Friday, May 21, 2010

Gregory Taylor @ FMI /MAY 17TH 2010


It was nice to have a lecture and studio visit with American performer/composer and cycling 74 accomplice, Gregory Taylor yesterday. The visit started with a lunchtime concert in studio A7 (photo: top left to right, bottom) with myself, adapted mandolin; Greg, laptop; and Kasper, re-appropriated and homemade instruments. The topic of his lecture centered on data control structures. I will say, he is not one to hold back; even after the lecture, he was forth-coming with suggestions and ideas for approaching musical ideas. Thanks to Jan for organizing the visit. (And thanks De Fenestrated for posting.)

GREGORY TAYLOR EXTENDS THE REACH OF AMBIENT IMPROV
The world is full of musicians who can humble us with their ability to play for really long periods of time,” says mixologist and producer Gregory Taylor, explaining his fascination with Indian ragas and Indonesian tonal systems — just two of the many musical forms that propel his creative flow. “One of the great gifts of experimental music of the 1960s, and John Cage in particular, was the idea that what makes a piece of music meaningful is the contemplation of it. And in the last decade or so, the arrival of wholesale access to non-Western music also gave us the great gift of discovery that this wasn't our idea.”

A veteran of the indie “cassette culture” craze in the '80s, and a tireless musical traveler (with a weekly radio show on Madison's WORT-FM that has aired since 1986), Taylor knows a thing or two about the regenerative power of sound. His mastery of Cycling '74's Max/MSP opened the door for his contribution to another one of that company's products: Radial, a loop-based performance suite (since discontinued) developed by John Eichenseer. Taylor has used the program to stunning effect on a recent spate of releases: The Desert Fathers: Coptic Icons (pfMentum, 2007), recorded live with trumpeter Jeff Kaiser; PGT's Temporary Habitations (Loochtone, 2008), featuring mandolinist Terry Pender and programmer Brad Garton; and Taylor's solo outings, Amalgam: Aluminum/Hydrogen (Palace of Lights, 2007) and Two Maps of Danaraja (Stasisfield, 2008).

“I've found that the simplest thing you can do to sound different from everybody else is to make your own loops,” Taylor explains. “Radial matches my sensibility because it's something that I can play with from zero as soon as I walk onstage. I tend to start with nothing when I play live — on The Desert Fathers, there might have been some filtered shortwave broadcasts or some water in a bathtub or something — and I do that because a lot of my work is informed by Indonesian tradition. With electronic instruments, it's easier to manage timbre if you work with just intonational variants of Indonesian tunings.”

In his solo outings, Taylor explores the subtle timbral variations of the Indonesian gamelan ensemble with an even more drawn-out ambient approach; ringing sonic textures gradually morph and “breathe” to reveal new elements or to build on a haunting theme. In his collaborations, Taylor often delves into Radial's ability to cut up and rearrange samples in real time, adding a glitchlike rhythmic quality to his soundscapes.

“We're essentially designing big structures that we steer by using a single control,” Taylor notes. “Instead of thinking about doing music that's about change, you do it about the rate of change. Instead of controlling a filter all the time, for example, the filter slewing is essentially under some other piece of control, and I'm controlling something else that controls that as a side effect.”

As with any experimental music that's improvised almost entirely live, the end result does involve some risk. But when it comes to working in a group, the approach has its rewards. “There's not a performance tradition for using laptops,” Taylor says. “I was afraid when I started working with other people that I wouldn't be able to adapt to that. And at a certain point, you realize that working in a community gives you the opportunity to fail. But the upside is that I've found myself in situations where I can play with people who are my friends. How does it get better than that?”

Home base: Madison, Wisconsin
Primary software: Cycling '74 Max/MSP and Radial (on an Apple MacBook Pro), Audio Ease Altiverb
Audio interface: Apogee Duet
Web site: rtqe.net

Termtutor iME Gerald Van Der Kaap (spring term)


TITLE: Hover Hover
ARTIST: Gerald van der Kaap
WORK DATE: 1991
CATEGORY: Photographs
MATERIALS: Cibachrome, dibond, wood
EDITION/SET OF: 3/4
SIZE: h: 49.2 x w: 54.7 in / h: 125 x w: 138.9 cm

Gerald Van Der Kaap
Opleiding
Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten St. Joost, Breda (1978-1980)
Prijzen
Singerprijs 2007

Gerald Van Der Kaap is een van de belangrijkste Nederlandse kunstenaars, en een grondlegger van het gebruik van nieuwe media in de beeldende kunsten. Hij is sinds 1993 veelgevraagd vj in vele binnen- en buitenlandse clubs. Van Der Kaap begon zijn loopbaan als fotograaf en uitgever van het tijdschrift Zien (1980-1986). Hij kreeg in 1991 een eerste solo-tentoonstelling in het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (Hover Hover), waarna vele tentoonstellingen volgden in binnen- en buitenlandse galeries en musea.

Zijn werk is vaak gepresenteerd tijdens evenementen zoals Heineken Night Live in AHOY Rotterdam met een symfonieorkest van 80 man (1999), en in bekende Amsterdamse gelegenheden, zoals Club RoXY en Chemistry. Vanaf 2000 organiseert hij maandelijks State of Bliss, een experimentele clubavond in samenwerking met DJ´s Dimitri en 100% Isis.

In 1996 kreeg Gerald Van Der Kaap de Capilux Alblas Prijs voor zijn hele oeuvre. Naar aanleiding hiervan verscheen de monografie Wherever you are on this planet, met een overzicht van zijn werk tot dan toe (Uitgeverij 1001). Het werk van Van Der Kaap is vastgelegd op tape, dvd en cd-rom, en is ook terug te vinden op zijn website www.geraldvanderkaap.com.

-Pauline Terreehorst, 2001

Gerald Van Der Kaap
Gerald Van Der Kaap was born in Enschede, the Netherlands, in 1959.
He studied at Academie voor beeldende Kunsten St. Joost, Breda.
From 1980 until 1989 he worked as an editor and publisher for different magazines.
He has carried out several commissioned art projects. He also works as VJ and is the creator of an “automatic veejay machine” at club 013 in the South of Holland.
He has also worked as a producer of art visual magazines such as Zien (1980-86) and Blind (1989).
He currently works on a number of assignments and projects which have/will become public shows in the Netherlands.
He’s been awarded Capi-Lux Alblas prize in 1996.

Gerald Van Der Kaap is one of the world’s leading media artists whose work has caused considerable controversy.

Passing the Information (II) is the sequel to a project of the same name, which Van Der Kaap presented in 2002 in Xiamen, China. Van Der Kaap spent three months as artist in residence at the University of Xiamen, a fast growing city on the South China Coast. According to officials, Xiamen is not only the most beautiful but also the cleanest city in China. For his exhibition in Xiamen, Van Der Kaap rebuilt a classroom with traditional Chinese school desks. A white surface was installed as a type of blackboard on which the artist projected video portraits of students he made acquaintance with. Passing the Information does not present teachers in front of the classroom, but students watching students telling jokes or students looking into the camera with a penetrating gaze. In this setting, the entirety of Chinese hierarchy and authority is temporarily neutralized, if not nullified. Without solicitation, Van Der Kaap also organized an outdoor party where he was both VJ and DJ. More than 1000 young people attended the party, which was the first of its kind in China.

Part Two consists of a series of works that result from a rigid, almost formal direction. The works explore situations in and around the campus and demonstrate an outstanding quality. They reside in a liminal zone between reality and fiction. The works are neither wholly documentary in nature nor illusions of narcissistic dreams. They are more a reflection of an engaged approach in which people are not models or actors, but participants. No commitment is implied, but Van Der Kaap aims to stimulate, or as he describes it, “pass on information.”

If Part One can be qualified as a “Manifestation,” Part Two is certainly a “Manifesto.” According to Van Der Kaap, “these are temporary and autonomous actions. Yet in one way or another they seem to bear consequence in the spheres outside photography. In China at least, they seem to interfere in their reality. Why specifically there? Maybe because such turbulent changes are taking place in China at this time. This work requires a totally new culture…"

The leading roles in Passing the Information are interpreted by three Chinese girls: Fang, Limei and Weiwei. Any real-life resemblances is merely coincidental. They play themselves, other people, and their own dreams. Van der Kaap has kept the hundreds of sms-messages and diary notes that he received from China via e-mail for a future publication or film. He may use this material when he returns to Shanghai to make a short film. As the artist said himself, "This is a work-in-progress. The making of as well as the meaning of the work change in time and through passing …let’s make it easy… the information."
Bart Vanderbeken

www.geraldvanderkaap.com

KVH Live @ FMI May 17th, 2010

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Enoch Cheung @ Blindspot Gallery

Blindspot Gallery
Blindspot Gallery is set up to bring contemporary photography, an art form that has entered the blind spot of the Hong Kong art market, to a higher degree of visibility and through its quality exhibitions, provide its audience a different level of stimulation. Blindspot Gallery focuses predominantly on contemporary photography. Being one of a small number of galleries in Hong Kong committed to this area, we see increasing appreciation, understanding and popularity of contemporary photography as its major missions. We feature both established and emerging photographers and artists, mainly from the region but not limited to.

A gallery space on Aberdeen Street near Hollywood Road in Central, opposite to the former Police Married Quarters soon to be re-opened for art and cultural exhibitions. The gallery hosts approximately 6-8 exhibitions a year


Enoch Cheung

Artist Statement

About ‘Secret dialogue: about children hospital’ (2009)
‘Secret dialogue: about children hospital’ contains a dual screen High Definition video and a series of panoramic images, about the Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children in Hackney that was closed down in 1997. After the hospital was closed down, there were burglar and passer-by entering the hospital without permission, now the site is guarded by security. For more than ten years, the empty site intertwined with the history of the children patients, the hospital staff and the interlopers. The remains from people establish certain hidden dialogue.
Hide Full Statement...
About the video
The image and the use of effect are simply ‘triggers’ of the thinking of the past and of the compressed childhood life from an empty site that was abandoned. The video attempted to by ‘triggering’ viewer’s short-term memory, then to explore individual value about life and death.
About the photography
Time seems frozen at the site, but subtly mixed with different interferences by different people at different time. The linear installation of the images leads the audience to witness the interlacing timelines of the history of the hospital.