Diagonal Thoughts

This is kind of an addition to my Minimalist post, which focussed on a series of used-to-be-obscure recording of so-called “minimal” music. Thanks to New World Records – who have also reissued pearls by the likes of Julius Eastman and Peter Zummo – another “lost classic” has been given a new life: ‘KMH – Piano Music in the Continuous Mode’, Lubomyr Melnyk’s debut album from 1979. According to Wikipedia Melnyk “pioneered ‘continuous music’ which employs extremely rapid arpeggios of varying duration, repeated with the sustain pedal to generate overtones and sympathetic resonances. These overtones blend or clash according to the harmonic change in the arpeggios according to a harmony based on Melnyk’s personal geometric models and often create a sombre, stately effect. He is also the fastest pianist in the world, sustaining speeds of over 19.5 notes per second in each hand. In addition he has the record for most number of notes played in one hour with 93,650 individual notes played.” His music has been described by critics as ”the play of atoms bouncing around at supersonic speeds!”. On his personal website (tagline: “first there came Franz Lizst ….. then came LUBOMYR (-: ), it is explained that Melnyk’s Continuous Music is “based on the principle of a ‘continuous’ and unbroken line of sound from the piano — this is created by generating a constant flow of rapid (at times EXTREMELY rapid) notes, usually with the pedal sustained non-stop. The notes can be either in the form of patterns or as broken chords that are spread over the keyboard. To accomplish this requires a special technique, one that usually takes years to master — this technique is the very basis of the meditative and ‘metaphysical’ aspects within the music and the art of the piano.” Although Melnyk’s earlier music was generally classified as ”Minimalism”, Melnyk prefers to call his music ”MAXIMALism”, since the player has to generate so many, many notes to create these ”Fourth Dimensions of Sound”. On the site it also states that “people have often said that, during live performances, they heard trumpets, horns, entire string orchestras emanating from the piano … for Melnyk’s music turns the piano into a veritable orchestra of sound”. Unfortunately, according to Melnyk this sound experience is lost in the digital processing, since the overtones no longer can live freely in their high dimensions, but are, as he puts it, ”plucked out like random feathers off a chicken, leaving the once so beautifully feathered surface, splotched and scabbed with tiny sores” (see here for more explanation). But anyways, here’s some samples…

This is part 5 of ‘KHM’ (available here for try-outs)
[audio:http://chicago1.binarybooty.com/x/$vzQQnzdUunBkn6SnbBdS8tgKCg4crfSo/061dd01aa6/05 – Lubomyr Melnyk – five kmh.mp3]

Also check out this sample of his ‘Voice of Trees’ (1985), a great piece for 3 Tubas and 2 Pianos, composed for choreographer/dancer Kilina Cremona. (available here for try-outs).
[audio:http://www.lubomyr.com/musik/VcOfTrees.%20Pt2-%20B.mp3]

Melnyk is still active, by the way. Here’s an interview he did in March this year, on the occassion of a concert he gave in Halifax. Time to get this man over here…

Update: here’s another interview, conducted by Jon Mueller.

“What’s that sound? Is it a noise? Does it bother you? Do you take this sound personally? Can you take a sound or just listen to it? Why interpret? Is it less dangerous? Scary? Impersonal? Why do you want to know the source of this sound? Are you concentrating? On listening? Are you bored? Are you interested?”
— Jeph Jerman

Check out this brand new blog made by a few buddies of mine: Pieter-Paul Mortier (Artefact) and Dave Driesmans (Kraak). Together they started up Displaced Sounds, initially a series of performances and presentations in which “unexpected sounds, exciting evenings where listening and hearing are the keywords. Even before we are born, we are affected by noise invading our safe and quiet space. We are surrounded by sounds that define the rhythm of our world. Artists and researchers will guide you through the labyrinth of sounds that constitute our daily lives”. The aponymous blog documents their research.

(image: Simon Elvins’ ‘Silent London’ project)

“The blood thing is the only thing you really have to know to understand capitalism. The Vampire can’t act without the blood, and he can’t keep it. He doesn’t feed on the blood in a way that he would ever be full. He’s thirsty all the time. Because, as you know, he’s already dead.”
– ‘On Blood and Wings. A Study in the Dark Side of Cooperation’

For those of you who appreciated my post on Christoph Spehr & Jörg Windszus’ On Rules and Monsters (2004), here’s the “sequel”, produced in 2006. It’s about the multitude battling capitalism. Giving a vampire twist to Marx in unveiling the crucial mechanism of capitalism (“to make more and more blood out of blood”), it shows the problems of the Multitude fighting the vampires to conquer capitalism towards a free and just society. The video is compiled of footage from a dozen different vampire movies, by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Robert Wiene, Paul Morrissey, Patrick Lussier, Stephen Summers, Michael Rymer, Terence Fisher, Michael Sellers, Len Wiseman, Abel Ferrara and Tommy Lee Wallace. Just like in ‘On Rules and Monsters’ the narration is by Tony Conrad. The clip can be downloaded here, the full transcipt is here.

Benjamin Godsill on Joy Garnett‘s ‘Kill Box’ (2001):

“Thanks to digital imaging, representations of violent conflict are often cleansed of real violence to real bodies: night vision, GPS, laser-guided bombs, and satellite imagery replace images of the violent destruction of actual bodies. Amid the actual obliteration of real bodies, war is waged on the level of the virtual and visual. As Retort formulates, the disconnection of images from systems of meaning-making increases their powers of social control; images acquire the ability to inscribe ideologies, ways of seeing the world, and viewpoints onto subjects when the gulf between the actual and the representation widens. With this growth, the ideological formulations supporting the construction, editing, broadcast, and reception of images increase in agency, as these functions connect image and event.

Joy Garnett’s painting Kill Box (2001) acts to deconstruct the hegemonic links between image and event. Garnett remediates one of the many techno-fetishist visual representations of the first Gulf War, hand-painting a tank in the digital target area–or kill box–that (presumably) a pilot has used to launch the missile seen blowing it apart. Garnett’s low-res style and palette loosely recalls the electronic green and ghostly white of the night vision technologies used by American forces in that conflict, whose images were then broadcast worldwide to signify American technological superiority. Representations of the Gulf War (a conflict that relied on digital technologies for both its execution and for the live feed of its images on global news) were overwhelmingly like the one in Kill Box. They were rendered from the point of view of machines that were designed and used to harm bodies, their night vision and infra-red points of view incapable of representing real physical bodies being destroyed yet masterful at creating cleansed, video-game-like war images to be beamed into living rooms…”

This works reminds me of some recent exhibited paintings by Luc Tuymans (Against the Day expo), ‘sniper’ and ‘bridge’, so-called ‘authentic falsifications’ of war images he found online.

“Sniper is the fabrication of a meta-reality. It is the instant image of a real hit from a sharpshooter at the moment of striking his target in Bagdad. By pure coincidence, while surfing the web I came across this image that was later deleted and replaced by simulated computer games bearing the same title. The intention of this work is to fully revert back to the idea of the impact, and the immediacy; here, the view is diverted to the idea of the deed”. About ‘bridge’: “Like in Sniper, there is also a limited field of vision here, or how an access route becomes visible by a night watchman: a sort of tunnel vision where only the shining parts, the headlights of oncoming cars, result in blind spots; distance and speed become abstracted.”
A quote from an interview with Art World: “the image clearly goes to the ground, spiraling down. The show presents the idea of an end, showing things as raw material, dispersed and disjointed, simultaneously offering more and more propositions, but basically going nowhere. It is the world as we know it.”

Katrin Kaschadt on Thomas Ruff’s night photographs

“Thomas Ruff first exhibited the large-sized photographs of his Night series in 1992 at documenta IX. Up until 1995 about 40 pictures followed each depicting a different location. The serial treatment but also the large format both feature in Ruff’s previous works, his Portraits, Houses, Stars or Newspaper Portraits. Moreover, the topic ‘architecture’ emerges several years earlier – wholly in the tradition of his teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher. What makes the night photos different is Ruff’s employment of a new, unusual method which relies on the so-called ‘available-light amplifier’. The infra-red low-level light device enables the human eye to detect objects in intense darkness by amplifying the available light electrons which are normally insufficient to allow this. In other words, the shots depict what would normally be invisible to the eye.

By using an optical device which became known through its use in the Gulf War, Ruff stirs memories of the green pictures shown in news reports – not only evoking the military context and the specific historical event, but also the special media dimension particular to this war. This was the first time in history that the media was supplied with censored photographs of the theater of war on such a scale. Since the images on the computer screens of the military decision-makers are identical to those on the domestic TV screen, the actual events coincide with their presentation by the media: The viewer is directly confronted with the events presented to him/her. Yet what might have constituted an essential instrument to soldiers in the war, appears to the viewer in his/her living room as mere ‘second-hand reality’ prepared by the media; it is a means of satisfying his/her curiosity. Consequently, the night scene becomes a critical statement on the voyeurism of the Western TV viewer.

That said, Ruff does not show any pictures from the Gulf War but separates the technology from its war context by employing the infra-red device in city scenes set in his native Düsseldorf. Nevertheless, the original military context is transferred to the new environment. The green cast combined with the slight, foggy blur as well as the focus on the illuminated, usually central picture section transform the familiar scenes to suspicious locations of strategic military importance. The medium reveals itself to be a vehicle of interpretation..”

“It was like the Discovery Channel – her eyes were gleaming and she looked like a nocturnal marsupial, or a sexual emu.”
– Justin Long about the Paris Hilton sextape (the night vision – or “Paris Hilton vision” – one)

A few more thoughts in the context of a little program I’m chewing on, titled ‘Night Vision’. I recently stumbled on this piece by Graham Gussin, ‘Dark Light Piece (Night of the Living Dead)’, for which he used a piece of technology that measures the luminosity in each frame of Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead ‘(1968). “The film becomes abstracted, translating the action, figures and narrative into a strange landscape of green material”. Like the thermic camera, used by Philippe Grandrieux in ‘La Nouvelle Vie’ (see previous post) the technology Gussin used uncovers what Akira Mizuta Lippit describes as a “secret visuality” – just like the X-ray photography, “a mysterious ray a figure for the body of a new form of light that yielded a new visibility, a modern form of light and its transmission that permeated the twentieth century.” X-rays not only unveiled the hidden structures behind the living skin, but also drew attention to the fact that the light waves which render us capable of seeing are but a small part of the spectrum of existing light. These two revelations are both encapsulated in the double meaning of the word “invisible” – that which can’t be seen because it is hidden, and that which can’t be seen because it exists outside of the domain of human perception (read Jasper Sharp’s review of Lippit’s book ‘Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)’).

New technology influences not just our perception but also our physical being. Jordan Crandell is one of the artists who deal with the new paradigms of seeing and being. His work ‘Heatseeking’ (1999-2000), for example, is a series of 7 films shot in the San Diego/Tijuana border region, centered around the problems created by the border situation and the surveillance methods used there, as well as the increasing militarization of the human gaze. “In ‘Heatseeking (Course Track)’ two golf players meet to tee off on the golf course at night. Alone in the darkness they play their game observed by a camera with night vision technology. In this strange scenery, the camera alternates between the tension-filled game between the two players and the golf course’s expanse. Camera shots of the golf players in this location alternate with shots from surveillance cameras and computer-controlled search programs which makes the two protagonists appear as if they are in the system’s target-finding zone. Quite unexpectedly, one of the players hits his opponent with his golf club – a fight ensues, they roll around on the ground while the camera attempts to follow them. Almost imperceptibly, aggression switches over into ambivalent eroticism. The video ends abruptly in a sequence of quick film cuts and breaks which looks as if the film has ripped. Crandall has perfected the use of a broad range of film methods in Heatseeking. With rapidly changing camera angles, B/W and color changes, and the use of various levels of media, the observer is confronted with a flood of images which he is hard put to process. The soundtrack heightens the surreality of the night-time golf course scene – in place of the expected swish of flying golf balls Crandall has used sound material from weapons in action, underlying the latent aggressive undertones” (Sabine Himmelsbach).

The military visualization images used by Crandall are those with which we are all familiar from the media coverage of modern wars. A prominent example is the Gulf War which was followed on television world-wide and whose images of military high-tech operations engraved themselves in the minds of viewers. Devices which were developed for military purposes have long since infiltrated the consumer market. Switching from normal image to infrared is now a common feature of video cameras and this is enjoying ever-greater popularity -it’s also a big thing in games, see image. The way we see is being altered by technical aids – these ways of generating images are increasingly defining our perception. Vilém Flusser wrote: “We see everything as if we were constantly looking through a camera.” Crandall himself speaks of “militarized images”. “Tracking, targeting and identifying formats begin to seep into the way we see, behave, and desire. They enter into the very structure of perception. The camera marks the place of battle.”

Crandall targets the power dynamics around contemporary moving images: “sites where body and senses are adjusted, oriented, ‘armed,’ and contoured within complex new formats of movement.” Modern technology constructs the body of the viewer anew. “There is a kind of mutation of images that occur in this landscape, in that images become part of processing systems, parts of apparatus that “see back” at us. It involves a kind of reversal of vision, displacing our location as privileged sites in the viewing exchange. We are seen, before we see. We are identified, before we identify. There are biometric systems, and other kinds of systems, which lock onto you, identify you through your behaviour patterns or biological characteristics. It is a kind of switching of positions, and this is a very important change to think about.”