bb: posterous

Last Chance: The Headphones Show (Till Fri Jan 9)

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 11:03:20 -0800

The Headphones Show, which includes my sound sculpture, Burble, will be up for just a few more days at Abrons Arts Center. I invite you to check it out, as well as the rest of the show, which is wonderful (as I hope 2009 will be for you).

The Headphones Show

The Headphones Show highlights innovative artworks that incorporate headphones as a critical element. Utilizing sound art, digital projection, and interactive artwork, these local and international artists explore the auditory sensation of inner space, as well as the power and nuance of sound.

The exhibit includes works by Vito Acconci, Andre Avelas, Betsey Biggs, Viv Corringham, Barbara Ess, Christina Kubisch, Abinadi Meza, Tristan Perich and Seth Price.

The show runs from November 13- January 9.

The Headphones Show

Abrons Arts Center, Henry Street Settlement

466 Grand Street (at Pitt Street), NYC

Map: http://tinyurl.com/6z9mm6

Subway: F to East Broadway; F, J, M, Z to Essex St.-Delancey; B, D to Grand St.

(212) 598-0400

info@henrystreet.org

http://www.henrystreet.org/arts

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If there is a history of walking...

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 12:04:00 -0800

... then it too has come to a place where the road falls off, a place where there is no public space and the landscape is being paved over, where leisure is shrinking and being crushed under the anxiety to produce, where bodies are not in the world but only indoors in cars and buildings, and an apotheosis of speed makes those bodies seem anachronistic or feeble. In this context, walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half-abandoned landscape of ideas and experiences.

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

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Thursday 6:30pm: Panel at Museum of Art + Design, NYC

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:32:00 -0800

Tomorrow evening (Thursday) at 6:30 pm, I'll be speaking on a panel organized by the wonderful slowLab, entitled "Slowing Down: Artists and Designers Mapping the City" at New York's Museum of Art and Design, at 2 Columbus Circle. On the panel with me will be Christian Nold and Natalie Jeremijenko, and the evening will be moderated by artist Sabrina Gschwandtner.
Christian will present his mapping projects, which reveal aspects of the complex relationship between us, our environment and our fellow citizens. I'll discuss my work, particularly my Park Bench Cinema series of site-specific audio work -- Almost Grand and Eleven Dreams in Red Hook. Natalie will discuss her health activism clinic that dispenses prescriptions for local data collection, urban interventions, and participatory art/design projects to improve an individual's wellbeing in the city.

More information is available here. Please come by if you're interested!

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Wanderlust 1

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:05:00 -0800

"Most of the time walking is merely practical, the unconsidered locomotive means between two sites. To make walking into an investigation, a ritual, a meditation, is a special subset of walking, physiologically like and philosophically unlike the way the ail carrier brings the mail and the office worker reaches the train. Which is to say that the subject of walking is, in some sense, about how we invest universal acts with particular meanings. Like eating or breathing, it can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic."

- Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust

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Three moments

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:33:32 -0700

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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50 Years Later: Poème électronique

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:23:06 -0700

Poème électronique, housed in the groundbreaking Philips Pavilion, was created for the 1958 World's Fair, held in Brussels. It was the collaborative effort of Le Corbusier, Iannis Xenakis, and Edgard Varèse.

This video has been posted elsewhere, but it's great to get a glimpse of what this seminal work must have been like 50 summers ago. Now just imagine walking through Xenakis's futuristic stomach-shaped pavilion, with 425 speakers arranged throughout the walls, projections and stills, and a giant model of an atom hanging from the ceiling. Really the first immersive installation (that I know of). It was immensely popular - nearly 2 million people experienced it before it was dismantled at the end of the fair.

Le Corbusier conceived of the project and created the visuals, which included "color ambiences, a movie, three small images around the screen, a sun and a moon, clouds, lightning, stars, and two 3D objects hanging from the ceiling." (quote from documentary below). Xenakis designed the building (and created a musique concrète piece, Concret PH, which was played as a kind of interlude between performances of Poème électronique). Varèse, of course, created the electroacoustic score. Together the work depicts the history of humankind in eight minutes. It's worth noting that Le Corbusier and Varèse worked on the visuals and music independently.

The intro text, translated, is:

Philips have created an automatic apparatus that inaugurates a new art with unlimited possibilities, via a synthesis of light, colour, picture, speech and music displayed in space.

The "Electronic Poem," wrought by Le Corbusier, his collaborator Iannis Xenakis and the composer Edgard Varèse aims at showing how our increasingly mechanized civilization is striving towards a new harmony in the future.

The scenario consists of the following sequences:

- Genesis

- Spirit and Matter

- From Darkness to Dawn

- Man-made Gods

- How time moulds civilization

- Harmony

- To all mankind

Also worth checking out is this documentary about a virtual reality project that reconstructs the Pavilion:

See and download the full gallery on posterous

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The Battery Maritime Building as Abandoned Nest

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:01:48 -0700

I've been reading Gaston Bachelard's book, The Poetics of Space, which I have been meaning to read forever. And I'm happy to say that it lives up to the hype, although the introduction was rather tough going - basically a logically rigorous defense of the poetry to follow. I'm happy to just read the poetry.

In any case, he has two chapters back to back, one on nests and the other on shells. It's interesting reading - he discusses the primal feel of security the images of nests give us (if he had only lived to witness the naming of the 'nesting' phenomenon) and the idea of resurrection to be found from the image of animals coming out of shells.

It occurred to me that the Battery Maritime Building, where David Byrne's Playing the Building is housed, really feels a lot like an abandoned nest, an abandoned nest now resonating in the movement that accompanies its evolution into something else. This sounding sometimes takes the form of squawking, sometimes moaning, sometimes rumbling, and sometimes making sharp painful sounds all over its body.

But then I read the shell chapter, and I also thought of this building, which birthed so many ships leaving its slips over the years, as a kind of shell into which the ships, and lots of lots of people, have retreated - and then left again, reborn into the symbolism of New York Harbor.

Fascinating stuff.

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Playing the Building: A few videos

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 22:16:09 -0700

I'll have a walkthrough up shortly... but in the meantime:

From Wired. Listen to the reverb!

I think this is the official video from Creative Time.

It's fascinating to see people's reactions so close up.

A longer feature, from Boing Boing.

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Will the Real Banksy Please Stand Up?

Sun, 13 Jul 2008 21:05:36 -0700

Apparently Bansky's identity has been discovered. So what?

I don't care much for the one-name phenomenon, and I thought the elephant thing was pretty lame, but I really do love some of his work. He makes me laugh.

See the full gallery on posterous

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Playing the Building

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 07:25:16 -0700

My first impressions: the space feels mythic, perched on the water, haunted by anthropomorphic sounds. I found it just as interesting to simply listen to it creak and sway as to play the organ.

I took the free IKEA water taxi to get there from Red Hook, which was super fun.

See the full gallery on posterous

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On my way to David Byrne's Playing the Building

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 11:01:01 -0700

Will be spending 3-4 hours there to see how people are enjoying it. Look for some photos and audio/video coming up.

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