Images of the Week: Act/React in Milwaukee

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The Milwaukee Museum of Art is currently hosting an exhibit titled Act/React, curated by George Fifield and dedicated to “intuitive, digitally developed interactive art.” The images below are, in descending order, of Janet Cardiff‘s “In Touch” (1999), a table top that talks when it is “stroked gently,” and “Echo Evolution” (1999) by Liz Phillips. Also represented in the exhibit are artists Brian Knep, Daniel Rozin, Scott Snibbe, and Camille Utterback. Act/React opened on October 4, 2008, and runs through January 11, 2009.

More info at the museum’s website, mam.org/act, and on the exhibit’s blog, mam.org/act/blog.

5 Most Downloaded Free MP3s of September 2008

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is a list of the 5 most popular Disquiet Downstream entries on free recommended MP3s from last month, September. They’re listed in descending order:

  1. Composer David Stutz‘s quasi-Gregorian a capella musical accompaniment to Neal Stephenson‘s novel Anathem (disquiet.com).
  2. Two DJ sets by Wobbly (aka Jon Leidecker) of mixes from his appearance at a recent Cluster concert, including a century-spanning collection of music related to birdsong, featuring work by David Tudor, Wendy Carlos, Florian Hecker, Christina Kubisch, and others (disquiet.com).
  3. A release by smohm from the netlabel Hexawe, which focuses on music made on the free audio software Little Pig Tracker (disquiet.com).
  4. Music made on Automaton, a piece of commercial software (from the company Audio Damage) that applies the cellular automata of Conway’s Game of Life to sound. One of the entries, by Kent Williams (aka Chaircrusher), glitch-ifies Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music”(disquiet.com).
  5. Closely mic’d eggshells, courtesy of Steve (Subscape Annex) Burnett  (disquiet.com).

Quote of the Week: Gristle in the Gallery

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This is Rachel Carvosso writing on the exhibit Yokohama Triennale 2008: Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle, currently at Shinko Pier in Yokohama, Japan, and running through November 30, 2008.

Through the use of sound both an internalized space of hearing and an external one related to the body and its position in the installation is created. There is a sense of an absent performer but of what kind one cannot be entirely sure. As we listen, our faces reflected in the mirrored surfaces, others look on and we become the performers. We are left to ponder the sense of sounds as an attempt to communicate that which is precisely non communicable. We can view ourselves in the mirrored surfaces but we cannot reach a definitive conclusion about what it all means; instead, this work encourages us simply to slow down and change our perception of space, sound and time.

Read the full review at tokyoartbeat.com. More details at yokohamatriennale.jp. Below is a photo, borrowed from Carvosso’s review, taken at the exhibit:

Pavel Büchler Audience Mashup MP3

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

About a year back, I mentioned in this space an album (and related MP3) by Christopher DeLaurenti (disquiet.com) consisting of field recordings made at classical music concerts before or between performances. As the Resonance FM website earlier this week noted (resonancefm.com), a solid precursor to DeLaurenti’s effort exists in the work of Pavel Büchler, whose album Live compiles the sound of audiences excerpted from the artist’s collection of live recordings of concerts (reportedly jazz concerts, though I could swear I hear Stevie Ray Vaughan in there).

That collection consisted of 351 albums, and thus 351 became the number of limited-edition copies of Büchler’s Live committed to vinyl. Fortunately for the approximately 6,699,999,649 rest of us currently living on this planet, a Resonance FM podcast back on November 10, 2006, presented Live in full for free download (MP3). The premise of Live is initially off-putting; applause is generally a distracting element in a live recording, probably the second least beloved element after an extended drum solo. The applause is so tied up in the ego of the performer that for the listener it can be the equivalent of watching a slide show of someone’s vacation with too many pictures of them in it. However, the sounds on Live successfully put the performer aside for the moment, and posit the audience front and center, a mass of humanity that, at its best, has the vibrancy of a great musical performance. (The MP3 file of the Resonance FM recording is housed at archive.org.)

The images below are from two others of Büchler’s sound-related works: an Istanbul installation titled “The Castle” (2005) featuring speakers designed by Guglielmo Marconi, and the gallery installation of a work similar to Live, the piece “3’34” (2006), a recording comprised of the sounds between tracks on 10 vinyl recordings of music by John Cage.

More on Büchler at the website of Manchester Metropolitan University (artdes.mmu.ac.uk), where is is a Research Professor.