Archive for category artists
All sound on Voice originates from Maja Ratkje’s throat…
BBC Review
All sound on Voice originates from Maja Ratkje’sthroat…
Colin Buttimer 2003-04-07
Voice begins and ends with glacial figures from ambient Aphex territory. At the end these figures are succeeded by silence, at the beginning they’re interrupted by elfin voices. Events quickly become unpredictable, unsettling, scary, as if small creatures had stolen into your skull and were busying themselves spitting out stray words, oaths, nonsense. It’s as though Laurie Anderson’s vocoder had been infected by a gleefully disruptive software virus.
“Joy” continues and diversifies into a chorus of different voices; strong and gentle, idiotic and innocent, whispering and cajoling, humming and screaming. On one hand there’s evident joy in the sound of words, of sounds all made possible by one set of vocal chords. On the other hand, whole histories of persecution justified by accusations of insanity, witchcraft, etc are also conjured. There’s a sense of patrolling and transgressing the boundaries of the known, of questioning sanity (perhaps in the best traditions of Dada). Listening to Voice is like occupying the head of somebody experiencing multiple personalities.
“Trio” fires off explosive screeches and spits, spats, strangled laughter, duck quacks, raging screams, evoking human beatboxes, cartoon violence (think Carl Stalling cut up and reflected in a kaleidoscope).
“Vacuum” clicks and crackles in the emptiness. Whorls of sound grow in volume only to be interrupted by breathtaking breathlessness, breathiness, breath caught and expelled, the breathy, quiet sound of near tears, of trying to breathe which is succeeded by a passage of spooked, echoing beauty.
All sound on Voice originates from Maja Ratkje’sthroat, though it has been much manipulated, processed, torn, stretched, pitch-shifted and who knows what else. The human voice is as close to home as an instrument can be and the impression of this music is of naked immediacy despite its manipulation. But that immediacy does not result in yet another restatement of the known but in revelations of strangeness, of travels beyond the known.
The cover of the cdshows Maja Ratjke’s face. She might be assumed to be sunk in meditation but on listening to her music a new possibility arises: instead of peacefulness, the suspicion increases that the closed eyes and mouth signify containment or communication with spirits, or a state much stranger, less quantifiable still. I look at the picture and fully expect the face to animate at any moment into a grimace, snarl, cry, smile, plea…
Make them our own…
David Rokerby
“I created the work (Very Nervous System 1986-1990) for many reasons, but perhaps the most pervasive reason was a simple impulse towards contrariness. The computer as a medium is strongly biased. And so my impulse while using the computer was to work solidly against these biases. Because the computer is purely logical, the language of interaction should strive to be intuitive. Because the computer removes you from your body, the body should be strongly engaged. Because the computer’s activity takes place on the tiny playing fields of integrated circuits, the encounter with the computer should take place in human-scaled physical space. Because the computer is objective and disinterested, the experience should be intimate.”
In Disembodied States: Vision, the Body and the Virtual
“As I engage in the process of thinking through our fascination – and sometimes revulsion – with the machines we have made and now want to imbue with consciousness – that is to make them our own, to make them the same as us – a number of questions come to mind. What philosophical systems shape our prohibitions and projections about the virtual worlds we inhabit?”
Longplayer
Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.
Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, London, where it has been playing since it began. It can also be heard at several other listening posts around the world, and globally via a live stream on the Internet.
more artists: time-based abstract compositions + maths
Robert Fairthorne and Brian Salt Equation X+X=0 1936
5 minutes. Collection: BFI National Film & Television Archive
more))
camile utterbacks's interactive installations
http://www.camilleutterback.com/untitled5.html
http://www.brown.edu/Research/dichtung-digital/2006/01/Dorin/index.htm
Camile Utterbacks’s Interactive Installations from GAFFTA on Vimeo.
Utterback’s innovative fusion of visual and physical, hand crafted and technological, is closely aligned with the early experiments of Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter, and Walter Ruttman who, armed with new moving-image technologies, abandoned static painting and looked instead to animation or “living abstraction.”
informants #1
Biosensers and feedback systems
http://nagasm.suac.net/ASL/NIME03/index.html
Processing visualisation ideas
200 Nanowebbers from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Realtime interactive psychedelic fluid simulation with processing
Pi @ Glastonbury
Samadhi: Documentary of a Human Soul
Jordan Belsonhas made me want to get my yoga practice in shape and rather than wire up someone else, wire myself up…
For two years, from 1966 through 1967, assisted by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Belson subjected himself to a rigorously ascetic Yoga discipline. He severed emotional and family ties, re-duced physical excitements and stimulations (not going to go that far), reversed his sensory process to focus exclusively on his inner consciousness and physical resources. Samadhi evokes the ecstatic state achieved by the meditator where individual consciousness merges with the Universal.
“I hoped that somehow the film could actually provide a taste of what the real experience of samadhi might be like. It’s a 
documentary of the human soul, The experiences which led up to the production of this film, and the experiences of making it, totally convinced me that the soul is an actual physical entity, not a vague abstraction or symbol. I was very pleased when I finally saw how concentrated, how intense, Samadhi is because I knew I had achieved the real substance of what I was trying to depict. Natural forces have that intensity: not dreamy but hard, ferocious. After it was finished I felt I should have died. I was rather amazed when I
didn’t.”
What we “know” conceptually has far outstripped what we experience empirically. We are finally beginning to accept the fact that our senses allow us to perceive only one-millionth of what we know to be reality—the electromagnetic spectrum. Ninety-nine percent of all vital forces affecting our life is invisible. Most of the
fundamental rates of change can’t be apprehended sensorially.