Old Timey Goes New Timey
Artists Eileen Simpson and Ben White, founders of the Open Music Archive, will present Ghost Trace Stellar at the Star and Shadow Cinema tonight in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK. Performed at a volunteer built and run cinema and open space, the event is a reanimation and expansion of the concept of Free/Libre and Open Source software models to musical proprietary, authorship and distribution.
The event is formulated around an open invitation to artists, musicians, producers and DJs to perform covers or reinterpretations of the 1920s and 30s out-of-copyright folk, blues, and jazz collated from the Open Music Archive. UK terms of copyright for literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work are set at the life of the author plus 70 years, and at 50 years from the date of recording for sound recordings. Artists have been invited to develop new works from tracks such as 'One Dime Blues' by Blind Lemon Jefferson and 'Ragtime Annie' by Charlie Poole and The North Caroline Ramblers Group. These performances will be recorded and licensed under Creative Commons Share-Alike, to generate a new resource for future use.
The Open Music Archive is an initiative to source and distribute copyright-expired music recordings, it is intended as a platform for the exchange and distribution of media-bound recordings and as a site for the creation of new collaborations. Ghost Trace Stellar is a collaboration with Polytechnic as part of their ongoing media ecologies programme.
Multiple Views
Artist Dan Graham (born 1942) has embraced a wide range of media and genres including film, video, performance, installation, architecture (he collaborated with Jeff Wall in 1989 to build Children’s Pavilion), women’s magazines (Figurative—made in 1965 and reproduced in Harper’s Bazaar in 1968), and rock music (where he has collaborated with musicians such as Glenn Branca and Sonic Youth). Graham is well known for his documentary Rock My Religion (1982-84), a fifty-two minute video that explores the religious and spiritual tendencies underlying the American obsession with rock music. In the exhibition catalog for Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, Diedrich Diederichsen claims that this video is “one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music.” Rock My Religion, as well as many other of these interdisciplinary projects are included in Graham’s current solo show, Dan Graham: Beyond, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
Call for Participants
The international live media festival Netmage, hosted in Bologna, Italy each year, is seeking participants for their live media floor. Netmage seeks projects that employ electronic, electroacoustic, analogue and cinematic means to produce visuals and sound. These projects will be performed in a single event space, on single or multiple screens, for a duration of about 20 minutes each. To read the call or to apply, visit the Netmage 10 site.
Zebra Standards 29 - R. Stevie Moore (1978/2006)
No Static - Bottin (2009)
Music video, edited by Iris Lateral, using all appropriated footage from Lucio Fulci's Warriors of the Year 2072.
Required Reading
"DG: So just to clarify, you and John Cale took the side of contingency, materialism, and cultural and historical specificity, and La Monte Young and his supporters took the side of permanence, ‘the eternal’ and that which transcends culture and history.
TC: Right. Which led me to become engaged in a reflection on the intersection between idealism in Western philosophical thought and in Western cultural tradition on the one hand, and on the other hand power relations - since our controversy was largely lodged in the context of a legalistic formulation. What about our Greek roots? What about Pythagoras? What about theories of music that had to do with numerology? This ensnared me in a set of concerns around the text of history. To answer your question more directly, the substratum of my current interests, and those that have held my attention most over the last few decades, has to do with the way in which the historical record can become the narrative. On the sound side, this process was really rich, and it branched out. I began to tell myself odd things, like modern physics had been generated as a branch of music. The power conditions in the Western orchestra had their roots in the same conditions as modern state bureaucracies and military drill practices. This gives rise to an analysis of how power is transacted that is not inconsistent with Foucault’s theories, but culturally modulated in a different way."
-- EXCERPT FROM INTERVIEW IN FRIEZE MAGAZINE, JUNE/AUGUST 2009
In the Shadow of the Sun (1980) - Derek Jarman and Throbbing Gristle
Derek Jarman used some of his 70s home movie footage to produce this wonderful piece of exploitational avantgarde cinema. Actually the original material has been slowed down to a speed of 3-6 frames, then Jarman added colour effects and the pulsating, menacing score by Industrial supergroup Throbbing Gristle
Call for Submissions:
IEEE VISAP'15 / Data Improvisations / Call for Papers and Artworks
Posted by Angus Forbes
Edwin VanGorder