Sunday, December 7, 2008
Thursday, December 4, 2008
so i was thinking . . .
What if during a show opening at a gallery or a museum everyone who entered the show was given a wireless microphone. All the microphones would be fed into a computer that would recognize the words and then display the words like this or this or some other form of data visualization, on a giant monitor in another room. According to a word's frequency it could grow in size, change hue or rise to the top. Or it could take another form altogether, like a bubble or a 3d object that would be extruded. Or it could grow something like this. A visual verbal petri dish of instant criticism.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Monday, November 24, 2008
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Saturday, November 22, 2008
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
filed under the category of conceptual work that i’ve been thinking about for a long time, but have recently rethought
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| saw this the other day on ffffound |
A number of years ago I thought about taking the college hoops scores — published in agate in the sports section — and turning the page sideways to superimpose a music staff over the scores. Where the scores meet the staff a note would be placed. The process would encompass the whole season, with each day equaling one measure and it would be purely percussive.
Last May I read an article in the New Yorker entitled Letter from Alaska: Song of the Earth about American composer John Luther Adams and a piece of work he created based on real time “information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.”
This sounded really great, since I’ve always been partial to new approaches to music. For myself, like Mr. Adams (and this is where the similarity ends), it started with Zappa (but for me it was “Absolutely Free”), then it was Satie and Milhaud, then Partch (wish his “Castor and Pollux” was on iTunes), Cage, ECM artists like Marion Brown and Azimuth, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Carl Stallings, Steve Reich and the list goes on.
Their exploration of music is why I now gravitate toward listening to world music ... so many approaches and varieties of sound that are way more interesting to me than most popular music except Tom Waits and Beck.
And just the other day I found sniff_jazzbox, a free iPhone app that converts wlan-waves into sound waves, so with wi-fi enabled, you can ride the bus or walk through your neighbor and let the app find all the hotspots and convert them to music. Within the app there is the ability to change instruments and the speed at which each instrument is played. There are also themes that have preset instrument groupings. You can find out more about it here. It is a great idea and provides another interesting approach to music.
Anyway, back to the New Yorker article. When Mr. Adams spoke of flying out of Alaska and his love of the geography, the place, I started thinking about converting topography into sound. While I’ve produced innumerable Tour de France, Giro and Vuelta stage profiles in the past, the thought had never occurred of taking a profile of the land and superimposing it onto a music staff until reading the article.
Here are the basic thoughts ... if anyone out there knows of something like this already in existence, please let me know.
The profiles I’ve done are crude, elevation increments of 500 feet. Better geographic data and plotting could help determine where the notes are placed based on the interaction of the profile and the staff. In other words, a note could be placed at every five or ten feet of vertical elevation change, or a note could be placed where the intersection occurs every five or ten feet horizontally.
Measures could be based on geography as well, through x number of miles from the locus — either equidistant or logarithmically. Movements could be going to or from the center. Additional cardinal points could also come into play.
Sunday, November 16, 2008
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
landscape series | part II | june 2008
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| basalt |
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| dogwoods |
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| bear in wildflowers near two mesas under a peeling sky |
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