My Bowed Piano Moment

It was 1984, and Mr. Jackson (requiescat in pace) was selling 28 million records and enthralling the world. Me? I was working on a completely unperformable and mostly forgettable chamber opera (sound chaser/soul chaser), which at least had one shiny moment: the final part, a nine-minute piece for 15 performers bowing 3 grand pianos: Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Sure, the technique had been around since Curtis Curtis-Smith, and Stephen Scott had recently resurrected the idea and formed an ensemble around it. So, I joined in the fray with this work. I’ll upload the score shortly, but here’s a performance, (from the only live performance of the chamber opera, at University of Wisconsin, February 14, 1986) and a local, recent newspaper article. Excerpts from the video are on the Bad Mind Time™ Ultra DVD.

And the title? The most fantastic title there ever has been, but it’s not mine, originally. It’s from a 3rd century Coptic poem by the same name, a litany of contradictory attributes spoken by a female diety (this from the Nag Hamadi Codex).

Thoughts on Visualist Notation

My most recent gig as visualist—appearing with my students under the name meme™ (media experimental ensemble)—raises this question for me: Is the visualist creating the literature of visualism?

My immediate response is, no, I don’t seem to see much of this craft being written down, or transcribed, or notated. There are, of course, performances captured on video, so there is certainly that record. But like performance art of the 1980’s, visualism is being practiced, but perhaps not always documented through notation, and a part of this emerging symbolic form will be lost, or —more to the point— not be saved in a form that invites future visualists to recreate it.

There is value to creating a notation system. Sure, music notation has served the Western world for a bit more than a thousand years (with a number of important modifications along the way, of course). Dance notation has been less pervasive—Laban method notation is taught at many universities, but most choreographers rely on a video record for preserving the basic steps and the nuance of their dance.

If much visualism is improvisatory, then, like jazz (remember that?), we might use notation on a need-to-know basis, sketching out the vocabulary, and the parameters within which they can be tweaked. Important structural elements—and what’s structurally important might vary from artist to artist—are less maleable, perhaps, than ornamental, embellishing elements.

Maybe all this is too precious or too fussy. Maybe all we need to do is zip up our clips and soundtrack, add a few cryptic directions in the ‘Read Me’ file, upload it to a Creative-Commons-friendly repository like Archive.org, and say, ‘Have at it!’. After all, this might be a post-notation age (I recently played a video of Cage’s Third Construction for my students, who were amazed that every note was written down, because it sounded so improvised to them.). Still, wouldn’t you be interested to see what visualists fifty years from now will do with your material? 

- – - – - 

OK, so for my initial attempt at visualist notation, I’m borrowing from the long history of graphic notation via conceptual and experimental music. There may be an introductory page of instructions, plus a key or legend to translate the notation elements. The notation itself is just a set of visual references to the succession of events, mapped to a timeline.

One conceit I use, which might be the first thing to go once other visualists start investigating this, is an attempt to mimic the controller (the NuVJ), with two video banks on either side of the page, with effects and other global settings or instructions in the middle. The timeline becomes vertical, not horizontal, which I’m not too thrilled with, but again, I’m open to suggestions.

Download all my work files (in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign) here.

So, any thoughts on this?

introducing meme

meme™—mEDIA eXPERImENTAL eNSEMBLE—has its first gig, April 11, 2009, at Cinema Paradiso, Ft. Lauderdale, FL at 11:30 pm. The ensemble will showcase the talents of students from the FAU Advanced Interactive Multimedia Class, mixing live video, Quicktime clips, and Flash to a soundtrack that examines current events (human trafficking, Soldja Girl), dream imagery, and glossolalia. Videojams by Nina O, Masta Mia, and Frantz DeoFils.

Sonic Ephemera from BLUE HAMMER

Vocal textures (stereo audio mix and/or live ensemble):  BLOOD TRAILS •  UNCOVERINGS • SCREAMING WOMEN • TYING AND KNOTTING • VIN’S SUICIDE

String textures (stereo audio mixes): atmospheric, another atmospheric, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Soundtrack wiki/workspace here (includes performance parts for vocalists); Blue Hammer blog here.

Recent Collaboratives

down/side — dance film (with choreography by Clarence Brooks, voice by Frantz Deofils, and music/text/film by me) is now available for visualists (photoJPEG format). Mix it up, at archive.org.

And, in progress, the Trans-Historical-Burlesque Dinner Theatre BLUE HAMMER, written and directed by Leon Johnson. Whitney Art Works Gallery, April 30 to May 2nd.

It’s been a busy few months.

CyberPuppets™ – like it was 1999

So, now that Animata has made it so easy to build interactive puppets, I thought it would be neat to dust off the CyberPuppets™, that ZWM (zany, wacky, madcap) gang that graced the early versions of Bad Mind Time™. This would have been around 1997 or 1998 – - although Happy Deth Puppet (the yellow one) made his debut with v. 1.0 on July 25, 1995* .

 

And remember, since this was done in Director (3.5 if I’m not completely brainded), you’ll need to install the Shockwave plug-in (Mac users – there’s probably a way to install this in Firefox, but I’ve only had luck on Intel-based machines with the Rosetta version of Safari—you know the little dance – select the Safari icon in the Apps folder, Apple – i to Get Info, click on ‘Open using Rosetta’.). 

CyberPuppets™ were never really about the absolute, greatest drop-ded fantastic coding. Nothing I’ve done has ever been really amazing code – - 99% of Bad Mind Time™ included. I’ve always depended on the weirdness of strangers – - strange text, strange graphics, strange music – - to redeem my unredeemable programming skills.

I did actually use the CyberPuppets™ in a live performance as introductory hosts to the Decatur Hot Shorts Film Festival of 1998. Ah, Decatur, GA  - – that oasis of artistic tolerance in the vast cultural wasteland which was Atlanta in the 1990s (more on this on some later pathetic, self-pitying post).

Here are, of course, the very subtle and understated Non-Sexual Puppets™. They never had names.

 

And here’s the officious, pretentious, and all too autobiographically-based Ian.

 

 

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* (yes, that was the real date – - but that version bore little resemblance to what would follow. All the work from 1995-97 was mostly about learning Director and Lingo.)

Confessions of a Downsider

“down/side”  - – choreography / dance by Clarence Brooks, voice by Frantz Deofils, music / text / film by Joey Bargsten – - will be presented at the FAU Dance Theatre Ensemble Performance this weekend on the Boca campus. Here’s the official info.

It’s pretty challenging to Escher-ize a subject in film, so I’m not certain I achieved that. But I was very pleased with the collaboration, and I like how the project stretched my personal notions of colliding narrative and non-narrative space.

The narrator talks about his “work”. Maybe it’s unclear that this is work in the opus or ouevre sense: the work of the artist (composer, dancer, filmmaker, whatever).

So, at the risk of being a little too earnest, here’s the text (plus, then it doesn’t need to be printed in the program. . . and I get to mention my site and get tons of traffic, yay!):

Visiting the mythical shanghai or tokyo of my dreemz:
LJ says once you arrive there, you take this awful shuttle
for 20 minutes to get to the city, “going past those horrible
student apartment buildings, one after another, for blocks
and blocks.”

We are waiting for the shuttle. It rains intensely, briefly.

At the guest house,
I am engaged in erotic fantasies
but, I have much work to do.
I’m distracted by a younger,
female robot version of myself.

She asks me about my work.
“how do you do it?”
I tell her, “Well,

You’ve got to be able to work
in spite of
regular, daily
poisonings,
especially by those who love you most.

You’ve got to be able to do the work
when you don’t want to,
and when you don’t have any money to do anything.

And, plus, you need to do this when you don’t have any time to do it, either.
And you need to do it when you’re really very tired,
And especially, when you are dispassionate
about the whole idea of work.”

So, that’s what I tell her.

She tells me, “You know,
I know of a falafel stand
 – - it’s down the street a ways,
and the guy there needs some help.
You should help him.”

Then, It turns out she has time
for some hanky-panky with me,
a near-total stranger!

At night in the mythical city,
lovers’ heads float in the air, slightly
above their bodies,
in the cool, damp, faded blue night.
They will attach themselves soon enough,
but they don’t always attach
to the right body.

More On Sticky Notes™

Sticky Notes™ is playing tomorrow (Dec.2) at the Zero Film Festival, LA (2:30 pst). More info here.

Let’s see . . . you can grab the final script online now. And as a companion piece to BEEST OPERA™, Sticky Notes™ uses some of the same raw video material, which you can download and remix from archive.org. Watch bits of the film on Vimeo.

My little talk last week:

“One of my favorite approaches to teaching digital media is to use the sticky note (or the Post-It Note® if you want to narrow it down to the original 3M product). I use sticky notes because the form is extremely accessible and modular, it suggests a formal and structural simplicity, and it invites a statement of essence and immediacy – - sticky notes do not pretend to be epic.

I use sticky notes to put a small, unassuming frame around visual improvisations (doodling) and if there is text, it’s often short, commonplace and fragmented. These frames are no-tech frames, in contrast to other contemporary hi-tech small frames (like the iPhone™), but they are still frames, capable of exerting limitations on content and design. These small frames can later be re-arranged or combined into larger units, which may have narrative shape, as storyboards do, or they may simply exist as a structured or unstructured collection of elements, and viewed as some sort of visual database.  

I view my film Sticky Notes™ as an essay on the dynamic between two forms of cultural expression – - the NARRATIVE and the DATABASE. The film began its life as a set of about 90 short, aphoristic statements in the form of a fantasy “To Do List”. I’d been collecting material for a “To Do List” film for quite a while, including voice-overs and short film fragments for this project, as well as material I shot a year ago in Italy, and a bunch of my drawings (some of them on sticky notes) that were placeholders for scenes I wouldn’t be able to shoot until I had more resources. I also shot SkyRon™ reciting the entire list while in Italy, as placeholder material for the voice-overs I had yet to record. (SkyRon™ is the Digital Media Idiot of Our Age, and his identity is concealed behind mask and dreadlocks–ed).

Last March I started to edit everything together, and I felt the need to provide somehow a larger narrative shape for this succession of mini-narratives. As composer, I was working with digital manipulation of primarily vocal material, and these experiments provide the through-line of the audio track. My interest in live video jamming software generated a lot of visual material, which, like the audio track, represented digital re-processing of existing footage. This was all a good start, but still not enough to unify the film beyond being simply a catalog of visual effects with voice-overs, interspersed with placeholder drawings and placeholder readings by SkyRon™.  Everything fell in place when I realized SkyRon™’s character, could be seen as the author of the little placeholder drawings. The verbal list would make more cinematic sense if it were transformed into visual sticky notes, and SkyRon™ would play the scribe of those notes. The to-do-list became Sticky Notes™.

So, here’s the result – - a digital film fitting roughly into the art/experimental genre, lasting about 28 minutes.” (Author shows film, apologizes sheepishly for everything, then weeps and drinks heavily.)

If it’s in a festival, it must be done, right?

Ok, so Sticky Notes™ is in the Zero Film Festival, to be held in Los Angeles December 1 – 6 2008. Yay!

Zero Film Festival has a truly urgently designed website, and a wonderful premise: all films entered need to have been created with a $0 (or self-funded) budget. 

View some brief segments of Sticky Notes™ here. And if you’re on campus (FAU, Boca Raton) next Friday (November 21), drop by the School of Communications and Multimedia Studies around 1pm, and hear my little lecture on Sticky Notes™ and Micronarrative!

Energy Levels: A 25th Anniversary (yikes!)

Yes, folks, it’s the 25th anniversary of my first piece for live ensemble and Walkman, Energy Levels (1983) for flute quartet. (Thanks to Archive.org for hosting multiple formats for download and a Flash player!).

Energy Levels first presented a notion I developed and revisited in dozens of other pieces, from my first little chamber opera sound chaser/soul chaser (1986), to my latest little digital media opera Anatomy of Melancholy (2005). Throughout the years, the artfully touchy Sony Walkman* was replaced by portable CD players and iPods, and the ensembles asked to participate in this madness varied from instrumentalists and vocalists, to actors, actresses, dancers, and unsuspecting students.

Where did I get this idea? My oprah-aha-moment occurred in Sheeps’ Head Cafe, in Iowa City, IA, in early spring ‘83. The upstairs of the cafe was mostly deserted when I sat down to my cup of their signature tomato soup. In either corner were two students, both into their studies, both listening to their Walkmen. Then, they started humming – two different songs, two different tempos! I was transfixed!

This whole idea of hijacking pop consumer technology as a cheap way of distributing audio ‘parts’ (i.e., click or tempo tracks, pitch tracks, texts, and performance instructions) was probably the only original idea I’ve ever had * *. And for you sober scholars out there, I would argue that this was my small way of engineering a delicate, slow-motion car crash between Minimalism and Modernism. I was into completely un-doing or dissolving a carefully crafted musical vocabulary right before your ears, right in the middle of a piece.

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* Tape speed accurate to within 6% — plus or minus 14 seconds over the course of a six-minute piece, like Energy Levels).

* * Well, ok, this, and the dancing butt figures of Advanced Circus from the late ’90s.