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Tag Archives: installation

Dark Side of a Pixel Moon

An essay to accompany the work Blackwork by Paolo Salvagione

[ November 4, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comment: 1 ]


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.

Up top are examples of Blackwork, in which voids are cut with lasers into blocks of thick paper, according to patterns developed in CAD software.

Shown above 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 exhibit “An excuse to respond.”

This is a photo of installation 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.

Blackwork photos by Heimo (heimophotography.com). Missing Window photo by Andria Lo (andrialo.com).

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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

An essay to accompany the work Orbit by Paolo Salvagione

[ August 4, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comments: 3 ]

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.

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.

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.

All photos, except the one of the cardstock, by Andria Lo (andrialo.com)

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Remixing History: Two Short Stories

[ June 30, 2011 / Department: field notes / Comments: 4 ]

The remix takes many forms. Music is remixed, but so too are videos, photographs, words, recipes, buildings, ideas. The remix is a means by which the past is made vibrant. It is the means by which the certitude of any form of documentation is probed and prodded until it loses its illusion of integrity.

The conspiracy theory is the remix of history. The conspiracy theory is the myriad variations on facts that threaten the foundation of those facts — that arguably threaten the idea of “fact” itself.

Maximilian I was emperor of Mexico for three years, from 1864 through 1867, a little longer than John F. Kennedy was president. Like Kennedy, Maximilian died a public death in broad daylight — by execution, not assassination — and like Kennedy’s his death, despite its public nature, yielded countless contradictory retellings. Numerous claims have been made that Maximilian wasn’t actually killed at all. The individual stories range from mundane to fascinating. The collected stories take on a truly kaleidoscopic appeal, for disorientation is the end result of the conspiracy theory, sometimes intentionally so.

I was asked to ponder the death, the deaths, of Maximilian for A Sors, a project developed by artists Julio César Morales and Max La Rivière-Hedrick, with Norma Listman, for the Warhol Initiative. Julio and Max have described A Sors as “a meal-as-art-project.” In more detail: “A Sors investigates Maximilian’s brief, tragic rule of Mexico, from 1864 to 1867, through the vantage of his most intimate and trusting relationship: the one with his imperial chef and confidant, a Hungarian known as Tudos.” The event was held for guests of a Warhol Initiative conference last Friday, June 24, in the Regency, a former Masonic lodge on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco.

For my part, I was asked to contribute some posts to the A Sors work blog, to tease out themes from the performance, and perhaps in the process help add to the mythology. The myth that A Sors takes as its basis is that Maximilian asks Tudos, the chef, to kill him. My efforts took the form of two short stories. I’m very happy with how they turned out. I write a lot of fiction, though I rarely share it with anyone. The two short stories are titled “Burying the Goat” and “A Change of Seasons,” and they’re both online at Max’s engine43.org website.

“Burying the Goat” focuses on the Masons, who are often associated with variations on Maximilian’s fate. I was trying, in the piece, to simultaneously add to and subtract from the Masonic legends by writing one more version, one that in turn provides an explanation for all the different stories that follow Maximilian in his fabled escape. The tone I was working toward was something along the lines of “H.P. Lovecraft minus the spiritualism.” It begins a year into Maximilian’s reign:

The Masons love their games, their plots, their symbols, their puzzles. History is itself a kind of puzzle, though two years ago Esteban Herrera did not know this. …

“A Change of Seasons” was an attempt to consider the events that history doesn’t record. In this case, that blank space is the dark carriage in which Maximilian rides from his prison cell to the hill where his executioners wait. The piece can stand alone, but also works to undermine the presumption of authority that hovers over the Masons’ secret meetings. It begins as dawn breaks on the day that Maximilian is due to die:

It is June 19, 1867. Summer has begun. With the change of seasons, the days will begin to get shorter as well as warmer. There is work to be done. There are fields to be tended, but today is a holiday. To the Catholics of Querétaro, Mexico, it is a religious festival, the Fête-Dieu. In a few hours, the date will become associated with another, more sorrowful occasion. …

I’ve served as managing editor on the A Sors project as well, and it’s been a great pleasure. Thanks to Max and Julio for the invitation, Norma for the food, and everyone else for the collaborative experience. More on the Warhol Initiative and A Sors at warholinitiative.org.

(Above photo for A Sors by Andria Lo, of andrialo.com; design by Brian Scott/Boon, of boondesign.com.)

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Euphonic Coordination ~ Music Supervision

Strategizing background music for an exhibit video by artist Paolo Salvagione

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

Back in April I shared here the essay I wrote (“Addressing the Competition”) for an installation, titled “Competitive Swinging,” by artist Paolo Salvagione at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, just north of where I live in San Francisco. Following that project, Salvagione asked me to assist in adding a score to a video documenting an earlier exhibit of his also held at the Headlands, titled “An excuse to respond.”

The video is shot in a bright room and shows various works, most of which could broadly be described as sculptures, and all of which involve some sort of interaction on the part of the attendees. There are flip books, a kind of elevated hopscotch game, a pair of boots attached to large brushes, and, among other things, a kinetic sculpture about which I’ll have more to say in the future. All are infused with a wonderful mischievousness.

The pacing of the rough cut of the video brought to mind a metronomic pulse, which was also the subject of the “Competitive Swinging” essay. It seemed that a steady-paced work that slowly built but never got above a murmur would suit the visuals. Such music would aid in the momentum, never overpower the images, and match the clockwork motion that some of the works display. I also wanted to use a recent piece of music, so whoever ended up supplying the background tune would gain some promotional benefit. After listening through a lot of work by musicians whom I admire, and listening back through entries in this site’s Downstream department, I contacted the UK-based Grand Canonical Ensemble to inquire after “Summer Clothes,” a track off the album Saying Goodbye, which I wrote about back at the end of January. Back when I first heard “Summer Clothes,” it already had struck me as a kind of score to a movie that didn’t yet exist (I likened it to a more upbeat work by Ryuichi Sakamoto). Thanks to Salvagione’s interest and their generosity, that movie now actually exists.

The video was shot and edited by Christian Schneider (of ideagarden.org), with titles by Brian Scott (of boondesign.com), the latter of whom will be familiar to Disquiet.com readers for his collaboration on such projects as Despite the Downturn; Anander Mol, Anander Veig (and its outtakes follow-up); and Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet.

Grand Canonical Ensemble consists of Josh Owen Morris and Sam Bradwell. More on them and their music at gce.tumblr.com and grandcanonicalensemble.bandcamp.com. Their third album and first ever to be released physically comes out July 18 at metersandmilesrecordings.com.

The video is hosted at vimeo.com. Salvagione humorously credits me with “euphonic coordination,” which is to say “music supervision.”

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