Silent Speeches

困在。 Being Trapped. A graduation work.

2011-07-28T10:52:00.003+08:00

Being Trapped (SO Ching-yee, 2011) in Beijing

I thought that's the end of the School of Creative Media (SCM) on the old campus, the end of my 13 years with this basement, also the end of my initiation period into art education and art-making at SCM, now that we have moved to the spectacular Creative Media Centre designed by Daniel Libeskind. But the spirit lingers... A door that freezes by itself and a clumsy chair on a lowly mound quietly dwell the abandoned garage space -- thanks to two Critical Intermedia students, So Ching-yee and Fiona Lee, who decided to stage their graduation thesis work in the place where they have spent their past four years as an art student.

So Ching-yee, whose graduation thesis I supervised, finally completed her work Being Trapped in an oral presentation yesterday. The final work on the spot was a sculpture, a rugged chair frame mounted on unleveled cement and concrete, dimly yet dramatically lit in the dark, in the newly evacuated former common area of SCM's. Barely for a seat -- and only if you struggle to climb up and allow your legs to dangle, the chair is somewhat larger than life size and yet just big and strong enough for one. The entire set-up invites me to stay at a distance to look, observe and meditate, rather than to relate to it or to sit on it.

To me, what really makes the work interesting is the staggering and prolonging life of the chair on the mound, its transposition from space to place, and the very different meanings and effects it picks up as it travels. The sculpture was made in Beijing, shipped to Hong Kong, and since then transported to various temporary storage spaces, including a street presence in the busiest part of Mongkok in the pedestrianized zone over the past weekend. In Mongkok, the artist was present with her work, inviting people to try the chair, talk to her and leave comments.

In its initial phase, the piece was personally motivated. The young artist's intimate thoughts about her own inadequacy to express and communicate, as well as her handicapped feelings being an exchange student in Beijing, evolved into a thorough process of working out shut-off emotions via 'massaging' physical materials. The 'journey' of the chair afterwards to me is not an epilogue, but the beginning of a different life, a new trajectory. I am therefore a bit puzzled by how Ching-yee has turned the chair-on-the-mound's adventures into just a back-story for the spectacle of the sculpture. There is a definite struggle between keeping the chair-on-the-mound as a pure object of intimate expression and exploring its performative potentials. Whatever she will do, I would not want to see the performative aspect as just the documentation, or stories that need to be told or added of the sculpture.

Whatever the case is in future, I am moved by the thoroughness of the creative process, and the rigorous strategies to give multiple lives to this piece of work, to sustain its presence, and to turn the chair-on-the-mound into an element of an open generative process.

For the artist's documentation of the work process and what happened in Mongkok over the weekend, visit her site: http://chingyso3.wordpress.com/

(Linda C.H. Lai)

The Signature of Documentary – thoughts from Open City London Documentary Festival 2011

2011-07-01T10:48:00.001+08:00

Opening night of Open City London Documentary Festival (June 16, 2011), photo by Linda Lai

To me, documentary is a total event that cannot be fully considered without taking into account the intention of the maker, relation between the maker and the documented, the use of the work in its life-span of distribution and circulation, the conversations it invokes, and finally other on-going discourses in which it works out its politics.

Textbook discussion on documentary film has often been caught up in issues of evidence of truth rooted in the camera’s being there and the photographic image’s indexical transparency. The shift to clarification of documentary as a genre, thus its visual and narrative practice as conventions, often results in reinforcing the acceptance of documentary works’ narrative constructed-ness and naturalizing discursive persuasion, which is very much the case, without sufficiently addressing the ethical stance and critical urgency of a work’s making.

As I was viewing Position Among the Stars (Leonard Retel Helmrich, 2011 / 115 minutes), Opening Gala at the inaugural edition of Open City London Documentary Festival (June 16-19), I kept hearing the two gentlemen behind me whispering, “This is staged… That is staged…” As for me, I couldn’t help thinking what impact the filmmaking process has had on the members of this 3-generation family in Indonesia, given the breadth of coverage of events and the omnipresence of the camera and the crew in their crammed living space. A pity that Helmrich was only present via pre-recorded greetings on video.

Dr. Michael Stewart, Festival Director and UCL lecturer of anthropology, pointed out in the Opening Ceremony that documentaries are testimonies — testimonies of the maker’s being there, as well as testimonies of his/her subjects’ testimonies of themselves. I feel close to this idea as a visual ethnographer.

Cristi Puiu, Chair of Grand Jury for Open City and award-winning director, describes many documentary makers’ felt struggle, “Personally, I do not have the courage and I sometimes don’t have the patience for making documentaries. For making documentary you need time and you need courage and you need patience to face your subject…”

Affirming that the camera not only records what happens in front of the camera but also draws out the subject’s full presence, Puiu uses the term “documentary look” to describe the subject’s ability to perform, her/his gestures and the entire event of articulation. He says, “The documentary for me is important not just because there is an object, a cultural object, an artistic cultural anthropological object which is the film. It is important because there is a very specific look to the object outside our head.”

Documentary makers, Puiu describes, “respect the fact that outside their heads there is something very concrete, which is this world. Life.” “This implies a humbleness, in order to look at this world not to impose your view but to be in a position to look, to search and to question yourself.”

For documentary to be a total event, documentary method and the maker’s reflexive, ethical practice have yet to be complemented by a generous thoughtfulness on a higher level. As Director Stewart says, it is not enough to just aspire our society as ‘open cities’, but “we need activities that promote open cities” as opposed to activities that encourage closed cities. (Linda C.H. Lai from London)

REVISED program for 'No Nukes Dreamers Film Festival' 2011.07.15-17

2011-06-29T13:16:00.005+08:00

website: http://www.greenpartypost.net/nonukes.html

enquiry: nonukessinohk@gmail.com

click image to view content

No Nukes Dreamers Film Festival 非核夢想家電影節

2011-06-27T15:42:00.003+08:00

Local activist group 反核@中國香港 'No Nukes @ China Hong Kong' is organizing a series of discussion and screening for an anti-nuclear platform.
[*official site for the group: http://www.greenpartypost.net/nonukes.html]

Please join their events:

主辦：反核之眾 Hong Kong People Against Nukes
費用全免 Free Admission
地點：塔冷通心靈書舍 Talentum Bookshop
油麻地窩打老道20號金輝大廈1樓6室(油麻地港鐵站B2出向左望)
Rm 6, 1/F, 20 Waterloo Road, Yaumatei (Exit B2, Yaumatei Train Station)
電話：2782 2027

內容 Programme:
7月15日 (星期五) July 15 (Friday)

* 7:15-8:06pm <核電爭議> Nuclear Controversies, 2004, 51min, 中文字幕 w/Chinese subtitles, 導演 Dir：Wladimir Tchertkoff

有關1986年切爾諾貝爾核災對人類健康的影響--誰是「專家」？ On the health effects of the 1986 Chernobyl accident - what is "scientific expertise"?

* 8:10 - 9:15 pm 討論：核電謊言與「專家」知識
Discussion: How nuclear lies are made and made possible

____________
7月16日 (星期六) July 16 (Saturday)

* 1:30-3:04pm <畸愛博士，或：我如何學習終止憂慮及愛上核彈> Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learnt To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, 1964, 94min, 中文字幕 w/Chinese subtitles, Dir. Stanley Kubrick

一九六零年代諷刺超級大國玩核經典電影 A classics satire on the superpowers’ playing with nukes

* 3:10-5:21pm <絲活的故事> Silkwood, 1983, 131min, 中文字幕 w/ Chinese subtitles, Dir. Mike Nichols

根據真人真事改編，核燃料廠工會成員絲活揭露廠方違反安全守則而引發的奪命下場 A film on the nuclear fuel plant worker Silkwood

* 6:10-6:34pm <犧牲> The Sacrifice, 2003, 24min, w/ English subtitles, Dir. Wladimir Tchertkoff

關於切爾諾貝爾的「清理」工人 About the liquidators at Chernobyl

* 6:35-7:09pm <表層之下> Under the Surface, 2011, 34min, w/ English
subtitles, Dir. Sager Klara

瑞典山區尋找鈾礦的不義之舉 A suggestive account of the hunt for uranium in the
Swedish mountains

* 7:15-8:15pm 討論：核戰與核電 ---「東西陣營」的年代及有權與無權的差異
Discussion: Nuclear war and nuclear power plants - "East" and "West", the "Haves" and "Have Nots"
____________
7月17日 (星期日) July 17 (Sunday)

* 2:00-3:43pm <活人的紀錄> Record of a Living Being，1955，103分鐘，中文字幕，Dir. 黑澤明 Akira Kurosawa

美國核試禍及日本漁民後，黑澤明的反響：我不想駭人聽聞，只是希望人民聽到一個活人的善良呼叫 Kurosawa's response to radiation contamination in Japan resulting from US nuclear tests in the Pacific

* 3:50-5:05pm <輻射永存> Into Eternity, 2009, 75min, w/ English subtitles / Dir. Michael Madsen

關於芬蘭的所謂永久存放核廢料 A film about "permanent" storage of irradiated nuclear fuel in Finland

* 5:15 - 6:15pm 討論：更多非核夢想家？
Discussion: May there be more No Nukes Dreamers

Non-place ▪ Other Space: the sight-and-sound archive of untold anecdotes for Hong Kong and Macao

2011-06-19T14:44:00.002+08:00

[*This article was prepared for ‘urban style; build up a (un)fair world’, Afro-Asian Institute Graz, Austria, June 7, 2011, as well as for the inaugural edition of the Open City London Documentary Festival at the University College of London, June 16-19, 2011 -- as a result of my reflection on this work after its appearance in International Competition at the 57the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, May 5-11, 2011.]

Videography as personal diaries, visual ethnography and historiography

Over the years, I have developed a method to create video works that are based on found-footage or video diaries in my own archive. Collecting sights and sounds in a certain existential mindset, and gaining fresh understanding of these documents much later like a researcher, form the rudiments of my experimental documentary position which maps a double “I” at work. My collecting activities are highly intuitive, much like Surrealist automatism, and yet inevitably shaped by my education and life experiences, whereas the formation of image/sound discourses from video fragments is an important process of discovery and critical intervention. And this is also whether my historiographic intention comes in.

Most of my creative works have a visual, auto-ethnographic dimension: through personal visual diaries I observe culture and history as concrete lived experiences and entrenched moments of the everyday. In terms of cinematic art, my works follow closely thoughts in the history of experimental cinema in the US and Europe, asking as well what experimentation possibly means in my cultural context. I’m particularly interested in Early Cinema moments – when cinema’s possibilities were wide open, and before cinematic narrative conventions were formalized. To me, the energies of Early Cinema bear an ethical dimension: the imperative to keep an artistic medium open and alive.

My critical and creative works in general have a strong concern for language and micro/meta-narrativity, grounded in a feminist sensibility that integrates critical theory, cultural studies and historiography. Language to me includes film language and visuality at work in general as expressive systems.

Non-place ▪ Other Space as experimental, critical visual-ethnography

Non-place ▪ Other Space is part of my continuous fuelled interest in found footage and compilation works, also an auto-ethnographic practice. I have been a fervent walker of the city as well as a detached collector of sights and sounds. Video-making then is to renew the old images that filled my archive, also to preserve the fragments for their own autonomy and openness for signification. In Walter Benjamin’s light, “the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.”

Non-place ▪ Other Space is also self-consciously engaged in the dialectics of the monumental and the fabric of everyday life in the context of Hong Kong and Macao, two cities whose histories and identities have been co-opted into the grand discourse of Chinese civilization since their handover to Chinese sovereignty.

Non-place ▪ Other Space compiles fragments of the city space in Hong Kong and Macao (1991-2008) to assert the possibility of many spaces and temporal sheets in one single framed discourse. It attempts the states between disappearing and emerging, visible and concealed. “Walking through” is a precarious experience. One penetrates, dives into, emerges and immerses in… In one moment, I see, therefore the video camera records for me; in another moment, the camera sees and retains, then I discover. Automatism leads. Virtual sounds I barely grasp in my mind, and fragments of a voice I have long forgotten, all blended into the placeless other space of non-place. Places and lived moments of disappearance return as the in-between, neither monumental, nor illusionary.

I have discovered much about my ethnographic impulses as I piece together fragments of sights and sounds. Hong Kong is a food-oriented culture; yet to me food is closely tied to death and demise. I meant to be anti-monumental, and looked for ‘history’ in the banal and the everyday. Yet as I review the finished piece, every other minute of the work carries fluttering fragments of a monumental event: Chinese New Year, the Ghost Festival, the 2000 Millennium celebration, China’s hosting the Olympics… Most of the outdoor sites in this work no long exist in current maps of Hong Kong and Macau as a result of ceaseless urban renewal projects; or some scenes have never yet existed as practical, concrete dwellings as they were only impermanent sites of art installations.

Montage as critical strategy

Globally circulated typical images of Hong Kong glorify the soaring skyscrapers of the city’s financial and multi-national corporate institutions, or else the skyline of the Victoria Harbor, crowds and traffic jams. To me, Hong Kong cannot be reduced to a handful of images, whereas it is in the act of walking that I discover my metaphor – ceaseless streams and torrents of sensations from eclectic and multifarious sources, sounding or muffled, colliding yet blending. Here and there, huge digital screens scream at crossroads as I sink into the boundless space of my thought world or sudden daydreams. Then at the quick turn of a street corner, a bustling road becomes a forgotten alley carrying on the life of half a century ago. Walking through the city space of Hong Kong to me is real-time experience of rapid succession of details sweeping by and ceaseless transition in and out of broken time zones. In the language of cinema, we call it ‘montage’. More importantly, as my visual research shows, the city of Hong Kong has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity – in the context of a real estate-driven development model.

In working through chaos and disorder, and in piecing together fragments of sights and sounds into an image discourse, I was drawn into a renewed interest in the meaning of editing. Montage is collage. Collage, with its historically subversive connotation, leads me to a method that achieves coherence via incoherence and incongruence. Thus I call my visual grammar that of fragments: an editing approach that liberates individual shots from discourse, and allows each image/sound fragment to take on new tones and voices as it freely cohere with each other.

The sight and sound fragments are pregnant with anecdotal resonance as yet to be made explicit. I’d like to use the pastry ‘napoleon’ (‘thousand-leaf, or millefoglie, or mille-feuille) as an analogy to describe the overall image/sound system resulting from the montage of fragments of varied texture and sensibility in Non-place. The many ‘leafs’ include: art space and art installation, food, small details of monumental moments, water (nature in the urban space), places where food is prepared, disgust (waste, relics, food), demolished place, human body parts, casual conversations, media broadcast, my mother…

Yet one final ‘leaf’ is my diary in the form of poetry. In the midst of the torrents of images and sound signals one finds the subject being of the artist, whose own private story and her relation with her tools could only be articulated in words. Text-image relation in this work is therefore not that of interpretation or supportive elaboration. The written words are not translatable into any visual form; they form an autonomous tier of space of their own, the private, desirous, and reflexive of art-making.

The untold anecdotes of disappearing places...

Non-place ▪ Other Space is an archive of visual quotations of vanished places whose stories beg to be told. Here are three instances:

- Portions of the harbor shore of Hong Kong that now become land from sea-filling... Despite the lacking in leisure space for the dense population of Hong Kong (now over 8 million), the Hongkong Government, until recently, had seldom considered the natural harbor shores of Hong Kong for providing a nice walk for its citizens. Heavy sea filling along the shore never ceased to make way for highways. Preventing the harbor of Hong Kong from disappearing due to over land-reclamation has been the main agenda of a local activist group called ‘Friends of the Harbour’. [The stories that need to be told: the history of Hong Kong’s harbor shore]
- Images of the Walled City, with workshops for food manufacturing, supplies for dental treatment, and inexpensive housing, a community that the Hong Kong Government cleaned up totally by 1993, now turned into a memorial park... [The stories to be told: elimination of communal life for urban renewal]
- Images of a charity home originally for domestic helpers who had sworn celibacy, the poor and women in need during the Japanese occupation (1940s): in the early 2000s, the Macao government loaned the space to independent art groups to stage alternative arts. After a few incidents of art censorship, the government decided to take back the space to develop it for cultural tourism in the name of cultural heritage preservation. Now on the same site, among the many tourists’ interest points is an atmospheric restaurant heavily publicized in all tourist guide books… [The stories that need to be told: top-down engineered cultural management for tourism, at the cost of forfeiting the nourishment of independent art-making]

*For more citation of this work, visit [...]

A visual ethnographer's experimental historiography for the city of HK

2010-08-09T22:14:00.008+08:00

image by Linda Lai from Voices Seen/Images Heard (2009)

[***The following is my outline submissions for my participation in the research workshop "Everyday Coloniality" workshop, initiated by Prof. Alf LÜDTKE, in the conference "The History of Everyday Life – Transnational." November 2010, Seoul, South Korea. My experimental documentary/video essay, Voices Seen, Images Heard, will be part of my presentation.]

As a historian, a visual ethnographer and artist, what do I care deeply about?

Mentalities…how do people really think? What do they care about? What do they do with their thinking? What are the ways they do things? How do they participate in a culture and a shared cultural past? What kind of ideal personhood do they project? How do they make sense of the world? What kinds of self-made philosophy of life? How does story-telling become the converging point of the above? How do visual and audio fragments handed down from the past facilitate access to those lived moments? What kinds of documents are they? What kinds of linkages could we establish with those fragments?

My historiographic approach is grounded in ethnography. My research location, 'archaeological site', or 'field', is the everyday terrain and the every day person. My assumptions are, first, the everyday terrain can be understood as a rich zone, consisting "of the little things one hardly notices in time and space." (Fernand Braudel, 1979) In Braudel's view, the 'everyday' pertains to "zones of turbulence," and is a progressive category that pays attention to the everyday and in so doing creates anomalies. Second, the everyday person, anonymous and ordinary she is, is engaged in meaning-making, whether conscious of it or not, via everyday doings. Her inner temporality takes the form of event structure, that is, her mentalities reside in actions, speech, the making of artifacts and other observable and perceivable forms. (Mark Blum) To me, the horizontal mapping of a broad range of 'surfaces' via the collecting of audio visual fragments – one form of visual ethnography – is a core research activity holding together my multiple-end historiography. Instead of deep analysis of the single sample case, which is the typical approach in qualitative research in social science, I prefer the aggregates of data.

Theory as practice is a key principle. I have done virtual walks through the main streets of my city Hong Kong in its colonial time in 1934 in an elaborate narrative with thick description based on archival newspaper and photo research. (Lai, 2006) I have collected video talking heads (head shots with audio) of ordinary people based on circles of acquaintances, who were asked to retell a well-known fairy tale or a story of their own choice. (Lai, 2006-2009). Using these talking heads, I study their articulation of self embedded in their logic of events through language configuration and speech performance, to arrive at glimpses of self-made citizenship of individuals through the movement of the private self towards the social in the duration of a short narrative. I have also assembled from my video diaries images of the urban space of Hong Kong that are outside monumental historical discourses, or simply gone due to ceaseless urban renewal, to form works of visual poetry with a purpose. Editing, rather than an act of pure aesthetic collation, is laying out, unfolding, alignment, and the construction of discourse. Phenomenological description is interpretation. (Andrew Reid Fuller, 1990)

Much of what I have studied is mediated experience contained in audio visual documents that are not innocent forms of representation. Visuality is not just about signification and discourse; it is a complex field that requires insightful dissection of language at work and activities around the camera as performative events of human interaction.

In studying and using film footage and photographic images I collected for the colonial past of Hong Kong, I am much conscious of the following:

> photography of the 20th century was developed at the intersection of the philosophical claims of realism and the cultural claims of the 'everyday' (John Roberts, 1998, 1999)
> photography and photographic documents have a strong impact on the concept and knowledge of the 'everyday'
> all photographs articulate a mode of attention (or attentiveness) that may or may not be aligned with grand discourses: it could be a fashion or style of image making promoted in mass communication, it could be a result of a certain model of camera, it could be government news propaganda, it could be highly personal as a memoir (the source); or it could be emblematic of class (which economical class could afford a camera, what kinds of professionals would travel around with a camera to make pictures).
> the temptation and limitation of visuality: "the more we reduce the focus of vision, the more likely we are to find ourselves in the environment of material life" (Braudel 1979); my question is, then, how to tie in visuality to the broad terrain of the observable everyday? What could one do with images? And what can images do?
> images could be used as forms of obsessions that have yet a linkage to ordinary behavior (Steven Johnson, 2005)

My general response is: visuality could be understood on multiple levels, as is the case in visual ethnography. Johnson recommends for the study of everyday life a flexible assemblage of methodologies that collaborate with one another: systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition, popular culture analysis, symbolic analysis, textual studies etc., to which I add visual and sound artifacts.

As a reflexive visual ethnographer, I construct my creative/artistic paradigm by which images of daily life embodies the collection and use of anecdotes, drawings, travelers' notes, the way people eat, dress, or lodge at different levels of society – to preserve the complexity of history, and the limitation of singular source of epistemology.

My experimental video work, Voices Seen, Images Heard, was created in the light of the above consideration and on-going practices.

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Synopsis:
A historian, also an interdisciplinary artist, engages in a self-dialogue of how to write the history of her city, Hong Kong. Drilling the disparate mines of sights and sounds, she re-examines the power and limitation of ocular epistemology, which favors visual perception as the dominant form of knowing. As she makes her way through the scanty and homogenous visual documents available, she re-imagines a city that has a precarious history of holding onto its look or preserving its architectural integrity at the interest of real estate development. In response, she re-constructs a visual essay that is also a collage of lost surfaces and shadowy fragments of existence. Her meditation leaves open the potential meanings of each of the sight-and-sound fragments that seem to have spoken to her, asking how feasible it is to access the past.

Artist's Statement:
Voices Seen, Images Heard is a work of experimental visual historiography based on visual ethnography. I have always been an earnest image-collector – photos, newsreels, movies with real location shots, drawings, found texts and graphics. I attend especially to the less noticeable details of these found objects, and I realize there's a lot to the 'surfaces' of things handed down to us from the past. I naturally find collage a powerful artistic form and strategy, and have adapted it to videography. In the process of it, one intriguing creative problem is how to embed still images in a video work; the other is what to do with available fragments that do not immediately form a rational whole. What I have done in Voices Seen is to liberate the fragments of found sounds and images from the domination of discourses, juxtapose them with my own video diaries, to let each fragment speak and perform to us.

Voices is the first of a series meditation notes in the form of video essays on the thought process of a historian attempting to re/un-cover the lost sights and sounds of a city whose 'appearances' constantly 'disappear' by the logic of progress and development. I have been driven by a strong desire to 'see' and 'hear' for myself… What did people look like? Who walks on the street? How did they talk? What did they sound like? In the light of phenomenological thinking, I highlight the historian's desire to gain access to, and the impossibility of sensual perceptual dwelling in the past -- even in the presence of a huge archive! The irony is – a lot of the Cantonese sounds I've found are not comprehensible to me. I look at them and listen – much like a stranger in the midst of a foreign tongue.

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Philosophical quotes I have used in Voices Seen, Images Heard

"The dead are not available to him as his contemporaries are; he cannot bodily enter their environment; he cannot converse with them; and he can know them only through fragmented and problematic records.
"He regroups and reformulates typifications of typifications, unable to obtain any immediate access to the settings which he explores."
[Paul Rock, "Some Problems of Interpretive Historiography," British Journal of Sociology v. 27, n. 3, September 1976.]
"So much of what really 'counts' to people in our society goes on in secret."
[J. Douglas, "Existential Sociology," unpublished paper, p. 31]

===========
Bibliography:
Blum, Mark E., 2006: "Phenomenological History and Phenomenological Historiography," in Analecta Husserliana XC, 3-26. Spring.
Braudel, Fernand, 1979 (1992): The Structures of Everyday Life: the limits of the possible. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles.
Fuller, Andrew Reid, 1990: Insight into value: an exploration of the premises of a phenomenological Psychology. State University of New York Press, Albany.
Johnson, Steven, 2005 (2006): Everything Bad is Good for You: how popular culture is making us smarter. Penguin Books, London, New York, Toronto.
Lai, Chiu-han Linda, 2006: "Producing Heterotopia: Traces of the Cinema in the Thick Space of Governmentality, Localism and Citizenship in 1934 Hong Kong" (Ph.D. thesis, NYU)
__________. "What is in a Talking Head?" (2006- ; work in progress); a project of visual ethnography, Hong Kong
Roberts, John, 1998: The Art of Interpretation: Realism, Photography, and the Everyday .
__________, 2006: Philosophizing the Everyday: revolutionary praxis and the fate of cultural theory. Pluto Press, London, Ann Arbor.

image by Linda Lai from Voices Seen/Images Heard (2009)

After a long while...an interview with me by Shanghai's Art World magazine

2010-08-05T19:02:00.008+08:00

This is an email-written interview I did with Jane Chun, the editor of a Mainland Chinese magazine, Art World, in late July 2010, after my presentation of my latest video work, Voices Seen, Images Heard (11.2009) at Xindenwei, an art project/community in Shanghai, on July 17.
Voices Seen, Images Heard is part 1 of my experimental historiography video cycle, "Meditations on a Minor History," growing out of my Ph.D. thesis on historiography. The cycle is still in progress, and will finish with 5 episodes.

Jane:
關於您和您的作品，我希望這樣來呈現：先來一小段您的（個人）藝術經歷（包括"Meditations on a Minor History"是怎樣一部系列作品、"探索跨界藝術創作的據點"等等），然後是關於您作品的一些介紹和分析，最後也是最重要的部分，我希望向您請教一些關於藝術與歷史的關係，也包括少許藝術與普通個體、藝術與當下社會的關係的話題。如果我沒有問到，而您有意賜告，也請儘管直言。

1，通常，理論就是理論，實踐就是實踐，您為什麼會在歷史學者、電影研究者之外多出一個"跨界藝術家"的身份？
[Me] 我對理論的興趣與學術研究生涯的開始，源於對社會文化的關切，所以我一開始搞的就是批判理論(Critical Theory)，即西方馬克思學術系統為基礎的鑽研，從經濟、社會開始，後由不同範疇的學者發展開去，涉及電影和文學研究，媒體理論，以至文化研究。批判理論強調的是改變，即搞理論最終的目標是社會文化中"變化"的出現，由建制、意識形態、生活實踐，以至理念的創造等等的"變化"；"實踐"理應是理論探索活動的核心。批判理論的另一個重點是拒絕不問因由而接納某一個理念、某一種論述為定案；批判理論的學者，基調是揭開論說的背後假設，揭示語境，剖開操控語境和論述的權力核心；換句話說，就是追尋甚麼時候、在怎樣的處境下、為了誰的權益的原故而至使某種意識形態或實踐成為主導，成為理所當然。還有第三個重點。在後結構主義氛圍的影響下，語言活動成為"變革"的活動的本體，張開了"實踐"的含義。要不斷的語言活動 – 不管是論述或是創作 – 比"實踐"過後產生的果效更為重要。我就是在這個基礎上去進行我的理論探索的。不是一般人說的搞理論是為了實踐（應用），而是∶理論就是實踐。如果我跟別的學者有不同的話，那只是因為我的個人歷史讓我的手裏多拿了幾套不同的言語 – 視覺藝術的、電影的、文學創作的、理性書寫的，當然還有人文學科的理論語言，而我一直覺得它們是相通的。甚麼時候相通呢？就是我對周遭的事物有所"注意"、策問、親身參與其中、窮其究竟的時候；而這種相通、融合，本身是藝術性的、是創作性的，而不是純學術性的。純理論於我是方法學上和批判的視野上的，求有依據的分析，實事求是而條理分明。藝術創作是我的率性(impulse)，是表述上的五花八門，想像力的飛騰、跳躍，是超越的衝動，靠的，是圖像、光影、聲音的語言，或更超前的創作平臺。

搞理論為甚麼又搞起歷史來呢？歷史與理論並不是分開和對立的。單從電影研究的範疇來看，上世紀七零年代末以來，最活躍的理論發展正正就是電影歷史寫法的方面。在眾多的史學論述中，我發現了的不單是擴大了的書寫空間，還有偌大的創作空間。搞歷史也因為我關心香港，覺得香港的歷史書寫，若要為記存她豐盈的存活，追尋她特有的作為城市的發展軌跡，就必須從"文化"的層次出發。所謂"文化"，用英國文化研究理論家Raymond Williams的說法，就是普通、日常的生活（的累積），於我來說，也包括了普及媒體有意或無意的記述以至再現。"文化研究"作為一個學術領域，其中最大的貢獻就是歷史研究和文化鑽研的結合，當中又透過田野考察(field work)和民俗志(ethnography)的方法的應用。有趣的是，文化研究對當代藝術是個重要的靈感源頭。

2，"跨界"，"界"是何意？它究竟在哪里？是怎樣一個形態？
[Me] "界"從正面說是秩序出現的條件。各歸各類，易於辨明特性上的共通和差異；各從其類，易於管理。從批判的角度看，"界"是人為的準繩的設立，是規劃，權力操控的體現，監察的起步，關鍵在於"誰"有權設立，又為了誰。用法國社會理論家和哲學家米契∙福柯(Michel Foucault)的眼光看，設"界"是效率的人口管理的重要條件，以"定界"去確立標準，讓政府、也讓國民自行斷定誰符合"好國民"的典範。對福柯來說，"界"也在思想領域運作。他的早期著作《The Order of Things》，其重點就是剖開西歐學術範疇的形成，在特定的時空"界"的出現的各種權力遊戲的含義。對他來說，揭發語境本身就是批判性的實踐。

二十世紀西方藝術發展曾出現過不少"破界"的運動，如二十世紀上半葉Collage（拼貼）的出現，成為帶政治性、批判性的創作法。又如達達主義（兩次大戰之間）創作者以及Fluxus群體（籠統而言由1950年代末到1970年末）對"intermedia"（互媒）觀念的拓展，都是我的參考研究物件。現今"跨界"處於潮流之巔，我不能三言兩語的理清背後的種種。毫無疑問，文化研究的堅持學科上的"跨界"是重要的力量。跨國主義的盛行又是另一種"界"— 地域遇物流的"界"— 的化解。當我說我是個"跨界創作者"的時候，有三層意義∶一，"跨界"是一種批判的態度以至批判行動的本身（見對問題1的回答），對既定俗成，層隸高低的挑戰；二，"跨界"是一種實驗，理論上和藝術創作上的，為了發現未知的，為了開發、張開；三，"跨界"是我對個人學術訓練和創作背景的自覺的回應，理出各種脈絡、網路和結連點（而不是系統），讓不同的理論和實踐有交彙的可能性。

3，沉思歷史可以採用很多方法和途徑，為什麼選擇了藝術的方式？為什麼是影像？
[Me] 先要說明，我是個確確實實的用文字寫歷史的人。文字給我的方便是邏輯鋪展，在述理陳辯以至描述上達到精准。然而我的研究考察過程中碰到很多的史料，似乎文字單一的媒體並不足夠引領我們潛進繁衍參雜而博大的過去的實存。藝術有自己的語言和發聲，是另一種接觸過去的方法，另一種表述。攝影有自己的聲音，活動影像也是，而可以捕捉並以科技方法紀錄的存在過的聲音，又是另一種讓人回顧過去、呈現過去的途徑。用影音的方法去呈現和理解歷史，長於氣質、氣氛、整體的感官上的參照。影音的陳述未必精准，卻像一個無底的資料庫，不斷的看，不斷的聽，還是有取之不盡的細節。過去數十年間，在文字的歷史法上相當的理論討論集中在敍事法和論述的效應上，史學法從"必須科學"的牢籠中走出來，朝向複數的方法學典範，容納"創作性"為歷史寫作的一部分。我看不出為何在歷史再現的媒體上就不能理性而實驗性的探索影音的可能性，以至在知識論層次上提出的思辨。

4，作為一件藝術作品，《看得見的聲音，聽得見的形像》的"藝術性"是如何體現的？在見證歷史的同時，您是怎樣努力使其成為一件具有獨立意義的"藝術品"？
[Me]（See artist statement and synopsis of Voices Seen/Images Heard……）
我尤其想用"片斷的美學"(aesthetics of the fragmentary) 和"碎片的理論"(theory of the fragments)去形容我的創作法。……拼貼（Collage）的方法在"碎片"的前提底下，就如敍事的文法，剪接的活動。……

影、音上的"斷裂"，這是相對於主流電影要求觀眾忘我投入，反而喚起觀眾的觸覺和自覺：錄影的書寫最終是人為的、創作性的活動，也就是歷史寫作的局部內情。

作品以視覺民俗志(visual ethnography)為考察基礎，對歷史的書寫，強調鋪陳、策問的過程，為存活的證據提供感官上的接觸，張開問題，而不必提出絕對的定案。

5，蘇珊桑塔格認為，觀賞藝術品這一經歷的目的不是為了說出其"真正的意義"，不要另建一個"意義"的影子世界，作品的價值肯定存在於別處，而不在意義當中。重要的是恢復我們的感覺，我們更多地看，更多地聽，更多地去感覺，而不是強加意義。您希望觀眾看到什麼？您認為他們會有怎樣的收穫？
[Me] 我正正想希望透過作品讓觀眾轉換一下"看"的習慣，就是暫時擱置蘇珊桑塔格所反對的"影子"論。

若引用符號學(semiotics)的"能指-所指"(signifier-signified)的視像結構，該說我們都沒有太多考慮下分了高低，視"所指"高於"能指"，即接觸"能指"（如照片）最終是為了"所指"（他所獵取的現實）-- "能指"所代表的意義。從"能指"到"所指"之間的操作與調解，就是我們常說的（藝術或傳播媒體對現實的）"再現"。問題在於我們都把"所指"理所當然的簡化為意義，尤其是社會文化意義。"意義"是詮釋的結果，也就是為甚麼"再現"可以是學術研究的物件。回到攝影與活動影像。在我看來，照片是"所指"也是"能指"。一個照片中出現的（"所指"）與拍照當時在鏡頭前的（"能指"），在"再現"上我稱之為零度或"極微"的調解，那是攝影（包括電影）跟別的創作媒體不同的地方。換句話說，照片與現實之間的"再現"特色就是近乎"直接的呈現"，主動詞不是"詮釋"，而是參照、潛入、凝視、或稱作"豐厚的描述"(thick description -- 綜合用班雅明Walter Benjamin和德勒茲Gilles Deleuze的說法)。這是我對蘇珊桑塔格認同的方面，對她的說法的進一步引申。作品的價值存在於別處而不在意義當中，那一方面是（科技所達至的）近乎"直接的呈現"和"豐厚的描述"的性格本身構成了媒體特殊(medium-specific)的美學狀態，是創作的核心，不必訴諸於外在的社會意義。

從現象學的角度看，一個留照、一段活動片斷，是某種特定思維結構的表彰，是造照片的人的內在時間意識(inner temporality)，轉化為帶"事件結構"(event structure)的創作體；但無論有多複雜，都在可窺可見之內，獨立於靠賴語境才有的分析。另一方面，按班雅明的"視覺的無意識"(the optical unconscious)的說法，一個照片所"攝取"的，因科技的能力，大大超逾拍照者自覺的意向，都是無意中的寶庫。

這樣說，一個照片其實是載著無窮的細節的，單是它的"表層"就夠我們"細看"，不必深層解讀。《看得見的聲音，聽得見的形像》依從這個想法，由各色各樣的照象和聲音"碎片"組成。它們各自發放魅力，獨立的任由我們看，也可以跟別的"碎片"並置綜合的看；因而"拼貼"法作為一個全盤組織的方法特別適切。可以說，於一個照片裏，意義終歸會回來，到這時候，所謂意義，就是另一個層次的事啦。

簡單來說，我希望我做的每一個作品，都讓有心的觀眾去經驗不同的看和聽的方法，張開我們潛在的視聽能力。

6，請您展望一下，您的作品以及類似您這樣在藝術方面的努力，會在多大程度上推動人們（包括香港人和中國其他地區人口乃至世界）認識和瞭解香港？藝術對認識歷史究竟有怎樣的作用？
[Me] 我不反對通俗、顧及大多數。如果我的想法有更多人分享固然很好。作為藝術創作者，我卻並不把這些條件變為我思考創作的前設。我會先從個人的研究、感觸和所關注的出發。我承認我的方向是比較對著知識份子走的。到目前為止，我算是幸運有知音。直至2010年七月，《看得見的聲音，聽得見的形像》已經或者已經確定將會面見觀眾的，已有四個國際電影節，包括一個女性電影節的創新視覺語言部分，兩個實驗電影錄影節，和一個另類紀錄片節。

7，完成整部作品《Meditations on a Minor History》，您預計需要多長的影像篇幅？是有一個清楚的預設還是邊做邊看（情況）？為什麼？能否透露一下這部作品的第二、三、四……部分是怎樣的？
[Me] 計畫中〈史耕、吃茶、翻舊賬〉("Meditations on a Minor History") 將有五個作品，但五個作品的內容則不斷在變動中。此刻第二個作品中在進行中，主要以1934年前後的香港中文報章的文字資料為素材，集中於那個時候的女性和男性專欄作家論述的"模範現代女性"的種種，化為帶有早期電影特色的擺設式的"活動"場景。第三和第四集都以遊走過去和現今的香港市區街道為本，創作亦已在展開中。 //

"State Change" - asserting presence in a mall with organized sounds

2008-04-03T13:27:00.005+08:00

State Change
...cellular automata in real time and space
...the reclamation of "privitized" public space

Time / Place:
March 1 (Saturday) / 11:30am - 12:30pm / Time Square, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
March 12 (Wednesday) / 7:30 - 8:30pm / Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong

Artists:
Hector RODRIGUEZ
Joao PAIVA

For direct link to video on YouTube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0nDAtG80r0

My view on the performative force of State Change:
Here is an example of a sound work (organized noise) which plays upon its performative force to break in and open up via inserting the individual bodies and the collective sound sheet into a space that is controversially public. State Change's cultural politics comprises of taking a scholarly concept -- the idea of cellular automata, and the intention to democratize this notion via a live performance -- and playing it out in the city's best known shopping malls. Its tactics lies in both the design of voice performance to illustrate cellular automata, as well as in bodily presence in a carefully chosen space and time. The occupation of space via organized sound and collective movement via the building's most mobile architectural installation (escalator) opened up the event for the accidental passers-by. The work's performative power therefore lies in turning passers-by into potential participants. The most beautiful moment of State Change, for me, as documented on the video, was when the security guards at Time Square started to step on the escalator and point his finger at every single person he passed by. In that moment, the security guard became part of the performance, adding one extra alien code to the 1 and 0. The security team's paranoia and scare was not planned, but was precisely a demonstration of the work's power to knock through the facade of friendliness, pleasure and prosperity to invoke the hidden discipline and order. The unplanned, unique in each of the two shopping malls, was the effect of the work's performative force.

A few views on "media archaeology"

2008-03-04T10:00:00.002+08:00

Eric KLUITENBERG describes “media archaeology” as more than just another branch of media theory and history. Researchers in this new area “choose to document the lineages of the media machines themselves.” [1]

Erkki HUHTAMO seeks to describe the multi-layered strata of media machineries to detect their occurrence, disappearance, and recurrence. In his view, media archaeology is “a way of studying such recurring cyclical phenomena which (re)appear and disappear and reappear over and over again in media history and somehow seem to transcend specific historical contexts.” [2]

Siegfried ZIELINSKIZ says, “I shall now launch a few probes into the strata of stories that we can conceive of as the history of the media in order to pick up signals from the butterfly effect, in a few localities at least, regarding both the hardware and the software of the audio-visual. I name this approach media archaeology, which in a pragmatic perspective means to dig out secret paths in history, which might help us to find our way into the future...” To Zielinski, digging up the past is closely tied to the effort to retain a utopian potential for contemporary and future media cultures. [3]

Thomas ELSAESSER, one of the “New Film History” theorists/historians who had revitalized the study of the cinema’s origin, argues for a new historiographic model, which he calls “media archaeology, to address the turn-of-the-century multimedia conjuncture.” In his view, the field of audio-visual experience needs to be re-mapped so that our understanding of the issue may overcome the “old-new” binary pair. The following terms require clarification:
Embodiment / Interface / Narrative / Diegesis / Non-entertainment uses of the audio-visual dispositive [4]

[1][2][3] Kluitenberg, Eric, ed. Book of Imaginary Media: excavating the dream of the ultimate communication medium. Rotterdam: NAi Pubishers, 2006. 12-14.
[4] Elsaesser, Thomas. "The New Film History as Media Archaeology," in CiNeMAS, vol. 14, n. 2-3: 75-117.

The missing links of automatism & the quest for systems (2)

2008-02-18T11:15:00.007+08:00

Dutch artist Humbert de Superville's treatise (around 1827?) provides a systematic description of abstract lines. To him, there are THREE directions of lines: the horizontal, the V-shaped, and the A-shaped, and to each he assigned specific colors and emotions.

The missing links of automatism & the quest for systems (1)

2008-02-18T10:15:00.018+08:00

In my visit to the "Turner-Hugo-Moreau: the Discovery of Abstraction" at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt last month, my interest was immediately drawn to the genealogy of automatism, the drive to allow chance to direct art-making in many different forms. Another aspect that caught my attention was attempts by art educators in the past 3 centuries to draw general principles in picture-making by abstracting famous painters' works into rational principles (or systems of rules). My intuition told me that there's a strong connection between chance-based automatist art-making and the notion of machine. Perhaps the affinity lies in the appeal to rationality, which Hector Rodiriguez describes as "random machines," a kind of machine that provokes randomness of the rule of its operation.

Here's a quick list of artists and works I spotted:

"Klecksografien"
= axially symmetric prints made by folding
The name comes from German "Klecks" which means blots.
18th-C techniques: had been used for ornamental purposes
19th-C: practised by artists and writers independently
Example: Justinus KERNER (1786-1862), Swabian writer and doctor

Alexander COZENS (1717-1786)
*English landscape painter and art teacher
*Systematically combined teaching composition with an aesthetic interest in "chance"
*Adopted the concept of the "blot" to describe the composition of a painting...
*He painted random, abstract-looking blots as a source of inspiration when preparing drafts for landscape painting.
*He treated that as new method of assisting the invention in drawing original compositions of landscape.

Gustave MOREAU
*A few of his sketches on one page were exhibited, something he developed for teaching...
*"Composition of Various Masters"...summarizes a few masters' principle style and approach of composition in line sketches

Frank HOWARD
*Three extracts are on display from his book COLOUR AS A MEANS OF ART: BEING AN ADAPTION OF THE EXPERIENCE OF PROFESSORS TO THE PRACTICE OF AMATEURS (London, 1838; private collection): "Turner's Principles," Ruben's Principles" and "Another of Titian's Principles"

Herman RORSCHACH (1884-1922), psychiatrist
*He published his EXPERIMENT IN INTERPRETING CHANCE FORMS in 1921. He used "klecksografien" for tests in personality and pathology studies.

Coffee stain images from the Coffee Stain Album [kafeeklecks album]
*The images were produced in Berlin around 1847-50 by Wilheim von Kauerbach and his assistants, Michael Echter and Julius Muhr...; published in 1880 as collotypes. Some doubted whether the stains were actually from coffee, but so far no one has taken theworks for a chemical test...

George SAND (1804-1876)
*She developed her own methods for producing chance iamges in color. They formed prints (1st layer, 2nd layer...) as end products.
*Images in her prints look like fossilized stone formations, which geologists called "dendrites" (streaks)

Mary MAGDALENE
*She is an example of painters in early 17th century working on "ruin marble"...
*The marbles used were usually quarried in Tuscany, which carried marks and were cut into slabs... The patterns found on the slabs resembled some kind of landscape. All artists needed to do was to add figures to these "pictorial stones." The "ruin marbles" were themselves the basis for painting.

Victor HUGO
*One leitmotif of his abstract drawings is "the chance shape."
*1830s...He would draw with any formal instruction...
*1834-35... He recorded his impressions of travels with lines and then cross-hatching.
*He then turned to imaginary landscape and the play with non-traditional drawing material (many of them everyday objects)...

Image 1: Justinus Kern's self portrait: Klecksografie (Selbstbildnis), 1857 (klecksografie and pen in brown)[owned by Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach]

Image 2: an example of "ruin marble" turned into landscape

For official article on the exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle-Frankfurt:
http://www.schirn-kunsthalle.de/data/news/1189519756_presse_turnerhugomoreau_engl_1.pdf

Wrapped time & space

2008-01-18T12:01:00.000+08:00

Another fine contemplation on time, space, city ruins and the insertion of subjectivities...
To play, to rest, to get lost, to find oneself...
A prototype of my student TAN Xue's MFA thesis, a work-in-progress:

WRAPPED (January, 2008)

Some thoughts on the work:
I appreciate the attempt to explore the soundscape...minimalist, which works well with the image...
I like the set-up of varied movements spinning off around a still centre. The piece has a very consistent mood and a distinct personality.

The piece deserves more contemplation on the actors' actions. A minor change in activity may result in a totally different world. It is very pastoral now, perhaps a bit too pastoral... There is room for more personal thoughts -- about the city, urban ruins, youthfulness, the loss of youth, the sense of loss, femininity, and many things that have impressed the maker as a human being and as an artist. I don't mean one should stuff a work with messages. I mean artistic sensibility always finds its root in our everyday experiences and existential presence, and they often find their way into our art work as small fragments, truncated, elliptical... even when the art work itself has other manifest purposes.

The musicality of the piece can also improve via more carefully considered orchestration of the different components, especially performance... Varied speed in different actions strung together or juxtaposed results in dynamics. Image composition and action can be thought of in terms of (dance) choreography.

Location as a STAGE... This is a great location. The skyline in the background deserves more attention rather than just being set aside as a significant background: it has a defining presence/function for the identity of the space chosen. Without that background, the location would only be an ordinary piece of disused land. In a way, the presence of the skyline of a bustling city enhances the foreground as "ruins." I could not help imagining/seeing minute changes in the background. Now I have the feeling that by chance or by mistake, some changes were accidentally captured in the harbor -- sometimes there's a ship, sometimes there's no ship...

The masking effect brings disruption to the surface of the image especially to the background. Defects can be used creatively.

The material form of a wandering flow, a prototype

2008-01-14T01:12:00.000+08:00

A project by MFA student CHEN Lei, which I supervise, seeks the interflow between the concrete and the abstract. Abolishing visual hierarchies, the impermance of perceptual states took over representation.

Here's the link to a prototype of the work-in-progress:

Some thoughts on the work:
...The attempt to blend the work via water and its flow would necessarily create tension with the pursuit for multiplicity in an intensified mode of attentiveness to images and to the world. The former suggests unity, the latter suggest clashes, conflicts, paradoxes, which could be closer to the philosophical exploration of cognition/perception... Even when the city is the same, we attend to different details differently. When we see the same thing twice, we see very different things.

I agree with the intention to stick to the "appearance" of things and stay away from hermeneutics or representational values. The idea of "energy" in the Chinese context is perplexing -- it is not about material, nor is it about emotions/feelings or ideas.

There is definitely the need to start thinking about sound -- NOT MUSIC! -- or to decide from the very beginning that there would be no sound. If it is decided that the piece is silent (-- silence is a form of sound!), then building in silence or unheard sound into the visual work should be a contemplated choice. The absence of sound should be a deliberate, active absence/presence.

The language of collage in stop motion: from a home-kitchen

2008-01-12T14:33:00.000+08:00

NEW SOUND WANTED...

An interesting home-made stop-motion animation, Butterfly Effects, created by a few of my current and former students because they want to carry on with creative activities... The beauty of free association... It invokes the langage of children which is a lost source of inspiration, a lost platform of creative approach we want to revisit as grown-ups.

This is meant to be an MV, but I recommend to watch it without sound to really understand its charm...

Venda Lee and "7" are the two main creators, assisted by other friends and family members who helped cutting the photo characters which are in bulk quantity. They spent over 7 months to complete the entire project.

"They are very selective members as we demanded high cutting skills HAHAHA. To me the hardest part of the project
is spending weekdays evenings in shooting..." said Venda.

Here’s a link to the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yd1uZfvk9Y

My quick remarks to Venda on the work:

"It is really cool work and highly imaginative. And honestly I think this work has much greater potential to be an experimental animation than for MV. For MV, there's a certain grammar you need to follow...MV works upon structure and repetition... This work may have to be re-cut for that purpose. However, this work is far beyond an MV that is subservient to the melody!!! I really think it would be good if the sound can be reconstructed as an autonomous soundscape. Give one more layer of sound and a different world, and you'll discover many great things you have already put into the work that you are not aware of..."

Jean Tinguely's writing machines

2008-01-10T00:34:00.000+08:00

(above) Jean Tinguely's "Meta-Matic No. 6" (1959) making random curve lines that gradually form a pattern that resembles a huge finger print of the thumb.

(below) This is a machine that keeps repeating the same pattern like someone signing continuously; Tim Lewis' "Auto-Dali Prosthetic" made 2000)

Met once again Jean Tinguely's works early January at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt's "Kunstmaschinen, Maschinenkunst" (roughly, "art-machine/machine-art). (There's always something exciting going on every time I visited Schirn. Also on was a show "Turner-Hugo-Moreau" which has one of the best display notes I've seen.)

The "machine' exhibition also featured works by more than a dozen of other artists such as Damien Hirst, Olafur Eliasson, Angela Bulloch, Rebecca Horn, Lia, and so on.

So much I'm obsessed with "writing machines," for me it is not so much the individual works that matter, but more the exhibition's general persuasion to the public. The introductory synopsis (curatorial statement) contends that even when machines are involved to do a lot of the job, it's the artist's ideas that make the machines work.

While being sympathetic with this intention (which would probably have worked with the Writing Machine Collective exhibition that I completed), the rhetoric reminds me of many mainstream US movies such as "Artificial Intelligence" (and many many -- emphasized), in which the narrative arguement is to state -- at the end of a whole film's showing off of science and technology -- that it is humanness that rules... If there's a more superior robot, it is one that has started to shed its machine quality and begin to feel and act humanly. I often feel frustrated with this kind of reductionist compromise. I am not anti-human (though I'm critical of of humanist rhetoric), but I think the courage to fully embrace machines and allow our hypothetical thinking to touch the limits of our imagination for the capability of machines is one form of moral courage. What What I am wondering is: do we always need to rush to settle back on the grand finale of human superiority in such a great hurry? Can we slow down, take more time to engage viewers/audience/visitors with the paths of automatic process and its components, the complexity of the evovlment, as well as the amazement it generates?

This leads to another level of discussion -- the role and meaning of "automatism" in arts. In the machine-arts/art-machines I saw in the exhibition, there is a distinction to draw between machines that work with the logic of mechanical repetition and reproduction of the same act in huge quantities, and those that follow a range of randomness with constraint, producing more or less unpredictable steps within a certain range of set patterns.

Many of the works shown in the exhibition were from the 1950s and 1960s, before computing art became a prominent category. These "machines' are about mechnics. "Assembly line," the metaphor for factory works, is the material form of a few works. Another session of the exhibition shows computer code-based programmed works. The first half is informative: the idea of randomness, "art at the push of a button" and other features we now attach to computer programmed works are now in place. For the second half, highlighting interactivity, the works are actually rather simple for those who write codes to generate graphics on the computer. Something is missing for me -- the kind of complexity I expect the computer would bring. It is surely the problem with the selection of works. The computing session does not really demonstrate the leap or the qualitative distinction between mechanical machines and digital (computing) machines.

an intercreative tool for composition and sound projection at Berlin's Tesla

2007-07-29T21:24:00.000+08:00

A project at Tesla's Open Studio this past May.

In an open studio, Daniel Teige and Martin Rumori are further developing their installation 16:9 into a universal tool for composition and sound projection. new content is created for the 60 channel matrix of loudspeakers with flexible interface control.
American composer Douglas Henderson, a guest of the DAAD berlin artists-in-residence program, presents a piece which he specially created with the matrix of speakers.

To listen to Daniel Teige's sound work:
http://www.dafoot.de/
Martin Rumori's projects
http://www.rumori.de/

***Tesla is berlin's laboratory for media art, for the exploration of the relationships between art and science, old and new, analog and digital media, for open and process-oriented artistic and technological research, for a dialog with current forms of artistic practice, and for the development of collaborations and networks. http://www.tesla-berlin.de/

See original posting at Tesla's web-site...

The work 16:9

A Collection of Chairs...

2007-07-29T10:41:00.001+08:00

Robert Watts, Chair (1962) @ MMK, Frankfurt

Walter De Maria, Pyramid Chair (1966) @ MMK (Museum of Modern Art), Frankfurt

Ai Weiwei, Fairytale (2007), DOCUMENTA 12, Kassel, Germany

A sound work in Kassel

2007-07-28T12:55:00.000+08:00

Here's a small clip of a sound work by Saadane Afif, titled Black Chords Plays Lyrics (2007), I saw at Documenta 12, Kassel, on June 24, 2007, afternoon.

Simple delay in sound to the approach of visitors to each guitar caught by the sensors...creating a chordal ensemble. I find the set up full of potentials, but thoughts given to sound and its richness are a bit preliminary. There's so much one can do this fine set up. I consider this a good work of interactivity, but lacking in sophistication of sound art.

Filling in the gaps...May to June

2007-07-22T12:33:00.000+08:00

I have been constantly traveling in the past two months...
10 days in Melbourne in May, 17 days in Germany and 12 days in Spain...

The posts in the coming days will be my new sound- and language-related collectibles...

Here's a rough video journal of a work, a machine-automated writing hand from the "Man-in-Machine" feature exhibition at ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany)

A writing machine:

"Ensoniment" - the Enlightenment for sound...the past made audible

2007-05-06T10:45:00.000+08:00

(my installation work / Kaohsiung, Dec 2006)

Addressing the question of why sound-reproduction technologies (such as the telephone, the phonograph, radio etc.) had to emerge in the late 19th century and not at some other time, Jonathan Sterne wrote, much in the light of a Foucauldian approach to the order of things, interrupting with his "beginnings":

"As there was an Enlightenment, so too was there an 'Ensoniment.' A series of conjunctures among ideas, instititutions, and practices rendered the world audible in new ways and valorized new constructs of hearing and listening. Between about 1750 and 1925, sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptulized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music. Hearing was reconstructed as a physiological process, a kind of receptivity and capacity based on physics, biology, and mechanics. Through techniques of listening, people harnessed, modified, and shaped their powers of auditory perception in the service of rationality..." (p. 2)

"Before the invention of sound-reproduction technologies, we are told, sound witheres away. It existed only as it went out of existence. Once telephones, phonographs, and radios populated our world, sound had lost a little of its ephemeral character. The voice became a little more unmoored from the body, and people's ears could take them into the past or across vast distances." (p. 1)

Source:
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: cultural origins of sound reproduction (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

Sound-writing collectibles, more (3): Chion on the Dolby(-like) sound of a few of my favorite films

2007-05-01T13:37:00.000+08:00

(MACBA, Barcelona, Jan 2007)

Francis Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979)... (sound design: Walter Murch)
"...the best-known sequence, the bombing of a Vietnamese Village with helicopter noise and explosions, is based on 'full' effects, but the film also has minimalist sequences in which all the loudspeakers 'suspend' their sound, like a great orchestra present but not playing, to allow a soloist sound to 'speak' -- for example, Marlon Brando's voice during the monologues at the end of the film."

Philip Kaufman's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988)... (sound design: Walter Murch)
"...the quality of the silence around the sounds - the shutter of the camera being used by Juliette Binoche; the music (from a sonata by Janacek); the discreet use of natural background noise; the rumble of a thunderstorm -- elicits by reflection a particular silence from the audience, underlining the density of the silence between the two women, which clearly has an erotic meaning."

Theo Angelopoulos' Ulysses' Gaze (1995)...
"...the film director played by Harvey Keitel arrives in Sarajevo during the time when the city is being shelled. The sound -- of explosions, of footsteps, of Keitel's voice -- is remote, stifled, but crystal clear in the setting of what we may call 'the silence of the loudspeakers', producing an extraordinary impression of life suspended."

Jacques Tati's Play Time (1967)...
"...a film made in 70mm with 6-track magnetic sound, ...Tati makes frequent use of minimal sound and maximum silence."

Ridley Scott's Blade Runer (1982)...

"...Blade Runner is one of the few recent films to have tried [the idea of an organic unity of all sound] and also to have achieved it, because of the material analogy between the electronic sound effects and Vangelis's synthesiser music, but also because of the rhythmic overall concept of the film, as a sort of rhythmic pyramid runing from the slow, deep-noted rhythms of the electronic 'drones' to rapid rhythms of high-pitched sounds, and finally because of the 'symphonic', organic configuration of Graham Hartstone's admirable sound mix."

Source:
Michel Chion, "The Silence of the Loudspeakers, or Why with Dolby Sound it is the Film That Listens to Us,"... (see the last blog entry)

Dolby-like sounds...the aesthetic of 'fullness' and 'sound density'...

2007-05-01T12:15:00.000+08:00

(Tokyo 2003 / 4 splits of a moment)

Michel Chion, in a lecture delivered at the Institut Français, London, on Thursday, April 16, 1998, portrayed the kind of sound pursued in the name of Dolby sound...

Here are some Dolby-like characteristics:
-magnetic sound quality
-broadened frequency range
-improved dynamics, with more extreme intensity contrasts and reduced background noise
-with two, three, four or six tracks instead of one
-juxtaposition without fusion
-overlaying without blending
-separation of sounds and dispersion across several tracks with gulf of silence between them
-interchangeable, associative terms: 'magnetic sound,' aesthetic of 'fullness,' 'sound density,' 'richness of sound'

The official beginning...
"When Dolby first appeared, launched to promote rock operas like Ken Russell's Tommy, in 1975, it was treated initially in the same way as CinemaScope: as a new acoustic space that had to be filled up to the greatest possible extent to make the best use of it."
Beginnings before 'the official beginning'...
Even before the mid-1970s, there had been films made with 'magnetic sound' giving Dolby-like characteristics: e.g. adventure films by David Lean, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, West Side Story, George Cukor's A Star is Born, George Lucas's THX-1138 etc.
The next steps...
The new, extra space created to be filled soon turned out to be a new sound space to empty, a new silence.
"This new silence, which reigns around isolated words or sounds, imparts a particular new intensity to certain scenes."
Dolby cinema has introduced a new expressive element:
"...the silence of the loudspeakers, accompanied by its reflection, the attentive silence of the audience. Any silence makes us feel exposed, as if it were laying bare our own listening, but also as if we were in the presence of a giant ear, tuned to our own slightest noises. We are no longer listening to the film, we are as it were being listened to by it as well."
The good side of Dolby sound...
precision of sound, richness in sharps and low tones, facilitates the need for sound of great harmonic richness, and for maximizing thin and rough sounds for their expressive and aesthetic effects
Its setback...
Dolby sound makes it difficult to realize the idea of an organic unity of all sounds, i.e., the dream of fusing different sound elements together to form the impression of all sounds belonging to a single universe...Dolby sound therefore also undermines the sense of rhythmic unity of creation which rests in the blending of sound, and not just overlaying.

(Compare the above to the earnest attempts of mono-cinema of early 1930s to 'achieve a continuum of dialogue, music and sound effects', often enhanced by keeping a more or less audible background noise to form a kind of 'basso continuo'.)
Dolby sound in cinema: the dialectics of history...
The effects of Dolby sound are "the qualitative and aesthetic consequences of quantitative technical change, all consequences of this type being necessarily unpredictable and dialectical... Dolby will be what people decide to make of it: we should not expect it to tell us how to proceed."

Source:
Michel Chion, "The Silence of the Loudspeakers, or Why With Dolby Sound it is the Film That Listens To Us," (trans. John Howe) in Larry Sider et al (eds.), Soundscape: The School of Sound Lectures 1998-2001 (London and New York: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 150-4.

Further Reference:

Michel Chion, "Quiet Revolution and Rigid Stagnation," (trans. Ben Brewster) in one of the issues of Les Cahiers du Cinéma, on other effects stemming from Dolby sound.

Monologue for a Broadcast Voice: the Future of Radio Art

2007-04-29T10:54:00.000+08:00

(a view of the Micro Narrative: Invented Time & Space exhibition I curated, April 2006)

Radiodays was a temporary radio station.

Radiodays was a 26-day live events broadcasted from De Appel Stichting in Amsterdam, April 1st - April 30th, 2005.
http://www.radiodays.org/home.php

For sample hearing, take, for example, Day 22, April 26, 2005:
http://www.radiodays.org/program.php?day=26

The following is an extract from a rewritten version of the monologue broadcast in the shopping centre "De Kalvertoren" in Amsterdam on Day 23, April 27, 2005, between 4.45 and 5.45pm in the Radiodays art project of the Curatorial Training Programme of Foundation De Appel. Several ghetto blasters hidden in plastic bags received the broadcast voice, which was dispersed over the homogenous pedestrian zone. New lines and spaces indicate pauses:

Hi, you do not know me, but I am talking to you.
I hope you don't mind.
You don't see me. But I am here.
Not only here. But here and there. And here.
Who I am?
Sorry, I didn't introduce myself. I am a solitary voice.
Whose voice? Nobody's voice.
We will never meet, but I will talk and you can listen, if you want to.
......
Listen, listen I cannot hear you. Listen to my radio voice and answer as you like.
Some tell you radio is about communication, mass communication.
Can you hear my voice?
I am radio talking to you, but this is not communication.
.....
Sometimes it is not necessary to communicate.
Radio as a means of dissemination does not care about the borderline between art and social life. Considered as an apparatus of distribution, radio intervenes in everyday situations.
You might think: radio an intervention in everyday situations? How come?
What does this kind of intervention mean?
Is it an intervention when I turn on the radio in my car? Or in my kitchen?
I suppose, you wouldn't agree that radio is intervening in your everyday life.
I propose a simple test:
When you are at home again, wait a moment listening.
Listen if your neighbours are at home.
Listen to the sound of your fridge.
Listen to the distant noises of the streets.
Walk through your flat listening.
Listen as long as it is necessary to differentiate all the tones that surround you.
Then please turn on your radio....
Change the frequency after some time.
Listen to the noise of the radio...
......
After a minute or so turn the radio off. Listen again.
How would you describe the difference?
I would say, as I said: radio intervenes in everyday situations.
It produces a difference, its sonic waves are changing the space.
.....
For the full text, refer to:
LIGNA, "The Future of Radio Art: a Monologue for a Broadcast voice," in Open Sound: Sound in Art and Culture (journal on art and the public domain), 2005/no. 9, pp. 110-9.

Writing sounds (2)...audible silence

2007-04-24T11:45:00.000+08:00

[fleeting sounds and images / 2003 / a forgotten place]

Descriptive writings on sounds fascinate me. Here's another of my collectibles.

"Sitting quietly in never-never land, I am listening to summer fleas jump off my small female cat on to the polished wood floor. Outside, starlings are squabbling in the fig tree and from behind me I can hear swifts wheeling over rooftops. An ambulance siren, full panic mode, passes from behind the left centre of my head to starboard front. Next door, the neighbours are screaming -- "...fuck you...I didn't...get out that door..." -- but I tune that out. The ambient hum of night air and low frequency motor vhehicle drone merges wtih insect hum called back from the 1970s, a country garden somewhere,high summer in the afternoon. The snow has settled. I can smell woodsmoke. Looking for fires I open the front door, peer out into the shining dark and hear stillness. Not country stillness but urban shutdown. So tranquil.
Truthfully, I am lying in intensive care. Wired, plugged and electronically connected, I have glided from coma into a sonic simulation of past, andpassed, life. As befits an altered state, the memories have been superimposed, stripped of context, conflated from seasons, times, eras, moments, even fictions, into a concentrated essence of my existence in the sound-world.
These sounds reconnect me to a world from which I had disengaged. Sound pleaces us in the real universe..."

Source:
David Toop, Ocean of Sound: aether talk, ambient sound and imaginary worlds (Serpent's Tail, 1995), p. 1.

s i l e n c e

2007-04-24T11:38:00.000+08:00

Silence is volume.

(Berlin, June 2006)

Writing sounds...(1)

2007-04-22T21:09:00.000+08:00

(a scene in Tsimshatsui, west of of Star Ferry, in the 1930s, Hong Kong, from my photo research)

This image is included in the official manuscript of my Ph.D. thesis on p. 610 with the following caption:

"Photo 37 - At the Kowloon Wharf: train coaches (a dining-parlor-car) was being unloaded and rolled down a large metal ramp from the ship [Source: Clark's Family Album, 1934-7]" (photo copy of archived object from the Hong Kong Museum of History's reference library)
======

I'm fascinated with descriptive writings on sound. Here is one by Mel Gordon:

"The concept of noise ws a by-product of the Industrial Revolation. Throughout the jerry-built and already shabby proletarian living quarters and workplaces of Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, there was a constant din of construction and pounding, of the shrieking of metal sheets being cut and the endless thump of press machinery, of ear-splitting blasts from huge steam whistles, sirens, and electric bells that beckoned and dismissed shifts of first-generation urbanized laborers from their unending and repetitive days. The normal sounds of rural life -- the bleating of domesticated animals, the chirping of birds and insects, the ping of hand-held tools shaping wood and stone -- whether pleasant or not, were all recognizable. Here, however, the cacophony of sounds in the nineteenth-century street, factory shop, and mine -- seemingly random and meaningless -- could not be easily isolated or identified. They became novel and potentially dangerous instrusions on the overworked human kind."

Source:
Mel Gordeon, "Songs from the Museum of the Future: Russian Sound Creation (1910-1930)," in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge: MIT, 1992), pp. 197-8; selected as an opening quote in Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (eds.), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (New York, London: Continuum, 2006), p. 3.

What is new media? - one view

2007-04-22T12:00:00.000+08:00

(a view from Micro-Narratives: Invented Time & Space (April 2006), a video installation exhibition I curated with Ivy Fung, at Too Art Gallery, the Hong Kong Arts Centre)

Rick Voithofer suggests one should AVOID the reductive "futurological tropes" in understanding new media, which looks at innovations as "supercession" of their predecessors, or upholds newer media's better capacity to mediate reality, i.e. for their augmented "transparency."
Here's what he recommends, and I summarize:
(1) the "interval" position:
"The term new media is employed to describe a historical period in which an emerging medium, such as virtual reality, is not yet accepted as natural."
As a form of "interval," the emerging medium is bound to "inspire diverse technotexts, productions that are self-conscious about their own materiality."
As a moment of becoming (my wordings), a so-called new medium provokes within society queries and questionings for existing media for the myths and conventions that have grown out of them.
An emerging medium also draws interested parties to together, leading to the formation of new interpretive communities seeking to define new semiotic systems, thus also serious enquiries to construct normative epistemologies of the new medium.
In such an "interval," it is likely that an old medium may seek for new functions as well.
(2) the "convergence" thesis: differences by production and reception modes
Voithofer has a detailed description of what occurs to him to be "new media" and how they work differently from the so-called traditional media:
"I contrast new media with more established media in terms of changes in production and reception that are occurring through convergence of text, video, film, animation, audio, photographs, and 2D and 3D graphics that are combined (i.e., autored, linked), stored (i.e., organized, manually and automatically indexed), and presented (i.e., searched, retrieved, and displayed through a graphical interface or metaphor) on some form of video onitor (e.g., personal computer, laptop, personal digital assistant, cellular phone) and that are transferred over distributed wired and wireless electronic netweorks. "

Reading Voithofer, I've picked out a few areas of focus for research:
(1) the adoption and diffusion processes of new media
This is more complex than it looks. This implies re-configuring existing paradigms in reception and consumption studies to cover the complex dialectics of multiple players at the multiple ends of adoption and diffusion.
(2) how the adoption and diffusion processes are integrated within existing historical trajectories of inquiry
(3) how new media create new social and cultural arcs.
To this list, I want to add two:
(4) ethnography of everyday users, with special attention to how a particular moment of usage is also a site of convergence of many disciplines, discourses and intentions, and how each particular moment of usage may differ vastly from another moment of the same medium.
(5) to map multiple genealogies for the so-called "emerging" media. (Yes, my position is each "new medium" always has many lines of ancestry.)

Source:
Rick Voithofer. (2005). "Designing New Media Education Research: the Materiality of Data, Representation, and Dissemination," Educational Researcher vol. 34, No. 9 (December 2005). Pp. 3-14.
Related references:
Duguid, P. (1996). Material matters: The past and futurology of the book. In G. Nunberg (ed.), The future of the book (pp. 63-102). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gitelman, L., & Pingree, G. B. (2003). What's new about new media? In L. Gitelman & G. B. Pingree (eds.), New Media, 1740-1915 (pp. xi-xxii). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Thorburn, D., & Jenks, H. (2003). Towards an aesthetics of transition. In D. Thorburn & H. Jenks (eds.), Rethinking media change: The aesthetics of transition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Must We Only Contemplate?

2007-04-20T21:49:00.001+08:00

(above) The Writing Machine Collective 2nd edition at 1a Space

(a forgotten moment in Tokyo)

An article on a recent art exhibition on code-based programmed works has just come out in 1a Space's March 2007 newsletter:

Here's the link to the English version of the article I wrote with Janice Y.L. Leung,

"Must We Only Contemplate? The political ideals of the 'Writing Machine Collective 2nd edition'":

http://www.oneaspace.org.hk/newsletter/wm.htm

details of the exhibition [...... ]

R. Murray Schafer's taxonomy of sounds: continuous ethnography required

2007-04-12T03:16:00.000+08:00

(a deliberately documented accident from my photographic activities / Tokyo 2003 )

Does it have a place to go under Schafer's classification?

Schafer's classification of "sound objects":

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS

[on the x-axis] attack / body / decay

[on the y-axis] duration / frequency / dynamics / mass and gain (borrowed from Pierre Schaeffer) / internal fluctuations

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO REFERENTIAL ASPECTS

1. Natural Sounds

a. sounds of creation

b. sounds of apocalypse

c. sounds of water

d. sounds of air

e. sounds of earth

f. sounds of fire

g. sounds of birds

h. sounds of animals

i. sounds of insects

j. sounds of fish and sea creatures

k. sounds of seasons

2. Human sounds

a. sounds of the voice

b. sounds of the body

c. sounds of clothing

3. Sounds and society

a. general description of rural soundscape

b. town soundscapes

c. city soundscapes

d. maritime soundscapes

e. domestic soundscapes

f. sounds of trades, professions and livelihoods

g. sounds of factories and officess

h. sounds of entertainment

i. music

j. ceremonies and festivals

k. parks and gardens

l. religious festivals

4. Mechanical Sounds

a. machines

b. industrial and factory equipment

c. transportation machines

d. warfare machinese

e. trains and trolleys

f. internal combustion engines

g. aircraft

h. construction and demolition equipment

i. mechanical tools

j. ventilations and air-conditioners

k. instruments of war and destruction

l. farm machinery

5. Quiet and Silence

6. Sounds as Indicators

a. bells and gongs

b. horns and whistles

c. sounds of time

d. telephones

e. warning systems

f. signals of pleasure

g. indicators of future occurrences

CLASSIFICATION ACCORDING TO AESTHETIC QUALITIES

(concerned with the contrast between the beautiful and the ugly, most and least favorite etc.)

(has to do with imagination and perception)

The following are observed to be obviously influencing likes and dislikes:

climate and geography / degree of proximity to the elements, e.g. animal sounds / cultural differnces

SOUND CONTEXTS

1. Acoustics [what sounds are: physicist, engineer]

2. Psychoacoustics [how they are perceived: physiologist, psychologist]

3. Semantics [what they mean: linguist, communicator]

4. Aesthetics [If they appeal: poet, composer]

...of a particular sample sound.

[source: R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Destiny Book, 1977, 1994), chapter 9 "Classification"]

A brief personal note:

Building a taxonomy of sounds is crucial to the development of languages to engage in and study the world of sounds, analytically and critically, a project to which Schafer and Schaeffer have both devoted themselves. For me, the world of sounds is ever-expanding and refineable. Not only is classification an act of positive knowledge production, but it also asserts an angle, embodies an argument, and articulates a certain discourse with preferences. Furthermore, naming, and breaking down categories into smaller parts, are critical acts of marking differences to allow the unspeakable to enter our consciousness via the activity of language. Ethnography, in this sense, is crucial to the maturing of the discipline of sound art. Open up, break down, find the words, create new expressions to effectuate new discussion... Based on the above beliefs, I have spent a lot of time in the sound art course I taught last year to set students to collect sounds, listen to album nunbers, to invent their own descriptive categories to capture what has been kept undefinable, and any qualities that escape the proper language of music.

Sol LeWitt, artist of generative conceptual works, dies at 78

2007-04-09T11:47:00.000+08:00

(my most favorite generative work by Sol LeWitt)

<-- "Modular Open Cube" (Sol LeWitt, 1996)

Read "Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism, Dies at 78," article in New York Times...

I make my point again!

2007-04-08T11:57:00.000+08:00

(chair series again / Barcelona again, by Linda)

I have made my point

I make it again

Now you get the point.

(A poem by Vito Hannibal Acconci, 1967)

Light My Voice (Like a Rewriting Machine Part 1) - Vito Acconci

2007-04-06T20:44:00.000+08:00

[a series of chairs outdoor inside MACBA, Barcelona, January 2007, photo by Linda]

The quotes in the following on and by Vito Acconci's creative works provoke in me some inarticulable, conflicting views on the recent trend of artists being invited to fill up shopping malls and public spaces with their works in Hong Kong. I have been invited to at least two government-run "public art" competitions in which young artists are openly invited and encouraged to participate in party-line propaganda, to produce eulogies for our heavily marred urban space. In one to which I was not invited, competition specs demand the organizing body's full ownership of the artists' works if selected, plus the rights to alter and edit those works!...What is public art really?

[From: Vito Hannibal Acconci Studio (MACBA, 2004), p. 358]...

Just Remember...

LIFE ON THE EDGE: MARGINALITY AS THE CENTER OF PUBLIC ART. Inside the gallery/museum, the artist functions as the center of a particular system; once outside that system, the artist is lost between worlds -- the artist's position, in our culture, is marginal. The public artist can turn that marginality to his/her advantage. The public artist is forced, physically, off to the side; the public artist is asked to deal not with the buildings but with the sidewalk, not with the road but with the benches at the side of the road, not with the city, but with the bridges from city to city. Outside and in between centers, the public artist is under cover: public art functions, literally as a marginal note: it can comment on, and contradict, the main body of the text of a culture. -- Vito Acconic

Once outside that system...

People act by giving their own telling and interpretations of life on both sides of power: both in dominance and in resistance. In short, the dominant view of things is never the only one, and the project of listening for alternative discourses is for current researchers every bit as basic to a penetrating social analysis as are the issues which anthropologists and artists treated as of central importance in the past. Listening to alternative discourses may seem more fragmented and fragmenting than synthesizing the dominant text of a culture, but it is a valid project. In fact, in supplying what has been left out, it offers a necessary rectification of much that was done perhaps too narrowly in the past. Not only that, but anthropology itself has to avoid becoming the silencer of resistance discourses and the promoter or creator of dominance discourse. So the recommendation here is to have more voices and fewer frozen ethnographic protraits. -- Wisdom's voice

I'm a guerrilla fighter, not an artist. This is not a show, but a hit-and-run attack. That isn't a gallery: it's a combat zone... I can get to know the terrain here: how to enter, where to hide, the way to escape... I am out in the open now, I will meet the enemy and disappear... The trick is: keep moving, give the enemy no rest... I have to widen my territory... I have to set up a new base... I have to take another ground... Artist's voice

Who Is Singing? - Donald Tsang, can you hear me? 誰在唱歌？…曾特首，你聽見我嗎？

2007-04-05T16:33:00.000+08:00

This a is a simple sound work I did with Lawrence C.Y. CHOI 蔡智揚 for the physical exhibition of The Writing Machine Collective 2nd edition (Hong Kong), presented Jan 13 - Feb 8 (2007) at 1a (art space) at the Cattle Depot...

Housed in a simple paper altar as an obvious metaphor for futile supplication, the work translates messages visitors wrote to Hong Kong's Executive Chief Mr. Donald Tsang into chants on the spot.

Here's a documentation of some of the messages left during the exhibition period. Click the individual message to listen to the chants created.

http://www.invisibilis.com/wm/

Official brief of the work:

http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/WMCe2/artists.html

Background, concept and cultural thinking behind the work.

http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/WMCe2/work_whoissinging.html

Tsang has just been "re-elected" Hong Kong's Executive Chief over a week ago by a 800-member "mini" electoral circle. When Tsang thanked "his people" in tears at the announcement of his victory, where were most of the 8 million HK citizens who did not vote? Was he having a hallucination?

Engageable Soundscape

2007-04-02T22:52:00.000+08:00

[video stills from Linda's work]

"At the end of the 1960s R. Murray Schafer introduced the term 'soundscape.' ...Schafer constructs a sound environment as one would a musical composition -- a masterpiece of nature. In this sense, the term soundscaple... refers to what is perceptible as an aesthetic unit in a sound milieu... 'We need to clear our ears' wrote Schafer. This didactic approach concerned with quality of listening across civilizations was largely restated under the theme of acoustic communication by Barry Truax in 1984...

"We lack the generic concepts to describe and design all perceptible sound forms of the environment, be they noisy stimuli, musical sounds, or any other sounds. The concept of the soundscape seems too broad and blurred, while the sound object seems too elementary (in terms of levels of organization), to allow us to work comfortably both at the scale of everyday behaviour and at the scale of architectural and urban spaces. To use a linguistic analogy, the soundscape corresponds to the whole structure of a text, while the sound object corresponds to the first level of composition: words and syntagmas. We are short of descriptive tools to work at an intermediary level, that of sentence grammar or...the level of a code defining possible configurations between the three terms to consider in our observation: acoustical sources, inhabited space, and the linked pair of sound perception and sound action."

Source: Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue (eds), Sonic Experience: a Guide to Everyday Sounds (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006) pp. 7-8.

Looking for sound - desparately

2007-04-01T18:35:00.000+08:00

Looking for the sound for this unknown, forgotten place and moment...I found:

"Orchestrate the singing.

Make a symphony of overlapping slow-down, speed-up singing. Run singing backward."

-- William S. Burroughs, My Education: a Book of Dreams (Penguin, 1995), p. 91

Sound Flushing

2007-03-31T11:22:00.000+08:00

(an unknown moment inside the Victoria Prison, Central, Hong Kong, November 2006 / Linda)

3 excerpts from my essay, "Wither the walker goes: Spatial Practices and Negative Poetics in 1990s Chinese Urban Cinema":

"...Jia's cinematic spatial practice [in his film Xiao Wu] combines a soundtrack that seems to shower from above -- propaganda messages calling for a crime-free town are broadcast over the airwaves in every corner of the city -- with a unique assemblage of places and locations of either dilapidation, demolition, construction, and much that is in-between..." (p. 220)

"...the town [in Zhang Ming's In Expectation] is a map of unconsummated desires, on which Zhang's analytical camera work traces and locates repressed yearnings drifting through in futility. Romantic encounters vaporize. The air is moist, pregnant with trapped emotions. Showers come and go; thunderclouds are just behing the hill, about to roar and roll over any moment. Everyday life seems to be purposeless and the course of events inexplicable. Human sexual agitations take on a different language -- of the balance sheets in accounting, of loss and gain, and of reward and punishment." (p. 221)

"[Lou Ye's] Suzhou River opens with a ten-minute monologue in voice-over accompanying images of the Suzhou River and its blanks in Shanghai. The sequence sets up the motif of drifting, literally. The camera work pans left and right with jump cuts here and there, resembling a drifter's random visual scanning of his or her surroundings. Images flick intermittently to parallel the sound of the camera shutter of the person who is delivering the monologue. The text-image relation is meant to remind us that a photograph is an open text, and that, in the words of Mary Price, 'photographs without appropriate descriptive words are deprived and weakened' for the interpreter..." (p. 221)

From: ZHANG Zhen (ed.), THE URBAN GENERATION: CHINESE CINEMA AND SOCIETY AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY (Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 205-237.

THE URBAN GENERATION

(book cover)

Jo Spence and "Phototherapy" - 2

2007-03-29T23:48:00.000+08:00

(Las Palmas, Dec 24, 2006 / Linda)

A railway that had been removed has been put back and preserved under thick glass panels to walk on. Looking at the past/present, preserving the present, recalling the past, staring at the inaccessible past via the material present...
I was photographing the past-present.

"Ways in which I have used the camera...include taking naturalistic photographs as things happened to me and around me (what is called documentary photography); staging things specially for the camera; using old personal photographs as a starting point and re-investigating what they mean. The whole technique depends upon expecting photographs to help us to ask questions, rather than supplying answers. Using this framework for photography it is possible to transform our imaginary view of the world, whilst working towards trying to change it socially and economically.
"As a newly emergent middle-calss woman who is involved directly with ongoing cultural and ideological struggles rather than economic ones, ...I feel it is still most useful that my time and efforts be deployed within the institutions of education and the media. I believe that I can best intervene in the place in which I find myself, not look outside (as a photographer) to 'help' others."

--Jo Spence, "The Picture of Health? - Part 1," in Jo Spence: Beyond the Perfect Image. Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, October 2005), pp. 268.

Jo Spence: Beyond the Perfect Image. Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism

(book cover)

Jo Spence and "Phototherapy" - 1

2007-03-28T08:33:00.000+08:00

(automatic mind-mapping on white board in my Creative Writing Workshop, fall 2005)

"I am continually asked `What is photo therapy?' It means, quite literally, using photography to heal ourselves. As part of my health project I have been working on my stress and anxiety levels, reviewing my life in general and trying to understand the part that psychic life (phantasy/fantasy) plays in my wellbeing, or otherwise...

"Photo therapy should be seen within the broader framework of psychoanalysis and its application to the photography of family life, but should always take account of the possibility of active change. We drew upon techniques learned together from co-counselling, psychodrama, and a technique called `reframing.'

Using this technique, Rosy and I began to work together to give ourselves (and each other) permission to display `new' visual selves to the camera. In the course of this work we amply demonstrated to ourselves that there is no single self, but many fragmented selves, each vying for conscious expression, many never acknowledged. We created a range of portraits which were the visual embodiment of our fragmented selves, which still continue to emerge every time we meet to have a photo therapy session. We have found ways of having a dialogue with ourselves about the conflicts and constraints of marriage, or of health education, ageing, class economics and oppression for us as women, and working 'against the grain' around dominant definitions of sexuality and love."

--Jo Spence, "The Picture of Health? - Part 1," in Jo Spence: Beyond the Perfect Image. Photography, Subjectivity, Antagonism (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona, October 2005), pp. 267-8.

Further reference:

Jo Spence 1934-1992

http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/studentwebs/session1/group54/Jospence.htm

http://hosted.aware.easynet.co.uk/jospence/jo6.htm

Spatializing sound

2007-03-28T00:28:00.000+08:00

(my Holga accident on a forgotten day)

Please click and play Erratum Musical (for 3 voices) (1934) by Marcel Duchamp (8 min. 6 sec.)

http://www.ubu.com/sound/duchamp01.html

In composing this piece, Duchamp made three sets of 25 cards, one for each voice, with a single note per card. Each set of cards was mixed in a hat; he then drew out the cards from the hat one at a time and wrote down the series of notes indicated by the order in which they were drawn... (from "The Music of Marcel Duchamp" by Petr Kotik)

To read the full essay, visit:

http://www.ubu.com/papers/kotik.html

Then compare the 3-voice version with: Erratum Musical: 7 variations on a Draw of 88 Notes performed by Stephane Ginsburgh, performed in 2001

Each note on a given keyboard is played only once, the order of the notes is determined by random draw, and there are no instructions for how the notes are to be played. A Dadaist joke? On the contrary, it yields intricate music and a primer for discussing how sound relates to emotion. In the first few minutes of this composition, each note is like the period at the end of the sentence--individual and straightforward. This succinct presentation lacks an emotional pull, as if pianist Stephane Ginsburgh is testing the keys rather than playing them. As Erratum Musical unfolds, however, the duration of the notes lengthens, introducing a fragile uneasiness. It continues with subtle manipulations of tempo and acoustic properties. Keys are struck with a feathery touch, making the notes quiver at the edge of emotional and audible perception--only to rush back to the foreground with a spiteful presence as Ginsburgh pounces on the keyboard with a seemingly smug resolution.

click here to listen to a clip and read more

What can a woman do with a camera?

2007-03-28T00:11:00.000+08:00

(Tokyo - Ginza, my Lomo-eye-witness on the spot)

WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR INVISIBILITY

"As a rebellion against family politics and media bias, I recommend the camera. That's why I take it with me to events that get little press coverage -- particularly when trouble-free...

"My own rebellion lies in deciding to expand the range of issues consciously addressed with camera and journal beyond the personal and private to include chronicling of events, recording opinions shared, accounting for feelings and emotions aroused. This is my way of insisting on a continuing currency of ideas and ideals ignored as irrelevant to the agendas of politics, or different from those I was encouraged to embrace by influential and powerful sources..."

Sylvia Ayling, "We have nothing to lose but our invisibility," in Jo Spence & Joan Solomon (eds.), What Can A Woman Do with a Camera? - Photography for Women (Scarlet Press, 1995; funded by the Arts Council of England), p. 127, 132.

When did it last rain?...Internal sound given concrete form

2007-03-25T14:02:00.000+08:00

Taipei: outside Eslite, Hsin Yee district, one year ago / Linda -

surrealism on the street...Is raining sound? concrete sound? found sound? a source of sound? a sound event? or "I" suddenly tuned to conscious hearing?

"Surrealism was accutely aware of its history an pre-history... Over the long course of their movement, the Surrealists acted as archeologists of the intellect, unearthing and revitalizing theories and ideas that had long since been forgotten or discarded but that still held the potential for significant revolution.

"Such was the case with Surrealist sound theory. Sound played an important part in the initial movement of Surrealism, when the word was used almost exclusively within theatrical productionss and was still considered the intellectual property of Apollinaire... Reacting to the excesses of Paris Dada, the Surrealist movement turned to ideas voiced by Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio shortly before the First World War. These became the basis for most Surrealist music theory... On the personal level, sound became the primary focus of the Surrealist movement, for the Surrealists made it their purpose to give concrete form to internal sound -- sound, they would argue, that might only be heard in silence."

Keywords:

NOISE, VOCAL QUIRKS, VOCAL & INSTRUMENTAL SOUND (EFFECTS), SING-ALONG (OF THE AUDIENCE), AUDIENCE RESPONSE IN "AUDIENCE THEATRE", SOUND POEM, SOIRÉE, TONAL COMPOSITION SUBJECT TO CHANCE OPERATION, DISSONANCE, INCONGRUITY, FURNITURE MUSIC (ERIK SATIE'S "MUSIQUE D'AMEUBLEMENT"), "NO MUSIC" (GIORGIO DE CHIRICO), "NEW MUSIC" (ALBERTO SAVINIO), AUTOMATIC SOUND, SILENCE, SURREAL OPERA

[SOURCE: Christopher Schiff, "Banging on the Windowpane: sound in early surrealism," in Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn & Gregory Whitehead (MIT Press, 1992), p. 139-77.]

variation by a minor angle in many directions

2007-03-23T18:46:00.000+08:00

(MACBA, Barcelona, December 2006 / an installation work by Juan Muñoz / photo & collage by Linda)...
a local nightmare in a foreign place...the familiar in the unfamiliar, or vice versa...

Absolute Silence

2007-03-23T11:30:00.000+08:00

(Festival Walk, Jan 2007 / Linda: a sudden impulse)

To John Cage, silence is positively (-- he would say "negatively" --) sound we can listen to, attentively.

In my words, silence is impossible, only imaginable, perhaps a productive category for a hearing exercise, for a different sort of hearing, perceivable but not documentable, unstructured and vastly expansive, and yet translatable via an invented notation system.

I still wonder what silence is like. Is death that only moment?

Impervious to Language

2007-03-21T10:04:00.000+08:00

(on-the-spot in Las Palmas, Spain, Dec 26, 2006 / Linda: I could almost hear, but not quite...)

The object-universe, like the unconscious dimension of history, is in fact impervious to language. … Our apprehension of it, then, is strictly filtered through systems of knowledge and belief that are perforce circumstantial and local but continually present and always renewed through representation. Yet the real world is not merely a figment of language. The world of objects is there, terribly `real’ in resisting human modification.
- Tom Conley
[Tom Conley, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. xvi.]

The Sound of Time...Clocks and more (R. Murray Schaefer)

2007-03-19T19:57:00.000+08:00

(early in the morning, Central, spring, 2003 / Linda)

"It was during the fourteenth century that the church bell was wedded to a technical invention of great significance for European civilization: the mechanical clock. Together they became the most inescapable signals of the soundscape, for like the church bell, and with even more merciless puntuality, the clock measures the passing of time audibly. In this way it differs from all previous means of telling time -- water clocks, sand clocks and sundials -- which were silent. ... The clock bell had a great advantage over the clock dial, for to see the dial one must face it, while the bell sends the sounds of time rolling out uniformly in all directions. ... The association of clocks and church bells was by no means fortuitous ; for Christianity provided the rectilinear idea of the concept of time as progress, albeit spiritual progress... Already in the seventh century it was decreed in a bullof Pope Sabinianus that the monastary bells should be rung seven times each day, and these punctuation points became known as the canonical hours. Time is always running out in the Christian system and the clock bell punctuates this fact. ... Clocks are centripetal sounds, they unify and regulate the community. But they are not the only centripetal sounds. From early times in agricultural territories, the mill was a prominent insitution at the center of town life, and its sound was as familiar as the voices of the inhabitants themselves. ... Another sound that continued all day within earshot of most of the residents of the early town was the blacksmith. "

[from R. Murray Schaefer, The Sounscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books, 1994), pp. 55-58]

Warblers, goldfinches, chaffinches, larks, wood pigeons, Laurent Schwartz and humans: no particular language...a hidden case of emergence & complexity

2007-03-19T11:36:00.000+08:00

http://www.maa.org/reviews/grappling.html Photo of Laurent Schwartz by Paul Halmos

The world of birds has been totally alien to me, a city girl turned city woman. Reading the biographical account of French mathematician Laurent Schwartz’s on life in his family house, I suddenly found myself in the centre of a totally fresh audio field. There I was, immersed in a finely layered blanket of bird-sounds, in the village of Autouillet, or along the road to La Haye-Frogeay, outside Paris, in the late 1920s… There, I made connections between the world of language, sound, and my readings on emergence, chaos, and complexity theories.

Laurent-Moïse Schwartz (5 March 1915 in Paris – 4 July 2002 in Paris)
The following is from his biography A Mathematician Grappling with His Century (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2001), pp. 10-11.

"When we were young...Warblers are not timid and didn't hesitate to approach us. A couple of wood pigeons used to fly around the garden in front of the house; we clearly heard the song of the male. The baby male leanrs the song of the species in the nest, by listening to his father. If he's born in the spring, he won't begin to sing before the following year, and then he'll seek out the song from somewhere in his memory. His first tries are somewhat deformed,and it's only after some weeks, progressively, that he will have completely reconstituted the song as it should be. In the spring, I've often heard these first tries of the wood pigeon. The young female also hears her father's song, and she'll know how to identify companions of her species.
"However -- birds can sometimes be fooled! If you let a couple of goldfinches bring up a young chaffinch, it will sing the goldfinch song as an adult. If you then let that bird bring up young chaffinches, it will teach them goldfinch and so on. It seems as though birds,like humans, are genetically predestined to learn a languguage, but not any particular language. Actually, things aren't really that simple. Successive generations of chaffinches brought up as goldfinches sing a song which is progressively less goldfinch and more chaffinch. Furthermore, in nature these birds are surrounded by other chaffinches and hear their song. After several generations, their song becomes pure chaffinch. Anyway, there exist several different chaffinch dialects from different regions. And like humans, even two chaffinches from the same place don't have the same voice. Among the innumerable chaffinches living in a given place, each female can immediately identify her male, and to mark their territories, they must be able to distinguish each other by voice. There is more.... Chaffinches living over a region of thousands of square kilometers, from north to south and east to west, sing the same song apart from differences of [human] dialect. This has been going on for tens of thousands of years. It's hardly possible to imagine such immobility without some genetic predetermination. The song of each species of bird, even if it is genetically fixed, can still be modified by special circumstances.
"The male city pigeon, the rock pigeon, emits only a little rolling one-syllable coo, whereas the wood pigeon develops a very interesting song on five syllables. It understands three or four sequences of five syllables of the following form: too-too-too-too / too-too-too-too-too / too-too-too-too-too / too.
Only the middle words has five syllables, the first one has four and the last one only one. From the mathematical point of view, they ought perhaps to be organized differently:
too-too-too-too -- too / too-too-too-too -- too / too-too-too-too -- too.

Remembering Theresa Hak Kyung CHA (1951-1982)

2007-03-18T11:15:00.000+08:00

I have only come across Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's works and writings in publications. But I felt a strong affinity to the works she did and her concern with the functionings of language.

(my photographic work from 2005: window views from home)

"Universal Character" (Theresa H.K. Cha)

)

"Dead Words. Dead Tongue" (Theresa H.K. Cha)

b. Pusan, Korea, March 4, 1951

immigrated to the US 1962
education: UC Berkeley (Comp. Lit., Art Practice, Film theory-practice, and video)

[an artist's statement she wrote...]

"The main body of my work is with Language, 'looking for the roots of the language before it is born on the tip of the tongue.'

Since having been forced t learn foreign languages more 'consciously' at a later age, there has existed a different perception and orientation toward language. Certain areas that continue to hold interest for me are: grammatical structures of a language, syntax. How words and meaning are constructed in the language system itself, by function or usage, and how transformation is brought about through manipulation, processes such as changing the syntax, isolation, removing from context, repetition, and reduction to minimal units.

These concerns are experimented with in book-making, with written texts and images, incorporated still within another structure, qualities inherent in the material, that of the book (page sequence, silences, pauses, time, space).

Similar intention and processes follow in working with other media and material: video, film, slides, projection, and performance, but with references to their particular structures.

The audience-spectator is a major consideration, from conception to realization of the piece. She/He holds a privileged place in that She/He is the receptor and/or activator central to an exchange or dialogue. The importance of audience becomes especially clear when the nature of these works deal with narratives. The audience is the subject to whom the narrative is being transmitted. ...

Introducing the performance aspect to projection is to present a possible alternative to the projected image that continues to remain flat and two-dimensional. It is also to explore critieria such as time, movement (real, illusionist) ...

(from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: the Dream of the Audience, Generali Foundation, Wien, 2004, p. 80)

More (digital) sound poetry: jörg piringer

2007-03-17T10:17:00.000+08:00

jörg piringer - digital sound, visual interactive poetry and more...
http://joerg.piringer.net/index.php?href=home.xml&mtitle=home
Almost a century, the project of the Dada's is still striving.
Poetry or not, the rudiments of sound re-examined, collapsing music and speech...
when choral speaking is not speaking...
when singing is not song-making...
when speech is not meaning-making...
when "chance" and a programmed "prototype" form the core materiality of performance...
when parts and whole together do not amount to structuralism...
when the layering and blending of fragments supercedes wholesomeness to produce an organic body...
when the energy of chance is also machinic...
when even "randomness" is too much of an understatement...
The in-between's of all sorts...

"the notebook of elisabeth h." (mp3 project)

http://joerg.piringer.net/index.php?href=mp3s/notebook.xml
http://joerg.piringer.net/mp3s/the-notebook-of-elisabeth-h.mp3

A notebook abandoned by its owner -- a "she"?
A voice without a body.
A HE-voice speaking a SHE-voice without a body.
A Chinese person listening to an alien language from an abandoned notebook of a SHE in the voice of a HE...
without comprehension
yet with understanding
I listened intensely, closely, imaginatively, earnestly, suspiciously...
I hear alienation. I hear de-subjectivity, I hear re-objectification...
What matters is: I listened, and I hear.

Media Ethnography: looking for the inactive

2007-03-16T12:16:00.000+08:00

(Linda' photo taken in Barcelona, summer 2006, with a dischargeable automatic camera: a shop window on my way to the MACBA, Museum for Contemporary Art in Barcelona)

S. Elizabeth Bird, in the summary chapter of her book The Audience in Everyday Life: living in a media world, cited two cases -- Kathy and Kevin -- that set the poles of the good (self-directed, active, purposive, reflective user) and the bad (passive audience lacking in self-consciousness) in a media world. She wrote:
"...it strikes me that audience research has been successful in telling us a great deal about the Kathys, and really vey little about the Kevins -- audience research has become a very optimistic tradition...
"...I believe we do need to more fully interrogate the reality of living in the mediated culture that some celebrate, some fear, and some...feel nervously ambivalent about.
"Moores (1993) writes that we need ethnographically-oriented studies not so much for their own sake, but because they will help us reach a better theoretical understanding of 'constrained cultural creativity and a proper method of interpretive cultural study'...
"Unspoken is the pain -- for those who share all these media-framed dreams but will never realize them, because they are too poor, too heavy, too 'ugly'...

--S. Elizabeth Bird, The Audience in Everyday Life, Routledge, 2003

A Mismatch...Lost and Found

2007-03-14T10:34:00.000+08:00

a found text against a found image...

"Automatic long time no see.
This is a tribute to the automatic writings I did on my last trip to New York, March 2001. Only fragments and broken pieces of the text remain in my mind... I wonder where the texts are, what had happened to them, whether anyone read them, or if they were heartlessly erased… ever since my first Toshiba Portégé 3440 was stolen from the Ambassador Hotel in Madrid one calm, sunny, breezy, summer day in August 2001.

Does the thief speak English? Did the buyer manage English, too? How curious was he? Would he care at all? Can't help asking. Thoughts are my own sign of fertility, and words, thoughts in concrete form. Sigh!!!

Automatic. Is this text going to be read by some strangers one day? Is this new computer going to be stolen as well? Oh, no. What can I say!

Mean meat washes off the stain of happiness. What does a face do with a pair of spectacles? Light, perhaps dark blood, flashes – at eight-o-five pm HK time on the twenty-sixth of March 2003, or seven-o-five am NY time on the same day?

I spoke at 11.30 in the morning of March 26 in Hong Kong, “I shall already be in New York this afternoon.”
At 9.30 in the evening of March 26 I stroll on the streets of New York.

Hush, hush!
Rushing rinse, singing bar, toddling dish, what taboo is not going to ring?

Crammed space, stolen space, intruded space, occupied space, colonized space… I hate the economy class for the two and half feet of chest space, or is it less? Yes, less, if the heartless person in front of you lavishes a lazy nap. All’s well that ends well. I’m only one quarter of my trip. The only space – writing space."

[written CX0888 HK to NY March 26, 2003] [Today, I have chosen today to unearth this pocket of thoughts on thoughts]
[image: avideo still from one of my works, 2004]

Marcel Duchamp's gap music / chance compositions / experimental compositions / musical sculpture / erratum musical...

2007-03-13T23:57:00.000+08:00

"One can look at seeing; one can not hear hearing."
-Marcel Duchamp, Green Box, 1934

A useful site on Marcel Duchamp, with a section on his works of music and related collaborations:
http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/dada_files/music_duchamp.html

The term "gap music" is used in Craig Adcock's article:
Craig Adcock 'Marcel Duchamp's Gap Music. Operations in the Space between Art and Noise', in Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (eds.), Wireless Imagination. Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press : Cambridge MA 1992).

Important works to review:

The entire musical work of Marcel Duchamp Ampersand : Chicago IL 2001 1 sound disc (48 min.) S.E.M. Ensemble (Petr Kotik, alto flute; James Kasprowicz, trombone; William Lyon Lee, celesta; John Bondler, glockenspiel). Recorded at Studi Regson, Milan, May 7, 1976. Multhipla Records, Milano, No.1, 1976. Petr Kotik Composer and Conductor.

The entire musical work Dog W/A Bone : New York, 2000 1 sound disc : digital, stereo

For further reference: "Aleatoric Arts Timeline" - http://web.mala.bc.ca/guppy/crew410/aleatory%20history_and_timeline.htm

Also: "Erratum Musical" by Chen Ya-ling - http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=805&keyword (source: tout-fait, The Marcel Duchamp Studies on-line journal, issue 1, 1999)

To mark, to differentiate, to divide, or to merge: sound asserts

2007-03-13T09:17:00.000+08:00

An ephemeral memento before it disappears... "Carnival" at the Tamar Site, Central, Hong Kong...(photo taken on Feb 16, 2007, Chinese New Year Eve)

=======

A curious phenomenon in the US starting early 1900s:

"For decades, the characteristic easy-listening 'background' sounds of Mantovani and a legion of imitators were an easily -recognized interior feature of elevators, supermarkets, convenience stores, and telephone-hold systems. Now, as a new population management strategy, they flowed outdoors as well. The earliest reports depict a group of retail managers and owners who turn to music in an atttempt to chase away youth who loiter near their shops: according to one account, the store owners originally intended to use classical music to drive away the kids, but they couldn't find any canned Beethoven. So they turned to easy listening as what one of them called a 'nonaggressive music deterrent' and blasted them with stringed versions of Rolling Stones hits and other rock songs. Elevator music. Background music. The teen-age hangers-about found the sounds so offensive they fled to another part of town.

"Soon after the success of a 7-Eleven convenience store in Edmonton, other downtown businesses joined together to blast Muzak in a city park to drive away 'drug dealers and their clients..."

***from Joanathan Sterne's "Urban Media and the Politics of Sound Space," in Open Sound: sound in art and culture (2005 / No. 9), p. 7

Between speech and thoughts: Mother's annual art event

2007-03-11T22:02:00.000+08:00

(photos taken on Feb 17, 2007)

Today, I attended a special forum on the JC Creative Arts Centre's role in adding quality to the life of the community in Shamshuipo district. Planners and administrators of the Centre were confronted for their under consideration of its influence/interruption/contribution to the local people in the district, and the lack of consideration of ongoing needs of the district. Residents in the neighborhood were invited to express their needs, and to consider views of outsiders, especially those that sought to see the need to plan on the policy level rather than just provide remedies.

Obviously, grievances were abundant, and at one point it was like the new Centre should solve all the problems. A lot of first-hand experiences told of life in Shamshuipo described ordinary people's ability to exercise their creativity due to extreme constraint...

I was reminded of these photographs I made less than a month ago in February, on the first Chinese New Year's day, in my parents' flat. My mother took great care and pleasure to densely decorate their teeny tiny living space with every single piece of folk/art/decorative object she had. Amazing it was to me how much time Mum spent to collect all of these "impractical" objects over the years. Her assemblage method to me speaks of a kind of sophistication of mind that cannot be straightened out in known theories.

What a mysterious principle of connectivity!!!! And how did she divide up these eclectic objects to distribute them around the flat?

我媽媽的周年藝術展 – 每年的農曆新年。
奇異的分類、組織、佈局、造型調配、擺設法則，不是我一腦子的理論所能涵蓋的。
今天參加完｢從賽馬會創意藝術中心看優化深水步社群生活｣社區論壇，聽到用棄置廢物造木頭車的夫婦，聽曾德平說三代單傳的自製漿料店…,我突然想起外婆在生時的自製生抽、臘腸，還有媽媽現今在家裏做的獨一無二的｢小擺設裝置藝術｣。

Did I hear? Or did I see? - on HON Chi-fun's "Sound Plus" (1991)

2007-03-09T23:51:00.000+08:00

The following is a poetic documentation of my long, meditative gaze at HON Chi-fun's painting Sound Plus (1991) exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, July 2, 2005...

默賞韓志勳之《聲噚》Sound Plus (1991)

藍與藍與紫
藍與紫與紫混進了紅
圓破了，風中的密語滂沱
流散著的橫紋直灑
沙沙沙總覺濕潤

破開了，是圓渾哲學的不支
透出來的，將要暴露的…
是光不是光，我確懷疑。
我只能觀望推想
藍如何帶著重量向框外延伸
我很想聽一聽
卻是油潤密濃的一番糾纏
一片、一塊、一條、一個…
既實且虛的空間

空之間，我擠進了路人好奇的胡想
胡想之間，我擺脫不了右視域裏的蚊飛髮舞 --
想像著在我的視網膜失效之前
我還可瞪著你藍靛的空間幾多回。

[香港藝術館（尖沙嘴）]

DarwInstruments: better sound through evolution

2007-03-09T23:41:00.000+08:00

From the eu-gene list, I found this digital sound work by Jer Thorp:
http://webmail.cityu.edu.hk/redirect?http://www.blprnt.com/darwinstruments/

Breaking Silence - purposefully

2007-03-07T09:37:00.000+08:00

Thanks to Jim Andrews' list, I discover Japp Blonk's The Blonk Organ (1997).
Japp Blonk is a sound poet and writer. The Blonk Organ is one of the first interactive sound poems on the Web.

To collaborate with Blonk to create your sound poem with his material:
http://www.jaapblonk.com/Organ/blonk/organpre.html

Upfront with the sun, rain and snow

2007-03-07T08:32:00.000+08:00

A silent ensemble

2007-03-06T19:54:00.000+08:00

Paintings by artist ZHANG Hao 張浩

Syncopated Time & Space...

2007-03-05T02:21:00.000+08:00

Black Tiles, White Tiles 黑瓦白瓦 (Xu Jiang許江) / water color / 45 x 60cm x 24 / 2005

Just saw a retrospective of Xu Jiang's paintings in the past 20 years at the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou. I was moved...
History crawls on the surfaces of city ruins, inviting close listening to muffled utterances underneath... Silence thickening like fog and smog, uproars dispersed like ashes, enchanting eulogies flushed down the crevices of shattered monuments... A deserted coin, a stained handkerchief, the snug hideouts for irreverence...

What is sound art? - one view

2007-02-24T21:15:00.000+08:00

“聲音藝術”作為一個專門概念，它所指涉的並不是普通意義上的“視覺藝術中的聲音表現”。二十世紀的視覺藝術一直在揪著自己的頭髮往天上飛，想弄清楚所謂藝術的極限在哪里。特別在六十年代，總體藝術的想法流行開來以後，對於很多藝術家來說，“視覺”這個首碼完全是一種不必要的血統論。做行為的時候弄出點聲響固然不可避免，在裝置中添點聲音也漸漸成了時髦。後來出現的錄影藝術當然絕大多數是帶響的（早期的錄影藝術有時故意裝聾作啞），但聲音藝術並不只是給耐不住寂寞的視覺藝術配音，它起自更特別的關懷：一是對於傳統音樂的批判。這包括對傳統音樂和樂器的改裝和解構，音樂概念的擴大化，如非樂器音樂和噪音音樂，甚至像“靜默”這樣的反音樂概念的引入。這也許是因為，不管是哪一種音樂都難於避免在附庸風雅的文化中成為一種習俗和教條，所以人聲和器樂都需要一再地回歸原始狀態，重新去成為一種質樸的材料。二是對於創造綜合性的現場藝術體驗的追求，這樣的體驗不能被文字或圖像的紀錄所窮盡，不能被理論所概括，聲音藝術是驗明正身立即執行的藝術，你不能道聼塗説，你必須身臨其境澄懷觀照 ---- 也正是這一點使互動性成為聲音藝術的重要特徵。三是對於當代的電子環境和媒介文化的反應。由汽車音響、隨身聽和手機這類發明所營造的二十世紀末的聲音環境造成的刺激本身形成了廣闊的話題空間，所以今天的聲音藝術的主要被歸類在新媒體藝術的範疇中，和錄影、數碼圖像、互動多媒體光碟（ CD-Rom ）、網路藝術等媒介同朝共事。事實上今天的聲音藝術的緣起與五六十年代約翰 · 凱奇和激浪派運動（ Fluxus ）中白南准、佛斯特爾等人的工作直接有關，而這兩人也同樣正是錄影藝術的創始人。聲音藝術與行為、表演、裝置、戲劇和舞蹈始終深深地糾纏，其從事者也經常互相流動，把他們貫穿在一起的，是一種一致的現場精神，以及總體藝術的烏托邦，正是同樣的精神，要求我們去傾聽身邊對於聲音的關注。 ... ... (nuendo)

Source: Harvard Design 《哈佛設計》DESIGN.ICXO.COM ( July 19, 2006 15:19)
To read full article, please visit: http://design.icxo.com/htmlnews/2006/07/19/881856_0.htm

What do you hear?

2007-02-21T17:04:00.000+08:00

Gibberish on slippery delivery: A typwriter that vomits quietly (The Writing Machine Collective 1st edition, exhibited June-July 2004, Hong Kong) ...

Justin Wong's Typing Machine (Junk Mail Factory) with a single automatic typing hand, presented at the Writing Machine Collective 2nd edition exhibition, Hong Kong (Jan 13 to Feb 8, 2007)

Details of work: http://www.writingmachine-collective.net/WMCe2/work_typingmachine.html

Tim Lewis' Salvador Dali Writing Machine I found on the web...

(from the Kinetica Art Projects, Kallaway Ltd., UK)

More on Tim Lewis: http://www.kallaway.co.uk/kinetica-press1.htm

Source of photo: http://www.bbc.co.uk/collective/gallery/2/static.shtml?collection=kinetica&image=7

AND http://www.kallaway.co.uk/kinetica_pictures1.htm# (see also Terms of Use)

A field of works by Robert Iolini

2007-02-16T17:01:00.000+08:00

New friend made, new works and new (sound) worlds discovered...

http://www.iolini.com

Panda Sneezes

2007-02-06T10:54:00.000+08:00

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8922875251875301807&q=panda+sneeze&pr=goog-sl

What is this? What's the drama? First sound on my silent blog!

review on Maywa Denki Mechatronica in Hong Kong

2006-11-26T16:14:00.000+08:00

A review on Maywa Denki Mechatronica’s performance in Hong Kong
(This is the original version. A shorter version was published in Hong Kong Economic Journal, October 28, 2006)
破格、跨類、從人到物∶
｢明和電機｣的100伏特電流說明單純的表演藝術不再
- 黎肖嫻（短版見：信報2006年10月28日）
========

說｢明和電機｣香港音樂會(Maywa Denki Mechatronica: HK Live 2006)是一次表演實在是簡化了點。這次的2006現場，是一椿綜合性的文娛策展事件，一個表演現象的個案。

筆者不是｢明和電機｣的擁護者，所以帶著的是開放的心情與態度；我尤其對聲音藝術（sonic art）深感興趣，特別很想認識東亞區的現今的流行例子。一個半小時（連早有預謀、列明於節目表的｢安歌｣項目）是有趣的滑翔經驗。起初，臺上的是mechanical automatism 的演/展出，節奏強勁、敲擊主導（rhythmic percussion）的声音，令人想起二十世紀實驗音樂理論家John Cage於1933年的音樂實驗宣言，明言音樂要解放與創新，其中一個重要出口就是向敲擊樂學習，放下旋律音階，同時擺脫樂器主導的聲音藝術，提出傳統樂器的另類奏法。他的提倡，引致往後的實驗性音樂進一步發展與發掘日常生活中的物件所發的聲音的可創造性和再創造的潛能。｢明和電機｣最起初的十分鐘大概相當接近上述的實驗性的聲音藝術表演；而且很物理科學，盡用貢杆原理，物與物、動作與動作之間的連鎖反應，構成新的敲擊法。

接下去理路風格就開始變化了。忽然我像身處傳銷公司的傳銷員勵志激發大會，有promo片打氣，再唱其企業會歌，只是一切都頗為輕鬆。產品介紹本是商品推銷，有板有眼的Demo示範表演，循序漸進，一時是｢棟篤笑｣的化身，一時卻混進悉心的美學考慮、綜合大｢秀｣的場面設計、歌迷演唱會的形象塑造、對觀眾反應的計算，以至令歌迷同堂參與的導引。

綜合、借取，向表演歷史和可辨認的類型作戲謔、玩弄，以並貼的方法對既定的界別進行破壞，於是我想起很多所謂後現代的術語，但又不想過於學究。我這個撰稿人不好單一的評論，專一的欣賞又太像樣。

｢明和電機｣的網絡藍圖

｢明和電機｣令我想起村上春樹的《電視國民》（或譯《電視人》）中那些穿著全身制服、勤勞而默默地進行搬運工作的、個子比常人稍小了一丁點的、行動一致的｢電視國民｣。器械性中尚有人性，活動得來又過於群性而個性含糊，是界別之間，難以定斷的那種。

策劃發起人文化工房的名字（李蘊賢、鍾小梅）認得出是正規藝術文化學科訓練背景出生的朋友。這又令我想起本地策展文化的新變動，策展是近兩年文化藝術圈內的熱門話題，不單是多了討論，且見越來越多的年輕一輩的藝術家透過策展去引入新的創作元素。作為本地人看｢明和電機｣，不該忽視背後策劃的用心和努力。

｢明和電機｣自覺的把產品就是藝術為何不可到底有何不妥的問題透過表演擺白。場刊像產品catalogue，又像歌詞本子，又像企業機構的｢公司簡史｣，也不乏文化哲理的陳述。

消費品離不開通俗文化，｢明和電機｣的眾演員台前側身揮揮單掌說再見，排排隊踏步出場。直觀是對｢卡娃依｣文化刻意的戲弄，看進眼裏，忽然覺得很香港。到底土佐信道嘲笑的是香港人還是日本人呢？

聚｢物｣、集｢人｣

場刊上｢明和電機｣社長土佐信道對他的TSUKABA音樂有明確的論述∶｢科技發達令採樣機、合成器、個人電腦（網絡系統）普及起來，卻促使音樂脫離『物質』（即樂器），而成為一種『資訊』。享受音樂的形式再不一樣，音樂以變成資訊/訊息的處理。…TSUKABA音樂正是為了重新喚起人們可能已久遺了的那種享受由樂器產生出音樂的快感。｣這樣的宣言，一半是理念的自我宣稱，一半卻是遊戲實驗上的妥協。

單從整晚節目線性排序的角度看，像人偶的人先演出，接著是｢自動樂器｣的演出，接著是人和｢自動樂器｣與仿人形的｢自動樂器｣一同演出，往下去是人們與眾人形樂器的攜手演出，然後是｢電機偶｣的演出，接著是數碼人形“bit-man”的出場，接著是帶面具的人和面具的演出，然後是各種｢電機小人形玩具｣（小的程度要由攝錄機現場拍攝再投影於臺上的大銀幕上），之後是小人形玩具如“knockman”等於｢示範表演｣般的錄象中陸續出場，然後是魅力巨星的真人偶像，然後…。在這串線性連續體中，人和電機和物件並置，界別層次的高低都破解了，平起平坐。

我還是覺得前半部以身體和日常物件發聲的部分比較獨特。後半的歌舞為主顯然是偶像文化心態的必須點綴，給｢偶像迷｣過足癮。又像材料準備未足，只能以演唱會的慣常招數補救；隨便拿一些預製好的音樂樣本（samples）播放，使電腦的採樣機（sampler）即場衍生音樂的功能也埋沒了。在整晚的綜合表演事件中，最前衛的、最具開採性的，絕對是電子電機數碼產品的玩弄。對物件的思考是人類學和文化研究近年回歸的重點，開發｢物｣的多義多用性是藝術創作的新中心點。但｢明和電機｣音樂會的擬人或人性化（anthropomorphic）的單一招數，卻把多樣化的可能性壓平，取通俗輕鬆而淡出，而創作相對產品，藝術探索相對消費品界線的破解，本帶有龐大的批判力量和戲謔潛能，亦化為純粹的一場嬉戲，消費完畢，也就一切完事。

一切由100伏特開始。世界之有無，視聽景觀的奪出至幻化之間，一瞬之別，盡在一個（排）按鈕。

2006年10月25日

（完）

A string of sounds...a string of words

2006-10-07T20:17:00.000+08:00

A response to Miki Yui’s “Ancienne” in Silence Resounding (October 6)

害怕靜默。靜默帶揭發的暴力。
---------
我知道我聽見的不是水聲，但我確實聽到水。
水在波動。水在歇止 –
在無底之上舞動、亂撥…，發不著迴響。
音頻加速。
水其實是冷氣機內部的音波震動，
在聽見與聽不見之間我看見。
意會著，在黑漆的前面銀光掙脫著黑色重量的裹纏。

I fear silence. Silence violently reveals…
---------
I know what I hear is not water, but I hear water.
Water vibrates. Water rests –
Over bottomless-ness it swings, hops and dashes off, echoless.
Frequency gathers in speed.
What I perceive as water can be the vibrating waves of an air-conditioner in a specific time of a specific place.
Between hearing and not hearing I feel that I see.
Grasping something – but what?
Perhaps fine silvery flashes of light, piercing through the darkness that is devouring them?

(Being in a room: a listening experience via automatic writing / October 5)

門關了。開了。關了又再開了。關了。開關的門把外面人群的碎語割出一份，然後這兒一片笑聲，那處一聲問候。問號。符號。符碼叫喚交換化成耳語、化成背景聲、化成噪音。我聽見了噪音，就在這房子的中央。聲像綿綿雨，著陸於灰色的地毯上給蓋上啞音，不浮，也不沉。

Writing against George Klein’s Transition (September 28, 2006)

打鐵聲。工作聲。有秩序的車，汽車，人聲，一群人。一個男人。一個小孩。一個男人向一個小孩。開車開什麼車。在什麼的房子裏開車。開車變成開聲。咿咿呀呀…他和他在開火，怎樣開才可以勝利？沒有了和絃，四周像褪了色的畫面，在油缸底下滴著三種不同顏色的液體。外國外國人。我是誰的外國人？我如何可以找到本國的位分？本國不本國我不知道。我只知道我香港、又不太香港，由馬路的這邊跑到馬路的那邊，喘著氣。

noise gate: an attempt for notation

2006-09-22T11:51:00.000+08:00

(photo series by Therrien-Gottschalk)

(an ethnography of a physics professor...)

source: Fermi News v.22, Friday, April 12, 1999 no. 7, p. 9

NOISE-GATE / a kind of electroacoustic effect...

it "involves the establishment of a threshold of intensity, literally a 'gate,' below which the signal is automatically cut...retaining only the most dynamic impact of a sound."

Jean-Francois Augoyard & Henry Torgue, Sonic Experience: a Guide to Everyday Sounds, p. 84

acceler-rallent-ando

2006-09-19T16:48:00.000+08:00

(video stills by Linda Lai)

accelerando...chorus...perdition...rallentando...anamnesis

his body hears...

2006-09-18T19:21:00.000+08:00

June 6, 2006 / outside Tesla (podewils’sches palais, klosterstrasse 68) (www.tesla-berlin.de) / a site-specific sound installation / sound travels in space, dances on architectural surfaces and bounces... / part of the Sonambiente Berlin 2006 (sound art festival), BERLIN
photo by Lai

Equivocality

2006-09-17T11:37:00.000+08:00

Source: Becher's Water Towers

first utterances...lost voice

2006-09-16T13:49:00.000+08:00

Can you hear?

Can you hear me?

video still from Linda Lai's One Take (2002)