Each Thursday evening at the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have just over four days to upload a track in response to the assignment. Membership to the Junto is open: just join and participate.
This is a set of the tracks created in this project. At the time of this update, there were 27:
The assignment was made early in the afternoon, California time, on Thursday, September 13, with 11:59pm on the following Monday, September 17, as the deadline. (There are no translations this week.)
These are the instructions that went out to the group’s email list (at tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto). The project is one in a foreseen series being done in conjunction with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. More information on the exhibit at apexart.org. The list of featured participants in the exhibit is: Kelli Anderson, Conrad Bakker, Beach Packaging Design, Matt Brown, Steven M. Johnson, Last Exit To Nowhere, MakerBot Industries, The Marianas (Michael Arcega and Stephanie Syjuco), Angie Moramarco, Oliver Munday, Omni Consumer Products, Staple Design, U.S. Government Accountability Office, Ryan Watkins-Hughes, Marc Weidenbaum/Disquiet Junto, Shawn Wolfe, and Dana Wyse.
Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store RecordingsThis project is the first in the Disquiet Junto series to focus on a pure, unadulterated field recording — or, in this case, a “store recording,” as you’ll see. Many of the previous Disquiet Junto projects have used field recordings as their source material, either audio created by the participants, or a shared sample created by a third-party.
For this project, you will record sound from a large retail space, preferably a department store. You will select a section of that recording that you find to be inherently exemplary, and that segment will be your project entry for the week. There will be no editing, no processing, no producing, per se — you may, if you choose, do a slight volume increase at the opening and decrease at the closing.
Background: The goal for this project is twofold. In the immediate sense, it is to explore field recordings as an end unto themselves, as an opportunity to document the world in sound.
The project, however, has broader intentions. It’s being undertaken in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker. The exhibit will run at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan from November 15 – December 22, 2012. Sounds produced for this Disquiet Junto project will be considered to be played in the gallery as part of the exhibit, and will also be made available to Disquiet Junto participants and other musicians and sound artists for subsequent projects related to Walker’s exhbit.
There are also plans afoot for a Disquiet Junto concert at Apex Art in late November in conjunction with the exhibit.
This is Apex’s initial, brief description of the upcoming exhibit: “As Real As It Gets gathers fictional products, imaginary brands, hypothetical advertising and speculative objects, devised by artists, designers, and companies. We resist commercial material culture as inauthentic, phony, and less than legitimate, but should we? Presenting the marketplace as medium — while supplies last.”
Walker is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and Design Observer, and the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House: 2008) and Letters from New Orleans (Garrett County Press: 2005). Walker co-founded, with Joshua Glenn, the Significant Objects project.
Deadline: Monday, September 17, at 11:59pm wherever you are.
Length: Your finished work should be between 1 and 3 minutes in length.
Information: Please when posting your track on SoundCloud, include a description of your process in planning, composing, and recording it. This description is an essential element of the communicative process inherent in the Disquiet Junto.
Title/Tag: When adding your track to the Disquiet Junto group on Soundcloud.com, please include the term “disquiet0037-asrealasitgets1”in the title of your track, and as a tag for your track.
Download: For this project, your track should be set as downloadable, and allow for attributed remixing (i.e., a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution).
Linking: When posting the track, be sure to include this information:
This Disquiet Junto project was done in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan (November 15 – December 22, 2012):
http://apexart.org/exhibitions/walker.php/
More on this 37th Disquiet Junto project at:
Disquiet Junto Project 0037: Store RecordingsMore details on the Disquiet Junto at:
http://soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/info/