TROGLODISME

After tripping the electrical mains of the whole gallery space, my installation is now to be...

Sat, 26 May 2012 16:32:00 -0400

After tripping the electrical mains of the whole gallery space, my installation is now to be professionally pat tested by the electricians.. How does a pat test work?!

WANTED

Sat, 26 May 2012 08:24:00 -0400

WANTED

Tidying up..

Thu, 24 May 2012 19:03:03 -0400

Tidying up..

getting there (?)…

Thu, 24 May 2012 12:16:00 -0400

getting there (?)…

Microphone shaft?

Mon, 21 May 2012 14:03:00 -0400

Microphone shaft?

Video

Sun, 20 May 2012 09:56:19 -0400

Turning on and off a Roberts FM radio using a Tip 120 transistor...

Wed, 02 May 2012 22:58:56 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Turning on and off a Roberts FM radio using a Tip 120 transistor (first test ever!)

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:45:40 -0400

Work in progress..

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:43:45 -0400

Work in progress..

Daniel Eatcock: Colander + Mirror Ball

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:03:44 -0400

Daniel Eatcock: Colander + Mirror Ball

“What a fuss people make about fidelity” Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 17:04:19 -0400

“What a fuss people make about fidelity” Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde

The Edison will record what you or your friends say, or sing,...

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 09:35:00 -0400

The Edison will record what you or your friends say, or sing, or play and the instantly reproduce it just as clearly and faithfully as the Records you buy are reproduced. This is a feature of the Edison Phonograph you should not overlook. It is entertaining, instructive and practical. You can send your voice to a friend, pre-serve the saying of children, record your progress as a speaker, a singer or a musician. Anyone can make records on an Edison. It requires no special machine. The blank records can be used over and over. Go to any Edison dealer to-day and let him demonstrate this great feature of the Edison Phonograph and when you buy make sure you can an Edison, the instrument that gives you not only the best renditions of the world best entertainers, but also the opportunity for home record making.

Edison Phonograph advertisement in the Saturday Evening Post, 12 NOV 1910. See: http://www.jstor.org/stable/742520.

“Questo è un vecchio nastro…” from La Dolce...

Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:55:17 -0500

“Questo è un vecchio nastro…” from La Dolce Vita - Federico Fellini (1960)

Absolut Quartet (2008) by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska,...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:44:00 -0500

Absolut Quartet (2008) by Jeff Lieberman and Dan Paluska, february 2008

Watchlist: The Day the Earth Stood Still,...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:24:00 -0500

Watchlist: The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043456/

Max Neuhaus: Sound Art?

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 14:39:00 -0500

From the early 1980s on there have been an increasing number of exhibitions at visual arts institutions that have focused on sound. By 1995 they had become almost an art fad. These exhibitions often include a subset (sometimes even all) of the following: music, kinetic sculpture, instruments activated by the wind or played by the public, conceptual art, sound effects, recorded readings of prose or poetry, visual artworks which also make sound, paintings of musical instruments, musical automatons, film, video, technological demonstrations, acoustic reenactments, interactive computer programs which produce sound, etc. In short, ‘Sound Art’ seems to be a category which can include anything which has or makes sound and even, in some cases, things which don’t.

Sometimes these ‘Sound Art’ exhibitions do not make the mistake of including absolutely everything under the sun, but then most often what is selected is simply music or a diverse collection of musics with a new name. This is cowardly.

When faced with musical conservatism at the beginning of the last century, the composer Edgard Varese responded by proposing to broaden the definition of music to include all organized sound. John Cage went further and included silence. Now even in the aftermath of the timid ‘forever Mozart decades’ in music, our response surely cannot be to put our heads in the sand and call what is essentially new music something else – ‘Sound Art’.

I think we need to question whether or not ‘Sound Art’ constitutes a new art form. The first question, perhaps, is why we think we need a new name for these things which we already have very good names for. Is it because their collection reveals a previously unremarked commonality?

Let’s examine the term. It is made up of two words. The first is sound. If we look at the examples above, although most make

or have sound of some sort, it is often not the most important part of what they are – almost every activity in the world has an aural component. The second word is art. The implication here is that they are not arts in the sense of crafts, but fine art. Clearly regardless of the individual worth of these various things, a number of them simply have little to do with art.

It’s as if perfectly capable curators in the visual arts suddenly lose their equilibrium at the mention of the word sound. These same people who would all ridicule a new art form called, say, ‘Steel Art’ which was composed of steel sculpture combined with steel guitar music along with anything else with steel in it, somehow have no trouble at all swallowing ‘Sound Art’.

In art, the medium is not often the message.

If there is a valid reason for classifying and naming things in culture, certainly it is for the refinement of distinctions. Aesthetic experience lies in the area of fine distinctions, not the destruction of distinctions for promotion of activities with their least common denominator, in this case sound. Much of what has been called ‘Sound Art’ has not much to do with either sound or art.

With our now unbounded means to shape sound, there are, of course, an infinite number of possibilities to cultivate the vast potential of this medium in ways which do go beyond the limits of music and, in fact, to develop new art forms. When this becomes a reality, though, we will have to invent new words for them. ‘Sound Art’ has been consumed.

Max Neuhaus

(First published as an introduction to the exhibition “Volume: Bed of Sound”, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, July 2000.)

Joseph Herscher

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 07:17:09 -0500

Joseph Herscher

Donate!

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 17:43:21 -0500

Donate!

Bartholomäus Traubeck’s Years (2011) “The foundation...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:58:00 -0500

Bartholomäus Traubeck’s Years (2011)

“The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.”

Video

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 07:01:00 -0500

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]