The Paris, Texas of the Second Empire

Compiled July 2012 by Lawrence Kumpf

The flâneur is someone abandoned in the crowd. He is thus in the same situation as the commodity. He is unaware of this special situation, but this does not diminish its effects on him, it permeates him blissfully, like a narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The intoxication to which the flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers. -- Walter Benjamin, 1938

A phantasmagoric journey through mid-20th century Country-Western music inspired by Walter Benjamin’s "The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire."

Like the poet as flâneur in Benjamin’s essay, the country singer holds a position as the susceptible vessel that embodies the incongruities and ruptures characteristic of modern life. Neither an active symptom nor proprietor of a solution for the social ills, the singer finds himself drawn into the intoxicating world of empathetic relations to, with and as commodity. We hear, perhaps more clearly then in Baudelaire, a voice speaking not from the elevated position of a social commentator or critic, but as the desire of the commodity and commodified. Connoisseurs of narcotics sing empathetic odes to inanimate objects and intoxicants, fortifying themselves in homes that are really bars. Hobos, trashmen and ragpickers walk the street collecting and picking through the worn out, exhausted items that have escaped our economy of exchange: the antiques of modernity, the images of obsolescence. The perpetual peregrinator, a rambling man, heroically stripped of the comforts of modern life finds himself stalking graveyards and mourning a loss that has yet to occur, the final refuge of his own death. In a way these songs embody the last gasp of a failed American politics, the moment before county western music slips into an emphatic listing of personal property as banal as Rick Ross’ "Trilla." The tragedy of our era is that the latent revolutionary desires present in Hank Williams Jr.’s "Fax Me a Beer" (not included in this mix) are forever doomed to find their outlet in an inane fantasy of endless technological advancement.

1.Porter Wagoner - The Wino
2.Jim Ed Brown- Bottle, Bottle
3.Porter Wagoner – Shopworn 4.Hank Williams – Men with Broken Hearts
5.Leon Rausch – Glass of Pride
6.Don King – Live Entertainment
7.David Allen Coe – Sad Country Song
8.Don Silvers – Play me another Hank Williams
9.Porter Wagoner – Bottom of the Bottle
10.Merle Haggard – Swinging Doors
11.Porter Wagoner – I Just Came to Smell the Flowers
12.D. Sheridan – Don’t Make Me Laugh (While I’m Drinkin’)
13.The Willis Brothers – Gonna Buy Me A Jukebox
14.David Frizzell – I’m Gonna Hire A Wino to Decorate our House
15.Frank Lowe - "Trash Man"

Lawrence Kumpf is a curator at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, NY.

eli keszler : cold pin from eli keszler on Vimeo.

New York-based musician and artist Eli Keszler integrates piano wire into his compositions in a way that falls between installation and improvisation. For Cold Pin, motorized beaters controlled by a generative sequence struct 14 piano strings hung across the wall of Boston's Cyclorama in 2011. Keszler then invited Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son and Benjamin Nelson to play off the work, improvising alongside the randomized clunks, scraps, and bangs emanating from the wall.

His recent L-Carrier at Eyebeam complicated this format by activating the motors in tandem with a changing visual score designed by Keszler. Hosted on a dedicated website commissioned by Turbulence, these images evolved when visitors tripped up "targets" on the site that interfere with the code, modifying the pattern of the motors. On June 7, Keszler again played in a seven piece ensemble in conjunction with the installation, including musicians Ashley Paul, Anthony Coleman, Alex Waterman, C Spencer Yeh, Catherine Lamb, Geoff Mullen, and Reuben Son.

In both compositions accompanying Cold Pin and L-Carrier, the installation serves not as a simple backdrop, but a central element. On their own, the installations continue to have a commanding presence. Unlike the extended resonating tones of Ellen Fullman's Long Stringed Instrument, which meditatively fill a room, Keszler's approach to auditory space reveals his training as a percussionist, where the plucks are akin to hits - busy, feverish and complex. Taken out of an enclosed environment, such as in Collecting Basin, piano wire is not only responsive to the whims of the motor beaters but also the wind and the elements. Here, Keszler hung the wire from a large water tower, transforming an industrial space into an open air instrument.

Eli Keszler Collecting Basin from eli keszler on Vimeo ...

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This post is part of a new monthly series of guest curated mixes for the Rhizome blog, entitled Wavelength.

 

JAPANESE NOISE: A REMINDER

Compiled Summer 2012 by C. Spencer Yeh

Back when I was an undergraduate and involved with college radio, we would hold educational meetings covering a wide variety of music by genre, artist, and geography. I was very much in thrall of the Japanese musical underground at the time, so I developed a presentation and this was the handout I made as an accompaniment. [See above.]

I’ve noticed the term ‘noise’ thrown around quite a bit lately, to encompass particular variations of form, ideology, and even affect, within organized sound culture.  I generally have no qualms with what 'noise' can now mean and manifest.  With that said, Japanese noise is my preeminent definition of 'noise'–my first and most formative experience.  The birth and development of Japanese noise is singular, defined by its relation to time and place, to culture and aesthetic.  Japanese noise taught me about freedom, fetish, listening, autodidactism, self-mythology, self-publishing, senzuri.

The selections for this mix date from the mid-'80s to the early '00s, are edited for length, and intentionally eschew the array of strategies in the scene (often deployed under the same project name) to focus on NOISE.  Big parties can be a blast, but once in a while, a long visit with an old friend is incredibly fulfilling and necessary.

Tracklist
(note: all tracks are edited for the purposes of this mix)
01. Violent Onsen Geisha 'Heavy Introduction'
02. Government Alpha 'Anonym Slander'
03. The Gerogerigegege 'Nothing to Hear, Nothing to... 1985'
04. K2 'We Destroyed Barcelona Again'
05. Aube 'Aquatremble 2'
06. Merzbow 'Chant 2 (Part 1)'
07. Hedlah 'Proud Flesh'
08. Solmania 'Panic Bend Rock'
09. MSBR 'Psychic Blue'
10. Incapacitants 'Necrosis'
11. Masonna 'Spectrum Ripper (Part XVII/Part XII)'
12. Hanatarash 'We Are 0:00'
13. Killer Bug 'One-Eyed Nudist'
14. Monde Bruits 'Continuum'
15. Hijokaidan 'What A Nuisance!'
16. Masomania 'Burn Me Fast'
17. C.C.C.C. 'Loud Sounds Dopa (Part II)'
18. Gomikawa Fumio 'Satan's Tail, Santa's Head'
19. Niku-Zidousha 'Untitled'
20. Flying Testicle 'Testicle Rider'
21. Pain Jerk 'Crack n' Roll'
22. Kazumoto Endo 'Itabashi Girl'

 C. Spencer Yeh is an artist and musician in Brooklyn, New York. He will perform at the New Museum on June 22nd with Graham Lambkin.

Wavelength is a new series for Rhizome’s blog that will examine sound art and music, with some attention towards the technologies that enable them. One significant aspect of Wavelength will be thematic guest curated mixes, which will appear on the blog monthly.

READ ON »

Our Best Machines are Made of Sunshine, 2009.

The notion of “feedback” is an important element for your sonic sculptures, where the viewer/listener is pulled into and directed by the work. As you stated in our visit, “What you hear affects how you move and how you move affects how you hear.” Your work SA-3, which you developed as a MFA student at Stanford, is a prime example of this technique. Could you discuss this piece and your research going into the project?

Well, for that piece it really started with noticing the moment in which I would become conscious of a localized sound, and how that awareness would pull me into or out of a particular relationship to the space. You could say an in-body/out-of-body type mediation. Through research in sound localization I learned of various directional speaker technologies and I combined that with an ongoing interest in how and why speaker systems are installed and controlled.

I was already looking into military projects involving sound as well as new developments in sound system technology. Talking with some folks at Meyer Sound in Berkeley, I was particularly interested in their Constellation system and their long-range speakers while I was also learning about spatial sound at Stanford’s CCRMA (Center for Computer Music and Research in Acoustics).  I came across the “audio spotlight” by Holosonics and the LRAD speakers at the time made by American Technologies. These both use ultra sonic transducers that heterodyne into an audible frequency controlling the localization of the sound through the inherent directionality of ultrasonic waves. The police and military are using the LRAD as hailing devices and have occasionally used them for crowd dispersal, a technique which is super dangerous because the key component of these speakers is that the user can control them without affecting their own ears. The person in control of the sound can inhabit the same space with those that it affects, while remaining immune to its force. Never before has this been the case. There’s a frightening disjunction in that control loop. So I was doing this research and I found a few really cheap small ultrasonic speakers on EBay and combined them into a hanging speaker array loosely based off of one of the Meyer Sound systems. I have always been attracted to the hanging speaker arrays and wanted to combine the ultrasonic speaker technology with the aesthetics of the stadium speakers to address the ways these more known systems control our bodily relationship to sound.  In a theater or performance setting there’s a loop between the performer, the sound engineer, the speaker system and the audience that returns back to the performer. With the LRAD system there’s a different loop where the person controlling the sound (performer and the sound engineer) do not experience the sound, yet they could see their “audience.”

Going back to SA-3, I wanted to play between those experiences by having the speakers of SA-3 play the sounds that you as a viewer make in the gallery. A mirror of sorts where you control what the sound is but how you chose to place yourself inline with the directionality of the speakers decides how you experience that sound in space. The audience is the performer. And I guess, as the designer of this system, I am the sound engineer.

Fri Nov 09, 2012 18:00 - Fri Nov 09, 2012

New York, New York
United States of America

Join us on November 9th at 6PM for "Architecture and Computation" with speakers Keller Easterling (Architecture, Yale) and Erica Robles (MCC, NYU). This will be the first event in this year's PROGRAM: Media and Literature lecture series.

Architecture and Computation

19 University Place, Great Room
New York, NY 10003
Map: http://goo.gl/maps/f2ad3

http://www.programseries.com

Free and Open to the Public

"PROGRAM" is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Media, Culture and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature Departments. Intentionally broad in scope, the series will present talks that explore the cultural, historical, aesthetic and political impact of software and programming logic.

This first event in our year-long lecture series explores the intersection of architecture and the logic of computation. How does computation structure our physical world, and in what ways has the function of computational media been applied to the spaces we inhabit?



Keller Easterling (Yale University, Architecture)

Extrastatecraft: Global Infrastructure and Political Arts
Repeatable formulas and spatial products make most of the space in the world. Now, not only buildings but also entire cities have become spatial products that typically reproduce free zone world cities like Shenzhen or Dubai. Space has become a mobile, monetized, almost infrastructural, technology, where infrastructure is not only the urban substructure, but also the urban structure itself. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this matrix space. Massive global infrastructure systems, administered by mixtures of public and private cohorts and driven by profound irrationalities, generate de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them—a wilder mongrel than any storied Leviathan for which we have studied political response. Infrastructure space is one crucible within which multiple fields of analysis encounter ample complexity, and it tutors special approaches to both form making and political arts.


Keller Easterling is is an architect, urbanist, writer, and Professor of Architecture at Yale University. Her latest project is titled Extrastatecraft.

Erica Robles (New York University, MCC)

Mediated Congregation: The Crystal Cathedral and God’s Place in a Networked WorldThis talk focuses on an often-overlooked institution that has helped produce and legitimate transformations in 20th century social life: the church. Through an analysis of the Crystal Cathedral Robles situates Protestant spatial production within a broader project of cultural re-formation whereby collective life became conducted via increasingly mediated, mobile, and distributed arrangements. For more than half a century, this influential Southern California ministry helped reshape the style and material conditions for worship. At its height, the Crystal Cathedral was perhaps the most visible Protestant church in the world.

Robles will render three distinctive and successive portraits of the church as a drive-in theater (1955-1957), an indoor-outdoor/television church (1962-1970), and then a globally-broadcast, glass and steel cathedral (1980 – 2012). Each site was a re-imagining of the socio-technical conditions for communion. Together, these portraits will trace a trajectory from the post-war to the present whereby the church helped determine technological and architectural meanings. By designing for mediated congregation, ministries like the Crystal Cathedral inscribed the production of broadcast and then networked geographies with spiritual significance. In so doing, they also translated Christian cosmology into a new technological regime.

Erica Robles is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.


Upcoming 2012-2013 PROGRAM events

Media Archaeology with Matthew Kirschenbaum and Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, March 1st, 2013

Values in Technological Design with Geoffrey Bowker and Sara Hendren, April 12th, 2013

http://www.programseries.com/

The series is sponsored by NYU's Information Futures, the Humanities Initiative, and the Departments of Media Culture, and Communication, English, and Comparative Literature.

Fri Dec 10, 2010 00:00 - Wed Dec 08, 2010

Music, Language, Thought V

Friday, December 10th 2010 / 3:00 - 7:00pm

Myles Jackson (History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, NYU): “The Role of Physicists in Measuring and Defining Nineteenth-Century Musical Aesthetics”

Kevin Bell (English, SUNY Albany): “Non-Cognitive Aspects of the City: Sound as Break in Christopher Harris’s “Still/Here"”

Ana María Ochoa (Music, Columbia University): “Orality and Orthography in Nineteenth-Century Colombia”"

Gary Tomlinson (Music, University of Pennsylvania): “Paleolithic Formalism”

Reception to follow

http://musiclanguagethought.wordpress.com

New York University / Silver Center for Arts and Science / 100 Washington Square East / Department of Music, Rm 220, 2nd floor

Sponsored by the departments of Music and Comparative Literature; with support from the NYU Humanities Initiative

Music, Language, Thought” is an interdisciplinary event series organized by graduate students within New York University’s Music and Comparative Literature Departments. Broadly speaking, the series focuses on the relationship between music and language, and our speakers will examine its theoretical ramifications for politics, aesthetics and historiography. The project stems from ongoing conversation and collaboration between graduate students within these two departments, and will continue on an annual basis.

Mon Jan 10, 2011 15:11

Call for Applications: Rhizome Curatorial Fellow

Rhizome is a leading arts organization dedicated to the creation,
presentation, preservation, and critique of emerging artistic
practices that engage technology. Through open platforms for exchange
and collaboration, our website serves to encourage and expand the
communities around these practices. Our programs, many of which happen
online, include commissions, exhibitions, events, discussion, archives
and portfolios. Rhizome is an affiliate of the New Museum of
Contemporary Art. For more information about Rhizome, visit:
http://rhizome.org/info/

Rhizome seeks a Curatorial Fellow from February through June 2011. The
Fellow will support the curatorial and editorial departments at
Rhizome through research, writing and administration. This position is
a unique opportunity for a person interested in pursuing a career in
contemporary art to further their engagement with the field and hone
their professional skills.

The Curatorial Fellow must be based in New York and must be able to
commit to 16 hours of work per week, for 5 months, beginning in Spring 2011. This position is unpaid, but academic credit may be arranged. The Curatorial Fellow will work directly with artists and be overseen by the Executive Director and Senior Editor.

The Fellow's primary responsibilities include:

* Coordination and development of the Rhizome ArtBase, including
managing submissions and reaching out to artists

*Researching topics for editorial coverage and writing articles for Rhizome's
blog and publications

* Administrative support of programs, such as Rhizome's monthly New
Silent Series at the New Museum

*General support of the organization

QUALIFICATIONS: Candidates should have a high level of familiarity
with contemporary art and particularly new media and its history.
Education or advanced experience beyond the undergraduate level is
preferred. At a minimum, the candidate should have very strong
writing, editing, and analytical skills, and very high internet
literacy. Knowledge of Microsoft Office software is also required and
basic Photoshop skills are preferred.

TO APPLY: Please email a cover letter, resume or c.v., three
references, and three writing samples (url's or attachments) to Ceci Moss editor(at)rhizome.org. Review of applications will begin
immediately. Starting date is February 15, 2011

DEADLINE: February 3, 2011

Fri Sep 24, 2010 19:02

Overview
The New Museum, New York’s only museum devoted exclusively to contemporary art, seeks an Associate Development Director, Grants to oversee and manage the institution’s $2 million grants portfolio. This position works closely with the Director of Development to cultivate, expand, and steward foundation, corporate, and government donors. S/He will oversee all aspects of institutional grants: prospecting and researching; writing proposals and letters of inquiry and final reports; and developing financials in accordance with each grant-making institution’s guidelines. Candidates should possess outstanding expository and persuasive writing skills, a high level of initiative, and an ability to work independently and as part of a team, as the situation requires. Candidates must have a proven track record and demonstrated success with institutional donors including municipal, state, and federal funding agencies. An interest in contemporary art and knowledge of the New York arts funding community is highly preferred.

The Associate Development Director, Grants also serves as the Development Manager for Rhizome, the New Museum’s affiliate new media arts organization who contracts the NM for development services (1 day a week). S/he reports to the Director of Development at the New Museum and the Director of Rhizome.

Primary Responsibilities for New Museum and Rhizome

* Manage and implement foundation, corporate, and government institutional giving initiatives
* Work with Director of Development, Director’s Office, and Director of Rhizome to cultivate, expand, and steward institutional donor relationships
* Timely and quality production of grant submissions and reporting, and other proposals as needed
* Manage an active grants calendar in Raiser’s Edge and update stewardship and cultivation actions as needed
* Facilitate donor communications for and be a primary steward to foundations, corporations, and government agencies
* Strategize on how best to present the New Museum to potential and current funders
* Liaise with other Museum Departments for Development purposes; coordinate inter-Departmental Development meetings and projects to ensure prompt and accurate grant compliance
* Implementation of grant, sponsorship, and major gift contracts including recognition, reporting, and added events and programs
* Maintain familiarity with the New Museum and Rhizome’s range of programs and accurately portrays organizational activities in verbal and written communications
* Assist in the development of annual grants budgets for New Museum; lead development of annual grants budget for Rhizome
* Work closely with the Rhizome Director on board, major donor, and community campaign communications
* Provide support for select fundraising events including: museum VIP openings and spring gala, and Rhizome fundraising events

Qualifications
MA in Art History, Arts Administration, Museum Studies, English, or equivalent preferred. A minimum of three years experience writing mid to high level grants for cultural institutions, excellent communication skills, experience in tracking grants and relationships in Raiser’s Edge, keen attention to detail, superior copy editing skills, strong follow through, and ability to interact with and anticipate funder benefits/needs are required. Excellent time management and ability to meet deadlines; requires flexibility to assume a workload that frequently necessitates an adjustment of priorities. Proficiency with Microsoft Office and its associated applications is required.

Application
Interested candidates should submit a cover letter, resume, and two grant writing samples which demonstrate their range of writing skill to: devjobs[AT]newmuseum.org.