alt.SPACE Festival 2007 | London | [1.] Sound.
The alt.SPACE Network of Artist Research Groups [www.altspace.info] >
alt.SPACE Festival 2007: The Revolutionary & The Radical > [1.] Sound
The alt.SPACE Festival 2007, the third annual alt.SPACE Festival, kicks
of with a series of events on the notion of sound within the overall
theme of the festival: ‘The Revolutionary & The Radical’. What are the
possibilities and radical points of departure that lie behind the
intentional production of sound waves? This theme will attempt to engage
with sound on a number of different levels, through theoretical
discourse in the form of presentations and reading groups, but also
through many practical examples of improvisation and listening events
where an emphasis still lies on the discussion/theorisation of the
production of audio and sound work.
General Program:
July 2, 4pm, outside the main gates of Buckingham Palace: The 2nd of
July sees the first of these sound events in the form of a peripatetic
disco traveling between different public sites with a number of DJs
joining both physically and over Skype to present and play pieces of
music and sound art. Contributors to this part of the program includes:
Sam Gould (Portland), Frans Gillberg (Malmö), Dan Wang (Chicago), Tom
Richards (London), Zefrey Throwell (San Francisco), and Johannes
Grenzfurthner (Vienna). The 2nd of July also sees the launch of the
journal alt.SPACE: hardCOPY and the first issue Introduction the
alt.SPACE Network will be available throughout the event. We meet at 4pm
outside the main gates of Buckigham Palace. We’ll be carrying alt.SPACE
Festival signs. Through the afternoon and evening we then move onto the
following destinations: IBM offices on the South Bank (5.30pm), Central
Saint Martins campus in Holborn (7pm), the Barbican (9.30pm), and Old
Street Cemetery (11pm).
July 3, noon onwards, alt.SPACE Radio: The 3rd of July sees the launch
of alt.SPACE Radio with recordings of the previous day’s peripatetic
disco being broadcast from noon onwards. Please visit the alt.SPACE
website – www.altspace.info - to access the player.
July 4, noon onwards, South London Gallery: On the 4th July South London
Gallery will host a series of sound events starting with an informal
breakfast at noon comprising an introductory research presentation by
Ola Stahl followed by a discussion of some of John Coltrane’s work. This
early session is followed by an evening session starting at 4pm which
comprises presentations by Åsa Ståhl and David Stent, followed by a
conversation and discussion based session with Marcel Swiboda, and a
concluding performance by David Stent and two collaborators. As it is
the 4th of July (Independence Day in the US), we end the evening session
by taking part in Red76’s Bring the War Back Home project.
July 5, noon onwards, South London Gallery: On the 5th of July, the
festival continues at South London Gallery with a morning reading group
at noon. The discussion will be based on a reading of Reza Negarestani’s
text ‘The Genealogy of Barbarity music tongue and Writing’. Those who
wish to do so, are encouraged to bring in sound pieces in response to
the text to share and discuss with the group. You can find the text in
the festival reader on:
http://altspace.info/archives/festivalreader.pdf. The evening session,
which starts at 4pm, is set up as a video conference link with a group
meeting in Malmö. Taking a form similar to the All Ears events series
organized by the alt.SPACE listening group, two recorded sound pieces
will be played followed by discussion.
Contributions:
Dan S. Wang is a Chicago-based artist and writer. Previous writings have
appeared in Art Journal, ART asiapacific, Ten by Ten, and New Art
Examiner. His work is included in the Baltimore/Chicago exhibition,
currently on display at the Decker Gallery of the Maryland Institute
College of Art. Wang is also involved with Mess Hall, a performance and
exhibition space/neighborhood center in Chicago's Rogers Park.
Wang’s contribution to the alt.SPACE Festival coincides with an event
he’s organizing at Hyde Park Art Centre in Chicago. As a return of the
long dormant Selections series, the Chicago event incorporates a series
of songs and presentations having to do with politics and feelings,
including feelings of Anxiety, Depression, Apathy, Impatience,
Irritation, Sorrow, Paranoia, Righteousness, Confusion, Inspiration,
Ecstasy, and maybe even a little Outrage. This will be a listening
party/presentation of recorded music mixed in with Wang’s commentary.
Some of the material will be well-known, some remains utterly obscure.
The alt.SPACE Festival will include a parallel event to the one in
Chicago. Wang’s program will be played live mixed in discussion
following the themes outlined for the Chicago presentation.
Marcel Swiboda teaches in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and
Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is a former editor and
current reviews editor of the cultural studies journal parallax and the
co-editor of Deleuze and Music, published by Edinburgh University Press
in 2004. Additionally, he is assistant editor of the Year's Work in
Critical and Cultural Theory. His current research interests are
primarily oriented towards a re-figuring of some of the key conceptual
developments in post-structuralism in relation to music and sound-based
practices. Inspired by the neo-materialist philosophies of Gilles
Deleuze and Félix Guattari, his work seeks in particular to explore a
number of the aesthetic, ethical and political implications deriving
from their work in relation to African-American vernacular musical
cultures, with the main focus on jazz, as well as ‘free’ or
‘non-idiomatic’ musical approaches. His future research will further
develop these ideas in relation to practices of improvisation, in an
attempt to pragmatically ‘sound’ some of the ethical and political
claims of contemporary Cultural Studies.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Marcel Swiboda will take part in a themed
conversation with members from the alt.SPACE organizers group. Although
based on examples and case studies, the conversation will breech issues
to do with the link between musical practice, ethico-aesthetics and
political engagement.
Ola Stahl is an artist, writer and lecturer, and a founding member of
artist collective C.CRED [Collective CREative Dissent]. He received his
BA (Hons) from the School of Cultural Studies at Sheffield Hallam
University and his MA in The Social History of Art with Distinction from
the Department of Fine Art, Art History and Cultural Studies at the
University of Leeds where he also went on to write his doctoral thesis
on an aesthetics of dissention in contemporary collaborative artistic
practice. For two years he was part of the editorial collective of
parallax, an international journal of cultural studies. He has published
several articles, catalogue essays and reviews in international
publications and edited volumes, and as an artist he has shown widely,
both individually and as part of various collaborations, including
biennales and festivals such as BIG Torino 2002: BIG Social Game (Turin:
2002), ISEA (Tallinn/Helsinki: 2004), and Urban Festival (Zagreb: 2005).
Since 2003 he has been lecturing on the Fine Art program at Central
Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts London.
Apart from being a founding member of the alt.SPACE Network of Artist
Research Group, he is currently working on common poetics, a
artistic/theoretical/writing project exploring notions of aesthetics as
synchronic movements of dissention within specific practices and
formations of power.
For the alt.SPACE Festival, Stahl will be presenting a research paper
entitled: 'to blow into the freezing night': John Coltrane's 'Sheets of
Sound' and the Actualization of a Dissentient Potential. The paper
engages with the mode of improvisation, which Coltrane developed in the
late 1950’s for a short period with his own band into the early 1960s,
and that comprised a particular technique where scales are played very
fast, over rapid chord changes and advanced substitutions, so that it
appears as if entire scales, all possible combinations and variations,
are played simultaneously, in a ferocious tempo, rupturing, opening up,
both harmonic and rhythmic lines and patterns to a wider field of
potential. The paper takes this mode of improvisation – what Ira Girtler
once referred to as Coltrane’s ‘sheets of sound’ – as its point of
departure and attempts to explore it in terms of the actualization of
virtual potentials within the context both of Coltrane’s later
developments in modal and free form jazz, and the historical and
socio-political situation in the USA at the time, which saw the
emergence of more radical and militant forms of left-wing and civil
rights activism. Drawing upon the writing of Spinoza, in particular the
relation between the two notions of substantia and potentia, and some of
the ideas around virtuality and actualization put forth by Deleuze and
Guattari, the paper attempts to link Coltrane’s music to this
socio-political terrain not by means of interpretation or historical
determination, but by delineating the site of an expanded aesthetics,
operating through the virtual, through the actualization of virtual
potentials, which is inexorably, albeit at times not obviously, linked
also to a radical ethical and political program.
Åsa Ståhl was born 1976 in Sweden. She is a sound artist who received
her Masters in Radio at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2001
and previously studied political science, ethnology and comparative
literature at Lund University, Sweden. Åsa currently works as an artist,
journalist, lecturer and researcher surrounding issues of storytelling
and participatory situations. Her sound based art has grown out of her
radio journalism practice. She has participated and exhibited her work
at the Wanakio Art Center, Japan, the gallery Sparwasser HQ in Berlin,
the Pixelazo festival in Colombia and the gallery seisporseis in Mexico.
Åsa has been the recipient of IASPIS grants, NIFCA Research Residency,
Finland, and group residency at NKD, Norway. She has been course manager
for Experimental radio production at Malmö university together with her
collaborator Kristina Lindström. Another long-term collaboration is the
sound art group Laika. Tape Salads is an on-going work since 2001. For
more: http://www.misplay.se or http://aok.el-ljud.se
Åsa Ståhl will present her Tape Salad project, a collection of
thrown-away cassette tape that began in 2001 between Hackney and New
Cross in eastern London and has since absorbed audio from locations
across Europe.
Johannes Grenzfurthner is an Austrian artist and member of the Veinna
based art-technology-philosophy group Monochrom
(http://www.monochrom.at). For the alt.SPACE Festival he’s put together
a program of corporate anthems and a presentation entitled The Innermost
Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem which he describes as follows:
The advancement of pre-capitalism (ie. the form of organisation for the
social production of goods and of its distribution) to post-capitalism
(ie. the form of organisation for all social relations in a particular
economical ideology) is seldomly as apparent as in a modern company or
enterprise, the most dominant type of organisation of the
post-capitalist endeavor. The company has taken the place once inhibited
by the factory. The factory thrived on the opposites of worker and
owner. The modern company, however, is built around the core-idea of the
post-antagonostic concept of work itself. The employees have become co-
and sub-entrepreneurs. Yet of course they are not, which becomes evident
when looking at who actually owns the means of production within the
company. The employees however are being turned onto the illusion of
being an active part, even a decision-making part of the "big family" (I
love this company!).
The modern company wants to return to the pre-capitalist crisis of
class-struggle. That means: Contradictions within, and indeed clashes of
interest take a step back behind the curtain of the "community". (A
visit at the Google Campus in Silicon Valley illustrates this concept
drastically). The return to old ideas of community also brings with it
certain forms of rituals, like the usage of a corporate anthem. But
there is no right feel-good in something that is wrong.
Using different historical and current examples (especially from the
area of the hardware/software-industry), I will give a theoretical and
applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate
anthems.
Come and sing along. Power napping is welcome, too.
Tom Richards is a London-based artist and musician working with
minimalism. For the alt.SPACE Festival he will give examples of his own
working practice.
Sam Gould is the lead instigator of the Portland, Oregon based art
collaborative, Red76 (http://www.red76.com). He is a founding key-holder
of MessHall, an experiment social space based out of Chicago, Illinois's
Roger's Park neighborhood. Along with John Vitale he edits the free
publication ".......". In 2006 Gould was nominated for the de Menil
Collection's Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement.
For the alt.SPACE Festival Sam Gould have put together a program of
songs that he will play from his Portland living room. Additionally, the
alt.SPACE Festival will participate in a Fourth of July version of
Red76’s Bring the War Back Home project, which is described as follows:
Since the war in Iraq began in March of 2003 the US media has given the
American public nothing but sugar coated versions of the reality of the
situation on the ground in that country, as well as here at home in
America. The glossing over of the realities of this conflict have led
the general America public, even those who are (seemingly) informed,
engaged, and upset, into a state of numbness and detachment.
With this in mind we encourage you, on this upcoming Fourth of July
(2006), to Bring The War Home. Since we don't get much from the American
media these days we went and looked over the internet and downloaded
video and audio, shot and recorded by US Soldiers in the field, which
they uploaded onto personal blogs and sites like YouTube; footage
chronicling their life in combat in Iraq. We've taken this material and
turned it into a sound collage of the gunfire, explosions, and voices
the public at large is not hearing here at home, but that they, and the
citizens of Iraq, hear day in, and day out.
We encourage you to download this MP3 and, along with any fireworks you
may be lighting off on the Fourth, play it outdoors at your barbecue -
LOUD: play it to remember, and help your neighbors remember, what those
fireworks are meant to symbolize each Fourth of July, and so we can
begin to discuss what we want those fireworks to symbolize on Fourth of
Julys to come.
Zefrey Throwell is a San Francisco based artist who describes himself
and his work as follows:
I am a self-taught artist who learned from looking over the shoulders of
friends. I am attempting to be as honest as I can possibly be. This is
what I think about when people ask me, What is it all about?
I do not think that my paintings or projects depict anything half as
twisted, beautiful, macabre, or hilarious as what the average person
walking down the street thinks about on an hourly basis. We are
murderous folk in our minds! We are loving people in our minds! We are
completely embarrassed and ashamed and we are also proud and generous!
We have these thoughts! Is it not better to get them on paper and start
talking about them and foster a human connection concerning the dark
secrets that we tend to carry? I have personal experience with trying to
bottle this up and it is not pretty. To expect real violence, frothing
emotion, and genuine passion not to make it into the holy wings of art
is worse than naive, it is dishonest. That is no longer the life that I
want to choose.
I make things directly from my heart and without malice. This is the
source. It comes out of me as though I am a channel. I am seeking the
human connection that comes from sharing experiences of one of the more
tender moments of my life with another person. I realize this may
contradict what people are used to seeing when someone says they are
having a spiritual experience when they make art, but I assure you, this
is the true me. Non-ironic and to flying to the heart of the matter,
like a dagger from the best man at your wedding...
My name is Zefrey Throwell. See www.zefrey.com. I am in 4 collectives as
well: Thin Ice Collective, Neighborhood Public Radio, Red 76, Social Record.
Zefrey Throwell is currently traveling around Eastern Europe. For the
alt.SPACE Festival, we’ll hook up over Skype for a program of songs
mixed in with Throwell’s comments.
David Stent. An artist, writer and musician, David Stent is a
contributing editor of Dispatx (http://www.dispatx.com). His previous
work has included prose and poetry projects, video and sound
installations, series of drawings and musical performances. He has
recently been awarded with a three-year research scholarship at the
University of Reading. David also maintains an ongoing interest in free
improvisation and is a member of Oxford Improvisers
(http://www.oxfordimprovisers.com), a collective group of musicians
performing both as individuals and as an improvising orchestra. He hopes
to continue incorporating aspects of this interest into the work of Dispatx.
At the alt.SPACE Festival David Stent will present some of his work and
interests. His presentation will be followed by a performance by Stent
and two of his collaborators.
Frans Gillberg is a producer, soundartist and co-manager of the
electronic music label Komplott in paralell to studies in landscape
architecture. Between 2001 and 2006 he has produced some 30 concerts
(Starfield Simulation #1–#30) at the Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art
and the Scania Park in Malmö. For 2006–2008 he was invited by the city
of Malmö to create a music program for the permanent sound/ music
installation in the Scania Park in the western harbour of Malmö.
For the alt.SPACE Festival he has put together a program of audio work
to be presented at in public spaces within the London housing project
the Barbican.
FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE alt.SPACE FESTIVAL AND NETWORK, AND
FOR DETAILS OF UPCOMING EVENTS, PLEASE VISIT OUR WEBSITE ON:
www.altspace.info.
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