For your post-holiday depression (see how thoughtful I am?) : a slightly updated, dusted-off, new hosting of BAD MIND TIME™ Classic! It’s been about eight years since I’ve done anything to polish these brutish crown jewels, and most of the Shockwave pieces weren’t working. So now they are, except for two, which I’ve YouTubed into video documentation (below). Also, a new Ten-Minute Tour, which really can now be done in ten minutes! (P.S. Use only Firefox for now!).
Finally, my little slender volume is published! Available on Amazon, it is a bit pricey (at about 51¢ a page—sorry, authors don’t get to name their price with this publishing house).
Topics include new sonic, visual, and textual vocabularies, the process of analysis-craft-synthesis, and infusing conventional expressive forms with digital media to arrive at a hybrid, experimental approach. And, plus, also, there is a visual framework for how to actually structure a visualist or VJ performance (like anyone is interested in that) !
So this work—Trialog and Interludes— began as a formal idea for a visualist presentation by meme™ (media experi mental ensemble): audiovisual compositions by individual meme-bers of the group would function as interludes between three “takes” of a larger, 17 minute work for visualists, dancers, and electronic music, the Trialog.
The Trialog is expressed in two ways—first, as a set of three-voice chantings of micronarratives (this is done in Flash, and the score is below) played as bookends to the entire performance (in an ideal performance; didn’t happen this time), and secondly as perhaps an imaginary 3-way dialog between the works of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Nam June Paik, representing their progressive approaches to music, dance, and electronic visual media, and giving the work its aesthetic frame of reference, but re-imagined through contemporary means. Are we good with that?
This was meme™’s first performance exclusively using Apple Quartz Composer to manage all the visuals and interactions. The fantastic Rutt-Etra Video Synth plug-in by Vade was a key visual element: it enfolded the dancers in a 3D mesh that responded in real-time to their movement.
Each dancer was asked to develop a vocabulary of 12 events, and she was given an instruction track she listened to over a clip-on iPod mini.
Special thanks to dancers Stacee Lanz and Kori Epps, and to my graduate class, Creating Interactive Culture: Cynthia Gutierrez, Michelle Hipps, Chandra Maldonado, Miguel Oubina, Steven Wang, and Xuan Zhang.
And a word on the sound component: This was also the first time meme™ performed without a pre-produced sound track (I know, high time). Compositionally, each of the visual sketches had a set of samples associated with it, and those samples were mixed live via Kevin Holland’s wonderful Sapling software (free, for those of you running Mac OS). The dance video above used a bunch of samples I created from the waterphone; other sections remixed Tallis (Spem in Allium—see earlier post—with editorial voices provided live by Bebot, the Singing Robot), as well as SkyRon’s Bister Badgent, my instrumental track Echo Mic (appearing on the American Sock™ soundtrack), and music I wrote for an interactive presentation of humanitarian work in Cambodia (based on indigenous melodies and instruments). Samples to be available soon!
OK, time for another meme™ show—this time, in conjunction with the FAU Faculty Biennial, next to the Schmidt Gallery, on the FAU Main Campus, Boca Raton (FL). It’s next Friday, September 16, from 6pm to 9pm, and it features works by FAU graduate students in the brand new Media, Entertainment, and Technology program. Directed by yours truly!
The image is the class video intervention object my Advanced class created last spring—it’s an image of Music of the Spheres by Francinus Gafurius, published in Florence in 1496. The Eight Muses (Clio, Caliope, Terpsicore, Melpomene, Eratho, Euterpe, Polihymnia, and Uania—such great names of nobody’s daughters these days) are mapped to the heavens (the five known planets, Moon, Sun, and stars) and the Eight Musical Modes (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, and their hypo-counterparts). A Cerberus-headed serpent at the bottom of the chart invokes the Four Elements, and so forth. An amazing graphic, and I refer to it in my little book (forthcoming post) as a 15th century interface design. Anyway, we rendered the image in our class in plexiglass, magic marker, mylar tape, shiny broken pieces of CDs, shards of wire mesh, and the broken electronics from ancient synthesizers.
But, one needs some suitable music to contemplate Music of the Spheres, so let’s go with the 40-part motet Spem in alium (probably between 1572-1596) by Thomas Tallis. The above linked recording, long out of print, features the Clerkes of Oxenford, conducted by David Wulstan. If that’s not celestial, shoot me. And look at the score sometime, to see how a composer manages 40 individual vocal parts.
(I can’t top that. Maybe the closest I ever came to celestiality is the moment of Vin’s Suicide from the BLUE HAMMER soundtrack. Go to iTunes U, download EarFilm2, and Vin enters other dimensions at around 17:44.)
By ‘It’ I mean, the last quarter of the 20th Century (personally, I got nothin’!).
Here‘s a video recorded for Japanese television in 2008, for Steve Reich’s 70th Birthday. It includes Daniel Variations (2006), and the venerable Music for 18 Musicians (1976) and Different Trains (1988).
This may have been available on the InterTubes for awhile, but I just stumbled upon it. So, for those who are interested, Different Trains is (along with A Survivor from Warsaw by Schoenberg) one of the two truly great works dedicated to the Holocaust (sorry, Mr. Spielberg. Sorry, Mr. Weisel.). Music for 18 Musicians is (along with Einstein on the Beach by Wilson/Glass) one of the defining works of the Minimalist movement. A little personal history with these works (20+ years for Trains, 30+ years for 18 Musicians) affords one a bit of . . . perspective.
So, watch, listen, and learn.
And a belated happy birthday, Mr. Reich!
(and p.s., you know the other 20th century work that featured two bass clarinets, right? Le Sacre, or “Soccer? What’s that?” in the words of Walt Disney as he was being presented with ideas for ‘Fantasia‘ in the early 1940′s . . .)
Just returned from a couple of weeks in London and Paris, and rather than buy you all cheap crappy souvenirs, I collected some local graffiti.
So, like the graffiti I collected in Italy a few years back, this new batch ranges from spray paint tags to sticker art to epic stencil work. Some of the items below are even signed (as in Konny’s weeping beauty outside the Pompidou Center), or no longer require signature, as in Space Invader’s ubiquitous (and quite tasteful) tiles, or Shepard Fairey’s Obey Giant (unfortunately, I was on a bus and unable to pull out the camera fast enough to snap a photo of one on the outskirts of London). Included in this set are two shots each of the graffiti on Oscar Wilde’s and Jim Morrison’s gravesites (or at least the poor tree near Jim’s marker). And unlike South Florida, you almost never see white vans without some decoration.
More to come! And you can always read my little essay on so-called ‘illegal art’ practices here (you will find it under Forms > Meta > Subversive Practices).
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And, in case you’re wondering, http://www.badmindtime.com will be redirecting here (http://badmindtime.wordpress.com) while my site gets yet another extreme makeover.
It’s mNotation™! Well, OK, not exactly an iPhone app . . . but if (in that mythical perfect tech world) iPhones and iPads could run Flash, then yes indeed, there would be mNotation™, the uberfantastic music notation generating software, for any number and combination of orchestral instruments, for any length of time!
So, after eleven years of life as a Shockwave/Lingo based project, mNotation™ has emerged in a slightly more useful form. Last Tuesday on the FAU main campus (Boca Raton, FL), the Grand Opening of the Living Room Theaters / Culture and Society Building was heralded by these three brave brass players (Bud Caputo and Brian Stanley, both FAU Adjunct Faculty, and Giovanni Garcia, Graduate Assistant in Horn), and a subtle yet subversive short film called “Ixion“.
Is it digital modernism? PostModernism? Post-PostModernism, without the seemingly requisite tone of unconscious optimism? Let the discussion begin!
That’s what three brass players would sound like. How about nine, with a gloriously gooey cathedral-length reverb added? OK, that would sound like this.
And, if all of the above is too opaque, boring, or just not con tempo enough for you, here is the slideshow:
Ah, autumn! Time for pretty decaying vegetation, tropical storms, and new art projects (sometimes, these three things are one).
So, between October 16 and 31, 2010, come to the lovely Second Avenue Studio, in the main floor lobby of the Askew Tower (111 E. Las Olas Blvd.) on the downtown Ft. Lauderdale campus of FAU, and see my art exhibitions, ULTRA MEGA NANO META™. There will be much questionable digital art there, and if you come on Tuesday, October 26 between 4pm and 7pm, you’ll see a performance by meme™, media experimental ensemble™, presenting some recent work, including New Misplaced Enthusiasms. You’ve got to like the names, right? No?
And, regrettably, there’s more! On November 16 (also a Tuesday), come to the gala opening of the new Living Room Theatres/ School of Communications and Multimedia Studies Building on the Boca campus of FAU. I’ll be unveiling my latest film IXION, an experimental auto-stereoscopic film, which I want to call ‘Do-it-yourself-3D’. More.
SkyRon™ unveiled the iTard™ today—it’s an iPad and a couple of iPods strapped together on a brushed aluminum guitar-shaped form factor! It has some buttons!
“See, right now the iPad and iPods are just playing their own apps, and they’re not talking to each other—just like real people!” said the socially-challenged inventor.
Finally, my little slender volume is published! Available on 
