” a collaboration at Fort Mason in San Francisco with sculptor Jefferson Mack (see arup.com/news).

I spoke on what I termed “Sound as Commentary.” I looked at the variety of remix projects that have originated at Disquiet.com and discussed the common thread: how both the politically motivated ones (“politically” broadly defined) and the musically motivated ones serve as “non-verbal” participants in an ongoing discussion.

If you were in the audience at GAFFTA, here are links to the specific Disquiet.com projects I mentioned:

• Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet

• Despite the Downturn

• Lowlands: A Sigh Collective

• Anander Mol, Anander Veig

• Anander Mol, Anander Veig (Outtakes)

I also spoke about several forthcoming remix projects I am shepherding, including one that will be a fitting commemoration of the 15th Disquiet.com anniversary, which occurs later this year. I mentioned that the open-source projects had lead to some commercial endeavors, like the Hanukkah compilation for Tabletmag.com (Anander Mol, Anander Veig) and a current effort with a singer-songwriter. And I described a new Disquiet.com effort to put together a compilation not of fixed audio recordings but of small “webapps” programmed by various contributors working in Flash, HTML5, and other related programming platforms.

Here now are quick notes about some of the subjects that arose during the conversation — as a result both of moderator Meier’s incisive questions, and of the audience’s questions and statements:

¶ It felt off, I realized shortly before I began, for me to talk about “Sound as Commentary,” since the concept of using sound as commentary is exactly that: an effort to use sound as a constituent part of the ongoing conversation that is life on the Internet. To talk about it was to use exactly the kind of communication I was attempting to avoid. I described how Despite the Downturn and Lowlands: A Sigh Collective were, in particular, attempts to respond in sound because in both those situations to have responded with written words would almost certainly have been to raise the temperature in the discussion rather than serve to cool it off. If you accept that, to borrow a recently popularized phrase, “everything is a remix,” then I simply am asking that people consider the closely related idea that “every album is an answer album.”

¶ A question about “ambisonics,” an advanced form of immersive three-dimensional sound reproduction that dates from the 1970s, seemed to focus on the opportunity to create “artificial” sound environments. I just wanted to make sure that psychoacoustics isn’t left behind: that just because a specific sound can be positioned at coordinates XYZ, we don’t lose track of the fact that different people will experience that sound differently. Precision doesn’t equate with causality.

¶ Myrbeck mentioned several subjects I’d like to dig into further, among them (1) an architecture for the blind and (2) the role of sound in healthcare.

¶ Another audience member inquired (in light of Schrock’s description of a “best practices” sourcebook for sound-art installations) about systems to formalize the presentation of site-based sound art (in contrast with other forms of sound art, such as fixed recordings or software projects), to allow it to be documented and therefore to be reproduced in the future. The word “standards” was employed. I raised the issue that even at this late date stereo, an ancient protocol if there were one, is far from perfect in its ability to match experience from one playback system to the next. Thus, we shouldn’t be too hopeful in regard to capturing the wide and disparate array of sensory experiences that constitute contemporary sound installations. I added, though, that there are existing standards that perhaps artists could use more often, like the sound systems in movie theaters. And I mentioned a project that Susan Philipsz, the artist who won the Turner Prize last year (which lead to the Disquiet compilation Lowlands: A Sigh Collective), had done previously in a British Tesco market, and joked that someone could reproduce it here in Fresh & Easy, which is a Tesco subsidiary. Also on the topic of artists employing existing “standards”: I hadn’t thought of this at the time but the stream of related matters reminded me later of what Philip Glass has said about having been in opera halls prior to ever composing an opera, and being inspired to bring an apparent dinosaur back to life.

¶ Someone in the audience — the lights were low, so I’m not sure who — told a sad-funny story about, in light of Eyebeam’s “best practices” project, an opening for a sound art installation for which the gallery, or museum perhaps, had hired a live band, totally missing the point.

¶ Myrbeck made a great comment about how the relation between technology consultant and artist is not unlike the one between producer and recording artist.

¶ Another time when the subject of documenting sound art came up, I suggested that the new skills that arise in the process of learning to document a work were even more interesting when one considered how those skills might be employed in the production of new art. Art will always be at least one step ahead of any documentary techniques or standards. That’s one of the points of art.

¶ One person asked about a mobile version of the Recombinant Media Lab (a promiment technological and curatorial force for adventurous audio-visual work in San Francisco) and I said I felt it fit right in with the rise of the gourmet taco truck, which has trained urbanites for such a thing. (Recombinant is run by Naut Humon, who was in the GAFFTA audience.)

¶ A gentleman in the audience whose name I didn’t quite get, but who works at Arup with Myrbeck, told a great story after the formal session had ended, when people were just having a drink and talking further. He described having worked on refining the sound in a local theater, and how when the new system had its debut performance, the proprietor of the theater was upset. He asked where the “fun” had gone. Apparently they’d done such a good job of cleaning up the sound that the sense of chaos — of projected audio bouncing off walls and mixing with the sound of the audience — was gone. I was reminded of my initial experience with HD television. Everything was so clear it looked like a soap opera. A wise friend advised me that my eyes and sensibility would adjust, and so they did. That turns out to have been the case as well with the theater owner.

¶ The same person also had, in my estimation, the best single sentence of the evening when he said something along the lines of how the ancients keep stealing our inventions — by which he meant that for each new thing that is invented, a distant precedent can be located. Riding the coattails of his comment, I mentioned that for all the high technology involved in modern sound art, a lot could be learned from Fluxus happenings (which in many cases are about as technologically simple as you could get), not just about how to document a work of living art, but also how to free oneself from concerns about documenting the work. Not quite ancient, no, but certainly distant enough to provide useful perspective on the present.

¶ One final comment. The subject of noise pollution, from an aesthetic standpoint and a public-policy one, came up several times. I stated my ongoing sense that noise pollution is not as big an issue as many people make of it, that aside from isolated cases (like the wind farm one that has gained appropriate news coverage) for the most part urban life in particular is more quiet than it has been in the past, not less quiet. I said I think that there other related issues — emotional issues, social issues, and so on — that really should be the focus of public concern. I mentioned in passing that San Francisco was the first city in which the newspaper rated restaurants in part by their noise level. Someone from Arup pointed out that in their research, a high percentage of the top-100 restaurants were also on the loudest-restaurant list, providing anecdotal evidence that context can play a big role in one’s interpretation of loud sound as what is colloquially referred to as “noise.”

(Photo of GAFFTA’s interior space, from a previous event there, via flickr.com and Creative Commons.)

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Orbit: Where the Sky Begins

[ August 4, 2011 / Department: reports/essays / Comments: 3 ]

House Out: The stark symmetry of Paolo Salvagione’s recent Headlands installation, “Orbit”

The artist Paolo Salvagione has been principal engineer on the clock of the Long Now Foundation (longnow.org) since he joined the project in 2000 (or, as they count over at the Long Now, the year 02000). In his spare time, his own artwork fuses the conceptual and the mechanical, to varying relative degrees. He asked me to write an essay to accompany an installation, named “Orbit,” that he debuted recently at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts — just north across the Bay from where I live in San Francisco. It is the third of his projects that I have been invited to contribute to. I supervised the score to the video that documented his exhibit “An Excuse to Respond,” and I wrote an essay to accompany an earlier Headlands installation, “Competitive Swinging.”

As with the “Competitive Swinging” essay, this one was printed on A5 cardstock on a letterpress by Rocket Caleshu of the San Francisco Center for the Book (sfcb.org), from a design by Brian Scott. (That’s Scott of Boon Design, boondesign.com, which among other things created the “cover” art for the Disquiet.com compilations Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet and Anander Mol, Anander Veig.)

There’s a solid description of the installation at baycitizen.org:

["Orbit"] is an enormous wheel with one chair attached that people can strap themselves into. They are then slowly rotated from within a dark room out a window and back into another window until they complete the circle. Once outside, they take in the sweeping vista of the surrounding Marin hills. It takes about three minutes to complete the circle, meaning that the viewer becomes the viewed, as those inside the room watch riders spin languidly in and out of the space.

Letterpress seems especially appropriate to Salvagione’s work. The technology can lend a sense of antiquity and effeteness to its subject, but the opposite is very much the case with “Orbit” and, earlier, “Competitive Swinging.” Both those works have a sheer, monolithic physicality to them, and the letterpress reminds us of that weighty impression with the words embedded in the thick card stock.

Heady Metal: Rocket Caleshu and Brian Scott’s letterpress card for Salvagione’s exhibit

The plot of land that is the Headlands Center for the Arts was, not so long ago, a military base. The splendor that we think of today as bucolic masked, not so long ago, an institution founded on anxiety. The hills were alive with the low level hum of constant preparedness. The grassy hills were the sort of place where weapons were tended to, where stations were manned. And it was the sort of place from which the coastline was observed vigilantly for signs of invasion.

Today it is the sort of place where painters stretch their canvases, where video artists work on their laptops. And it is the sort of place where a sculptor, such as Salvagione, might create a circular installation that carries a seated individual slowly out one window and back through another.

To look out a window from a Headlands building today is to see a view not dissimilar to what someone saw when it was under military control. And at times, bits of the past peek into the present: ordnance remnants, dilapidated bunkers, arcane signage.

How might we gain perspective on a place, on its history, especially when its past and present purposes are so distinct, almost at odds with one another?

We might look out a window and ponder that which others saw before us. Or we might venture further. We might take a seat in Salvagione’s circular sculpture and submit to its slow orbit. We might look out a window, and then pass through that same window, following the path that our eyes had laid out for us. We might take in the panorama by engaging with its circumference, enacting its circumference: viewing not only the distant structures and foliage, but the exterior of the building itself as the ride turns back, completing its cycle. We might, with some ease, find ourselves circulating between worlds.

Full Circle: Views of Paolo Salvagione’s installation, with the artist shown above

Here’s the text of the essay I wrote for “Orbit”:

“Where the Sky Begins”

The place where past and present meet is a liminal state.

It is not unlike the skin that protects internal organs from the elements, or the surface of the ocean, where vessels skim the division between sea and sky. The place where past and present meet is not unlike a window, which allows views in as well as out.

The liminal state is a tenuous one. We gain perspective only by cycling back and forth. We see the outdoors from inside our home, and we see our home as we return to it from our ventures in the world. Some of these states are more easily grasped by us than are others — more easily sensed, observed, accessed. It is a fairly simple exercise to determine where your body ends and where the world beyond it begins — easier, say, than resolving the atmospheric koan as to where, exactly, the sky begins.

Certainly, we cannot step into the past with the same ease with which we can open our front door. However, once we accept that the division between past and present resembles more familiar liminal states, we can map common experiences onto the more esoteric.

To take a seat on Paolo Salvagione’s Orbit is to ride that liminal state. To buckle in and pull tight its strap is to acknowledge the tenuous nature of being in between realms, as if taking precautions against psychic turbulence, as well as physical injury. To take that seat is to enter a mode of technologically mediated meditation. To submit to Orbit is to momentarily float free from gravity, free from now.

And to participate in Orbit is to discover yet another liminal state. This is the one that art posits between object and audience. For to truly appreciate Orbit is to participate in it. And to participate in it is to view the work by becoming part of it. And to become part of it is to be viewed by others who stand waiting to, themselves, take that seat. To participate in Orbit is to engage in its exquisite cyclical nature — not just the cycle inherent in its physical structure, but the cycle inherent in approaching it, observing it, becoming part of it, and then stepping off it to observe it anew.

An earlier draft of the essay took the form of a short story that told of a romance between an engineer and an artist, and that borrowed structurally from the implicit symmetry of Salvagione’s piece. I may post it at a later date.

Smiling Shadow: Another exterior view of Salvagione’s recent Headlands installation, “Orbit”

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