Research & Development

The Index

2007-01-26T12:33:00.000-08:00

Before we forget the genesis of this, I'll recount the story of The Index. We were at the Marc Joseph artist's talk at Reed College for his New and Used show at the Cooley Gallery. He mentioned that our beloved Stephanie (Snyder) had used the term "index" to apply to his photos of used book and record stores, used books and record sleeves. I got really excited about the notion of an index. I thought that we could collaborate on an index, a comprehensive, far-ranging, idiosyncratic, highly personal, abstract index.

Two things: one, this gives us a great way forward (that we can collaborate on in a really healthy way), and two I then got even more excited about the fact that we'll be able to make such very interesting work based on our index.

Because the multiple meanings of index all come into play here...that list that you find at the end of the book that tells you what's in the book and index as general indicator (like a stock index). The following definition was lifted from hyperdictionary.com.

Webster's 1913 Dictionary

Definition:

\In"dex\, n.; pl. E. {Indexes}, L. {Indices}(?). [L.: cf.
F. index. See {Indicate}, {Diction}.]
1. That which points out; that which shows, indicates,
manifests, or discloses

2. That which guides, points out, informs, or directs; a
pointer or a hand that directs to anything, as the hand of
a watch, a movable finger on a gauge, scale, or other
graduated instrument. In printing, a sign [[hand]] used to
direct particular attention to a note or paragraph; --
called also {fist}.

3. A table for facilitating reference to topics, names, and
the like, in a book; -- usually alphabetical in
arrangement, and printed at the end of the volume.

4. A prologue indicating what follows. [Obs.] --Shak.

5. (Anat.) The second digit, that next pollex, in the manus,
or hand; the forefinger; index finger.

6. (Math.) The figure or letter which shows the power or root
of a quantity; the exponent. [In this sense the plural is
always {indices}.]
{Index error}, the error in the reading of a mathematical
instrument arising from the zero of the index not being in
complete adjustment with that of the limb, or with its
theoretically perfect position in the instrument; a
correction to be applied to the instrument readings equal
to the error of the zero adjustment.
{Index expurgatorius}. [L.] See {Index prohibitorius}
(below).
{Index finger}. See {Index}, 5.
{Index glass}, the mirror on the index of a quadrant,
sextant, etc.
{Index hand}, the pointer or hand of a clock, watch, or other
registering machine; a hand that points to something.
{Index of a logarithm} (Math.), the integral part of the
logarithm, and always one less than the number of integral
figures in the given number. It is also called the
{characteristic}.
{Index of refraction}, or {Refractive index} (Opt.), the
number which expresses the ratio of the sine of the angle
of incidence to the sine of the angle of refraction. Thus
the index of refraction for sulphur is 2, because, when
light passes out of air into sulphur, the sine of the
angle of incidence is double the sine of the angle of
refraction.
{Index plate}, a graduated circular plate, or one with
circular rows of holes differently spaced; used in
machines for graduating circles, cutting gear teeth, etc.
{Index prohibitorius} [L.], or {Prohibitory index} (R. C.
Ch.), a catalogue of books which are forbidden by the
church to be read; the index expurgatorius [L.], or
expurgatory index, is a catalogue of books from which
passages marked as against faith or morals must be removed
before Catholics can read them. These catalogues are
published with additions, from time to time, by the
Congregation of the Index, composed of cardinals,
theologians, etc., under the sanction of the pope. --Hook.
{Index rerum} [L.], a tabulated and alphabetized notebook,
for systematic preservation of items, quotations, etc.
\In"dex\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Indexed}; p. pr. & vb. n.
{Indexing}.]
To provide with an index or table of references; to put into
an index; as, to index a book, or its contents.
\In"dex\, n.
The ratio, or formula expressing the ratio, of one dimension
of a thing to another dimension; as, the vertical index of
the cranium.

Verse.Chorus. Bridge en Boite

2007-01-13T15:34:00.000-08:00

It's a box. Magic Lantern-style. Kinetoscope with crank. Music-box mechanism. Images turn, frame-by-frame, of Verse.Chorus.Bridge corresponding to morse code (Golden), activating light on the top. How do we make it?

Use the Sifter, Wouldya? You're Gonna Get Lumps

2007-01-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

Extrication, isolation (or distillation), extraction, a rare experience, focus.

Well yes, because one can feed back at same level of complexity or distill.

But then that's what every bird-on-the-fence-epiphany poem does, eh? The little lens bringing into sharp focus until whammo! the bright light turns on, serenely. Yech.

Let's bend the light rather than bringing into focus. REFRACT.

Hey, who turned out the....

p.s. Mina Loy, Yoko Ono.

New Year's Resolution

2007-01-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

I don't want to engender, empower, validate or foster anything.
Let's embrace Das Ding an Sich.

Notes on Next

2006-09-22T19:21:00.000-07:00

Some notions:

variations on theme. repetition is compelling particularly when it is spiced with unexpected variation. Yubiwa Hotel did a zillion repetitions of a dance routine from Band of Outsiders in their recent piece for PICA's TBA festival. When the pattern locked in, the deviations from the pattern became interesting. (long story very short).

the space between the performer and the audience. Deborah Hay's Whole Egg Theory...the notion of activating the space between the performer (yolk) and audience. shrinking that space or forging direct connection

all five senses...thanks Don Rood (and Jennnifer Munson's mint)

spatial variations, distance and proximity

confounding expectations...TdR's old thing about when he moves his stick toward the drumhead, people are expecting a sound. What if there were no sound but just movements.

palette...perhaps the next task could be to generate a juicy, chewy palette of words whose denotations and connotations might make interesting combinations and permutations.

&c.

Catch up: New Needs Need New

2006-09-10T08:40:00.000-07:00

Two projects this year that have suggested new directions, reminded us of themes and strategies. For the Richard Foreman Festival we did a couple of firsts for us. First, TdR had no drums and I had no microphone. Second, Tim composed a beautiful, drawn out, Feldman-esque piece of music. After a long intro, we recorded a poem over it in Jason DuMars studio. We also constructed to telegraph stations and modified them to light rather than make a sound (yeah, Radio Shack!). The piece was performed in the dark, the only light being generated when one of us tapped out Morse Code, lighting the other station and so that operators face. It was a good still moment.

For Gallery Homeland's Scratching the Surface, we did verse.chorus.bridge., for which we gave ourselves the instruction, "Improvise a bridge between here and there." We chose sound as our first bridge material (me=poem tdr=drums), starting on the pier just north of the Hawthorne Bridge. Then TdR played a duet with a Morse Code recording of the word "golden" while I walked across the Hawthorne Bridge reading New Needs Need New into a megaphone. We ended signaling with white cloths on opposite banks, me doing semaphore, TdR playing his drums with white rags. (That was the best bridge, incidentally.) We did the piece two days in a row in 104 degree heat. The lemon footlights that TdR launched into the river to float away, weirdly stayed nearby, we saw them a couple of days later, still floating brightly.

Barely There

2006-01-13T13:48:00.000-08:00

Had a conversation with artist and jeweler, Hazel Cox, about her recent works, one of which is the lightest spray of white on an olive ground. She talked about someone looking for an image in the piece, but that it was meant to be an image of water vapor. Specifically I thought of breath on glass (probably because her work is shown behind 1/2" thick perspex). She and I talked about the tinyest, found, stain on a white page...she said to her it was the most beautiful thing in the world, her favorite (if found) art at the moment. I thought of shadows, erasures, and coffee stains...of Oskar's white-ish t-shirt that had so many stains etched into it and bleached and Spray 'n' Wash-ed out again until it was a shadow collage of the life of a 7-11 year-old boy.

I wondered what this might be like in words. The first obvious thought being whispered words. But what else. What about incidentals, left-behinds, the indentations made by the pencil through to the page beneath (recall our piece for the Unreadability show), notes, lists. What about, performatively, space between, haphazardness, and yes, quiet.

The Real Question

2005-11-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

The real question I'm trying to answer is what else can words do. How far away from the ordinary use and purpose of words (like ordering a cup of coffee) can I get while maintaining the recognizability of words as words (in other words without devolving into animal speak) ? How can I take this very common currency and make it as uncommon as possible? The research is play.

Note: should look again at how children learn language. "Put that in your pipe and smoke it."

Fully Fathomed

2005-10-28T12:43:00.000-07:00

In looking into the origins of the title of one of Pollock's paintings, "Full Fathom Five," find that it is a poem by William Shakespeare (at least according to untested web-based sources...I have yet to confirm or deny) and another by Sylvia Plath. It's also a band in Athens, GA.

Here's Willy's poem for the record:

Full Fathom Five

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them - ding-dong, bell.

William Shakespeare

So I got to thinking about accretions building up around a phrase the way coral or other organisms might build up around a shipwreck, say. Just as connotations build up around a word over time. So... thought, creation, connotation, etc. can build up around a phrase over time. The echoes of the phrase. Reactions to the original. Inadvertent repetition of echoes. I hum this song but don't know what it is or where I heard it.

Pealings

2005-10-28T12:41:00.000-07:00

for Maya Deren

I am falling in love with my pealings.
ree(a)lings
luminous accidents
aluminum particles dare:
between accident and control
meshes of the of
susp-
a tongued key
susp-end risk
mirror mirror, Maya
fall hollow
he stair up ‘ollow
mirror
I am falling in love with my
propositions
repetitions and echoes
viscosity
with elegy
sedimentary study
plums
metal allic duluminum
under longed pro longed may

properties: key, knife, mirror
under longed pro longed may, Maya
peripatetic
sensation hunt egg, hunt easter
hiding and leafing properties
grail (“lying down upon it”)
and egg,
key, knife, mirror grail and egg
vestibule visitor re-
vestidisitor re-
key repeat mirror
intuit excision
pe-reating repetition
inguition
arp methodology
shift calder shape
and mobile, egg, key, knife, mirror and mobile
echo, shift, echo
re-hearing or prime ring
3, 3 ring 13
I am falling in love with my
falling not in
echolo- imperfect
loca- imperfect
soundings --tion
breath driven mobile
mobile, egg, key, knife, mirror
choreography of
I know what kind of movements to make
Or
Accumulate readily
May ignite
Vapors vapors
contents under
Sparks heat or open flame
Accumulate will and may
between control and accident
s-s-s-surface
tension intention contents under
push me pull you
I’ll never tell
but over and over again, vapors
echoes falling in love with my
echoes accumulate
with my
will and may
re-

Mr. Edwin Denby

Inside Out and...

2005-10-24T10:54:00.000-07:00

Tim,
I had some ideas about performance and process, about revealing process, about the overlap of non-performance and performance.

Notion 1: Inside Out. for a performance, there is a scrim at the back of the stage or performing area. Your drums and whatnot, my mic and whatnot are set up behind the scrim, facing toward the back wall of the stage. As the audience comes in, we are on stage, but it is set up as a backstage area. We're talking about the performance, about whatever, drinking wine, water. I'll put on lipstick and take the lint brush to you. When audience is seated, we'll go out "onstage" behind the scrim and perform our set. When we're done, we'll come "offstage" on to the stage. Maybe the scrim is somewhat transparent (like a scrim, duh) but lit that way...you dig?

Notion 1a: Audience seated in theater. We go out on the sidewalk to perform. Sound is recorded and played over speakers in the space. Hey, if we performed on a streetcar, the moving images in the windows would be a visual, performative if incidentally so, element. But that's another notion.

Notion 2: Process. All of the notes, emails, snippets of you experimenting with sound. The materials that go into making the performance. These are exhibited as objects. We perform in the space.

That thing about the streetcar: the whole inserting art into real world thing...does that still matter? No, what I want to say is that it's not really relevant for our practice. We know we're engaging in a rarified soundmaking, not engaging the masses, yo. More on this later.

DJ Spooky

2005-10-16T18:33:00.000-07:00

Elsewhere, I wrote this about several encounters with Paul Miller/DJ Spooky and his work at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's 2005 Time-Based Art Festival. I guess I want this read into the record, so to speak, as we continue to talk about the making of this project. I feel a strong affinity for many of his ideas and methods that I want to note here as relevant.

chronophotographical projections

2005-10-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

Are you there god, it's me muybridge STOP me in my sequentiality my seriality STOP in my body my lens fig. and lit. STOP drop butterflies in screwtop jars with chloroform-soaked cotton STOP descending STOP a bucket a body STOP pin to a board STOP on hands and knees STOP as if the horse were flying STOP lawn tennis STOP bodies at rest and in motion STOP and at rest STOP STOP

Untitled (Pour)

2005-10-10T09:49:00.000-07:00

(from 830 Fireplace Road)

It's raining it's pouring
clearly treading
water not lightly
would grounded were
heavy but suspension as
Doc Ricketts specimens
in so much formaldahyde
An act of preservation
pick-ling pornographically
his amphibian ways
treading swim treading

sidebar:
let it be crimson, let it run scarlet

he doesn't pull for shore

ruby ruby ruby I'm
swimming in love with my feelings, yes
"I repeat myself when under stress"
I repeat myself when under stress"
I repeat myself when under stress" (dip)
I repeat dip level
I dip level and pour
poor poor

poured into an arm of chair
hold court
courting randomly
witty whittle witness
fermented drowning
drizzle or dash of aluminum paint 214
mars black liquid obsidian trailed

Ted said, put a little red in there
"plump rumpled skirts I'd like to try"
poured into a highball glass a jelly jar
his lap an arm-ed chair
patternless patterns allover work in
viscous media
next the next work next lacunae

he said with airmeaning bubbles

Reminder

2005-10-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

I found this today. It is called T + L Working Document. Just a bunch of notes really, but essential

Our work has far more in common with abstract visual art

Pollock
Radical going beyond – we all try carve out our own path, he flew
“unprecedented physical involvement with the act of painting.”
Benton boasted that with him Pollock had found "the essential rhythms" of art.”attempt to free expression from subject” a clear step toward abstraction.
Mark of the hand…unapologetic mark making
resonates with movement and the "controlled accident" that Pollock had practiced in workshop sessions with Siqueiros

density, complexity, abstraction

physical action and emotional expression achieve balance

The painting is the result of both split-second decisionmaking and happenstance, choreography and chance. Each physical "performance" was a unique, spontaneous, and unrepeatable event, but the final product was always subject to artistic will. I can control the flow of the paint," Pollock contended. "There is no accident."
"that the modern painter cannot express his age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture. Each age finds its own technique."

Unassigned and heroic gesture

Refusal to resolve – come into focus
Sustain a flat surface
But within that there is Virtuosity, heroism…risk taking
Our voice our sonic palette

Marinetti
Pollock --
Fluxus
Free Jazz
Gertrude Stein

Classic avant garde of 60s free jazz, you can hear it in things like our performance from the 2003 Experimental Music Festival

Come from jazz
Not beat

Talk about process
More in common with installation art or minimalist conceptual performance
Using familiar touchstones like the cabaret performance to repurposed sense of word and sound

Make video -- Interview selves
Snippets of our performances

Water

Pollock
Indeterminate, messy, visual residue of action
But human action, gesture

Surface studies (TdR)
This led to his dealing with water as surface
Variety of ways you can excite sound from a surface, brush mallet finger, bead plunging through surface of water
Manipulate surface
Surface space and silence
Like pollock, movement, angularity, rhythm, humor…barely contained within the framework…like jazz you are always within the frame but the frame is always getting bigger …as the canvas got bigger…
And also similarly the expansion of the toolset…to get to the sounds you hear in your head, need to employ ever greater arsenal of tools

Water – George Brecht…inquisition, conceptual doors
Waves, ebb

exhausting

2005-02-17T22:28:00.000-08:00

sometimes,
i find art ex-
hausting. Not
in the sense
that it taxes me, but
in the sense
that it doesn't--
like a very long shot
of nothing more
than the attempt to
capture Dutch light
on film.
Exhausting is
the wrong word because
it implies exertion.
Draining.

Diary Entry No. 2

2005-02-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

Well, we're frankly distracted by a thousand other writing and making and (for TdR) performing things right now. But to follow up on the earlier note about the necessity of celedon and the utility of the white racks that we found at a thrift store, here's a photo of us performing at Performanceworks Northwest that I consider to be a study for the work. I'd always seen us performing before color blocks. Oh, and don't forget about blue christmas lights. (This performance was part of a benefit for Cydney Wilkes Penta.)

Open Construction

2004-10-21T13:44:00.000-07:00

This came from here:

Central to this project were two apparently contradictory impulses that Boulez and Berio found prefigured in Joyce's writing: the artist's attempt to exert total control over the musical material, and the simultaneous interest in aleatory forms that required the active participation or choice of the performer.

Neither the control system nor the chance aesthetic was considered adequate alone: total serialism, the mathematization of all harmonic, rhythmic, dynamic and timbral parameters of a work, created a formal complexity that could rarely if ever be discovered by a listening audience, while chance composition was considered to be too great a renunciation of artistic responsibility. The model of the "open work" was proposed to synthesize these antitheses. In his influential early (pre-semiotic) study of the open work, Umberto Eco defines it in opposition to
a classical composition...[which] posits an assemblage of sound units which the composer arranged in a closed, well-defined manner before presenting it to the listener. He converted his idea into conventional symbols which more or less oblige the eventual performer to reproduce the format devised by the composer himself, whereas the new musical works...reject the definitive, concluded message and multiply the formal possibilities of the distribution of their elements...In primitive terms we can say that they are quite literally 'unfinished': the author seems to hand them on to the performer more or less like the components of a construction kit (Eco 2-4).That is, Eco's exemplary open musical works consist of rigorously composed parts that may be assembled in many different orders (as in Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI [1957]), or of parts whose relation is capable of change even if their order is fixed (as in the durations and tempos of Berio's original Sequenza for flute [1958]); an open work is not improvisatory, like jazz or Indian raga, nor is it a complete refusal of intention and control, as in Cage's Zen-influenced works. Open works are not indeterminate, not totally without pre-existing structure, but rather suspended between many different but fully determinate structures. Thus they enable a composer, in principle at least, to reconcile the apparently contradictory imperatives of complete control, which reached its apotheosis in the total serialism of the earlier Boulez and Stockhausen, and the freedom in performance that was the hallmark of Cage's aleatory works.
Both kinds of formal openness, that of sequence and that of intra-sequential relation, find privileged models in Joyce's writing, though not only there. Eco insists that the literary work in general, even when its order is fixed, is a "continuous potentiality of 'openness'--in other words, an indefinite reserve of meanings"--of which "the work of James Joyce is a major example" (Eco 10). He cites "Wandering Rocks" and its multiplication of perspectives, and more importantly Finnegans Wake, which "is finite in one sense, but in another sense it is unlimited" (Eco 10) by virtue of its circular construction and its puns. "Each occurrence, each word stands in a series of possible relations with all the others in the text. According to the semantic choice which we make in the case of one unit, so goes the way we interpret all the other units in the text" (Eco 10).

aluminum paint 164

2004-10-20T21:41:00.000-07:00

from the margins to the margins (Mr. J.P.) (from tentatively titled 830 Fireplace Road)

double down:
double dare
signal to noise negotiation
axes dented
counted rolls

tween up
meshes of the
molten, viscous
echolocation
keys columns and mutes
straight shot detours
accident and control

there will be brushes hardened
trails sticks tones
basters trowels
towed stones

repeat
revisit vestibules,
rolls
blanks fill in the
allatonceness
gestured map
see to “c” to sea

falling in love with my
propositions
repetitions
locations and echo
bounce
edge edge on edge
sounding
verity
viscosity
plumb plum-ette plum
negotiate gravity
sling twisted harmonies,
peripatetic crane arm
bow arm
swope arc and sure
rosin for bite, a
ragged choreography with
ochlocratic leanings
I know what kind of movements to make
make
long the line
litter
nails, tacks-buttons, coins, cigarettes,
long the line
litter…
etceteras

50 million 60-watt household bulbs.
atonceness alum readily
accumulate and may
not what but how
Miss Aladine says
but how

event horizon
“blind men take the stage”
grail of the grail hunt
white light verge
on the of
alchemy ullulate
combustible v.
under longed pro longed may hiding and leafing properties
vapors may
accumulate
bring april showers
ignite

Diary Entry No. 1

2004-10-20T21:40:00.000-07:00

This weekend we bought the Big White Racks at Village Traders. These will be ultra-portable backdrop armatures. They're around 7 feet high and 3 wide. Yeah! Of course TdR is already talking about using them to suspend sound-making/resonant objects...gong, pipe, etc. I think they'll be bashed up before we ever use them for Original Intended Purpose...meanwhile I hang wet laundry on them in the basement.

Something should be celadon.

Human memory

2004-10-20T21:34:00.000-07:00

More about memory.

Human memory

Forgetting from Short-Term Memory: Decay or Displacement?

2004-10-20T21:32:00.000-07:00

What I think is really at base of my interest in language bumping up against itself, meaning/not, etc. (more elsewhere) ... revise: not "at base of," but "important to my consideration of" language is thinknig about memory and how memories survive or distort, or decay or disappear.

Forgetting from Short-Term Memory: Decay or Displacement?

Urgent See

2004-10-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

Marinetti (Sintesi Musicali Futuristiche)
Tzara ("The Approximate Man")
Krakatoa
galvanized sheet metal
velocity
B-flat (event horizon, black hole)
resonator
locomotive
forge
Boccioni
The Enigma Machine or here
Public Address System
voice muted, tubed, megaphoned
Tim improvising on piano

Speed -Velocity: Angle/Repose

2004-09-27T14:24:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about speed today: Eduoard Lock, Pollock, and how I make things. I've always seen a great amount of speed and sublime motion in Pollock—more like an ACT colliding with an ION, than the misnomer of Action Painting. Containment. Reflex. Lock's complexly fierce gestural vocab had a lot of the same onrush. Much of what I make in an improvisational setting is about lightening-reflex, whiplash timing.

I'm a quick change artist. Process and delivery are one of the same momentum.I was thinking about "dromology." That's a phrase that Paul Virilio coined to mean the study of the science (or better, logic) of speed. It also sounds close to "drum." The poetry of acceleration.

Or how's about this dance number from Edmund Burke's Greatest Hits (your favorite top 40 18th century notions of the sublime): "Besides these things which directly suggest the idea of danger and those which produce a similar effect from a mechanical cause, I know of nothing sublime which is not some modification of power."

I love the notion of White Light—which naturally triggers in my head Jimmy Lunceford's White Heat from the 1930s (Lunceford incidentally died in Seaside, Oregon while signing autographs at a record store). And with it's mad-at-you-swinging tempo of 362 bpm definitely fits into the speed-velocity factor of the day. And back to the velocity: Steve McQueen's Le Mans, a collaged cor-Ten, skidding Formula One adrenaline soundtrack for a late Pollock slide show.

Acceleration, momentum. . . .yield, stop (amplified pauses). . ."Instantaneity is the ideal toward which speed aspires"

Klutterkammer

2004-09-27T14:06:00.000-07:00

This could be a bogus translation (or more likely a slang-y one), but there is an art exhibition at the ICA in London right now entitled, Klutterkammer which they translate as "an area that is used as a storage or working environment." or both. like this. or like my desk.

White Light

2004-09-27T13:47:00.000-07:00

…White Light, which has a blazing, acrid, and dangerous glamor of a legendary kind, not unlike those volcanoes which are said to lure the native to the lip of the crater and by the beauty of their writings and the strength of their fumes cause him to fall in.
Frank O'Hara on a painting by Jackson Pollock in Art Chronicles 1954-1966

I was looking at melting points today. Thinking about Tungsten. Then coincidentally read the above. White Light.

This is the work I want to make. The work that will make Frank (MHRIP) come to the lip...at risk of falling in.

Nancarrow

2004-09-25T21:58:00.000-07:00

Now here this for repetition and the crazy counterpoint of the phantom right hand. Can I make a poem like this?

Nancarrow Study No. 1

Arp

2004-09-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

I've always liked Arp.

I was reading your Feldman article that incidentally referenced Cage and a turn away from 12-tone to one strategy involving collage.

I remembered that once Arp had made a piece by letting torn pieces of paper drift down onto the ground. Leave 'em where they lie.

Acts of Submission

2004-09-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

Slightly off-topic and yet, what are we all about but the collaborative play between we two...

--- admit2 : no. 1, september 1st, 2004. ---

Palettes

2004-09-24T10:19:00.000-07:00

Sounds like collusion, or is it collision?

For more sonic discoveries. . . type in "drip" for instance, go Here

2004-09-23T23:06:00.000-07:00

X rays, speeding electrons, radioactivity, high-frequency alternating current and its sparking effects, the liquefaction of inert gases at previously unheard-of low temperatures--thermal disturbance and radial excitation. . .
all this still excites me as a metaphor for sound production.

horsekicking a circle of cardinal points

"Make a painting of frequency" (Duchamp). . . what does that sound like? Wave follows wave

2004-09-23T22:47:00.000-07:00

Morty's got painter envy

Regarding Meaning Narrative And

2004-09-23T22:18:00.000-07:00

raccoon : notes and scavengings

See this for some questions about indeterminate meaning

Soundtrack to Vision

2004-09-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

He listened to this
Artie Shaw & His Orchestra - It Had To Be You (2:30)

While painting this

Ragged energy, precision-tooled randomizer, leaping toward the edges but contained in a frame. Grid, square, illuminated ab-ex manuscript (200 tiny Pollocks)

Light(ing) bowl with water, rich hues (composition no. 12).

Windchimes made from heavy gauge lead pipes

Loop, echo. . .soundtrack

I will become Jack (Benny) with viola to accompany an abstract waltz with you.

Listening

2004-09-23T21:27:00.000-07:00

Listen! - Fado Performance Inc

Five performance artists address listening, mostly in public context.

Homonym

2004-09-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

In a book about our New York School poets, the reviewer states the "poets changed the face of postwar American poetry with sophisticated applications of irony: intelligent and irreverent parodies, zany collaborations, faux translations, unconventional novels and plays, throughout favoring a gesture which Lehman characterizes as the blague, from the French for 'practical joke' or 'trick.' "
source

Now See Here

2004-09-22T11:33:00.000-07:00

Scale. Angularity.
Speaking of Expressionism, which you were...
(oh, and on the page I found these images, the image above was Pollock's Lavender Mist. Coincidence? I don't think so.)

Upper Case

2004-09-22T11:21:00.000-07:00

As TdR puts it, we are, "amplifying existing strategies."

Scale -- this will be important for the staging.
No more easel painting. Monumental. Pollock's Mural. Serra.

we may visually address scale to amplify the figures on stage
shadow, bar-stool, podium, peacock tail, light
how the Kasai performance used light to change what might have been an intimate piece into a grand one

Heroism
Manifestos, especially Futurists
F.T. Marinetti
Drive (in its varied meanings)

Sound Notes

2004-09-22T11:09:00.000-07:00

TdR has brilliant idea to perform a sound sequence live. record it. play it again later in the piece while TdR improvises with self

let's really work with sound
for Lisa: alternative deliveries, pushing vocal performance rather than defaulting.
whisper, megaphone, muffle, mute
enunciation: play, improvise with pause, consonant, syllable

Note: Akira Kasai's "walking with a stop feeling." Lisa thinks about what would speaking with a stop feeling be. She considers spaces between words at the stops. TdR brilliantly points out that the stops may be the consonants. That is why I love TdR.

I want some heaviness in sound, some tension, something ominous or better, portentous (the second definition, not the first...hooey indeed! Humph.)

Ooo, here's a better word. Let's elicit some awe, shall we?

Bowed cymbal ground. Please oh please.

some notes

2004-09-22T10:29:00.000-07:00

TdR says this is to be a "non-objective performance piece"

attack on requirement that language mean as paint was once required to represent or portray
aim for indeterminacy
aim for variously
a shifting received meaning
a parfait cup, a neural network

intensity (and to amend this, the precision) of Amelia
chrome, angularity, Futurism

scale, surface, collision, light, speed, scatter, H20
velocity, momentum, forward motion

Manifesto
Idea that you are either with us or against us

swerve, tragedy, urgency, death, making

Title Again + Feldman

2004-09-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Last thing on the title I promise. (for now.) I found the painting I stood in front of forever when I was in Venice that one time...(stayed in a convent on an island as overflow for hostel)... I think looking for a long time at this painting is like listening to The King of Denmark.

Alchemy, 1947. Oil, aluminum (and enamel?) paint, and string on canvas, 114.6 x 221.3 cm. Peggy Guggenheim Collection. 76.2553 PG 150. Jackson Pollock © 2003 The Pollock-Krasner Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Title

2004-09-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

Following up on your idea for the title. 830 Fireplace Road. Interesting. Whether or not we use it for title, it will be incorporated. Fire. Furnace. Roman Candle. Also my favorite number is 8.

Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center
830 Fireplace Road
East Hampton, NY 11937-1512
Phone: 631-324-4929

Some Pollock

2004-09-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

"flicking, splattering, and dribbling"

"Pollock first created a complex linear skeleton using black paint. For this initial layer the paint was diluted, so that it soaked into the length of unprimed canvas, thereby inextricably joining image and support." Well this speaks to our talk about armature, which we are building now. I love the word armature.

"contrary visual rhythms and sensations: light and dark, thick and thin, heavy and buoyant, straight and curved, horizontal and vertical." source.

contrast. balance. I guess AK said, "the unity of opposites." But really I think of it as tension provoked by incorporation of opposites. As in when a score contrasts with the movement rather than running in parallel. Much more interesting/powerful.

"hardened brushes, trowels, sticks, and even kitchen staples like basters. He used his wrists, arms, and whole body as he whirled thin streams of paint around the canvas." It might be interesting for you to experiment with some of these objects in sound making...imagine baster mallets. (?!) source.

One other interesting point of relation is his improvisational approach to painting. That you (and when I grow up I will) employ improvisation in your creation of sonic canvas.

Two Things I Like

2004-09-21T13:16:00.000-07:00

Thing One.
I like the term, "non-objective," as in New York City's Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. It's kind-of fallen out of favor. But it isn't the same thing as abstract and I like it better.

Thing Two.
The notion of Pollock's "alloverness, characterized by a rejection of central focus in favor of spreading designs all over the canvas." this came from here.

Full Fathom Five

2004-09-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

One site calls Full Fathom Five the first of the allover drip paintings. You can click on it to see it in all its glory. I think the blue's a bit gaudy. Note the media list below!

1947 (210 Kb); Oil on canvas with nails, tacks, buttons, coins, cigarettes, etc, 129 x 76.5 cm (50 7/8 x 30 1/8 in)

You could read about the painting here.

A Strategy

2004-09-21T11:51:00.000-07:00

a strategy:

paterans (pine cones) - a bread crumb trail --
after first pass at piece, go back and litter a few words throughout. follow ripples outward to modify surrounding words/phrases/lines

Commencement

2004-09-20T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am really excited about starting this collective/collaborative brain dump, smelting furnace, blackboard, launch ramp, scaffolding, sparkplug.

GFW!*

*(Go. Fight. Win.)