J. describing learning lines for the Sight is the Sense monologue, during a camping trip in Mexico. Lain sleepless in the desert, in the pitch darkness of a tent next to his daughter, using his cell phone to highlight the text - each brief illumination of the phone's screen enough time for him to read just one line, after which he'd lie there and repeat the phrase again and again, before pressing the keypad once more to find the next part. Piece by piece, the whole emerging, in green insomniac light, and silent repetition.
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A friend wrote:
The meeting was a little strange, they all seemed to be really tired and half ill from all the work..
(The idea of traveling far to a meeting and on arrival finding the place very odd – the people pale, listless, the windows shut. The managing director comes out briefly but the light seems to hurt his eyes. The presentations by his underlings are nervous, distracted, unfocused. On leaving the traveller sees that the secretary has fallen asleep at her typwriter table.)
(Thinking for some reason of Herzog's Heart of Glass with all the hypnotized performers.)
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Excerpt from forthcoming M.E. Smith autobiography Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith at The Guardian here. No doubt The Fall are the greatest band since war-time living memory etc, and as lyricist/all round difficult bastard Smith has few rivals. Perhaps because he long ago applied the cut-up technique to his own brain means that as an interview subject - or here as supposedly relaible/ 'realistic' self-portrait artist - he's not always as sharp or as insightful as his persona/s. Might trust Roman Totale's version more than this one. Some great touches though, esp Smith's childhood game 'Japanese Prisoner of War Camp'.
Vlatka and I are showing our collaboration To Bring Down a House at Sfeir-Semler Gallery in Beirut, from April 12th - May 31st. It's a part HOME WORKS IV: A FORUM ON CULTURAL PRACTICESwhich includes exhibitions, lectures, panels, dance, performances, film and video screenings, and publications. Sfeir-Semler is open 11am - 7pm. Closes on Sundays and Mondays.
Starting as an almost bare space, the room for To Bring Down a House is slowly growing into an unruly archive of proposals - some simple and enactable; others more far-fetched, absurd and playful - all suggesting different ways to destroy, attack, or otherwise 'bring down' a house; ways of destroying it, hauting it, making it unhomely. As an installation the piece is 'performed' or animated from a distance, as Vlatka (from New York) and me (from Sheffield, Vienna, Essen etc according to my ludicrous travel schedule) continually send new material by fax and email to be added to the work. The installation changes daily as more than a hundred collages, drawings, instructions and texts are added over the course of the exhibition, pinned to the walls by gallery staff. A couple of the new collages I've done are included above. I'm really liking a certain scrappy devi-may-care photoshop approach - more an attitude than a techique! I love the scraps of random background/noise copy-pasted by accident and repeated/left in place in the second image for example.
To Bring Down a House in Beirut is a new incarnation of a project originally created for the Protections exhibition in Kunsthaus Graz, fall 2006.
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Coming soon. Jim Fletcher and I are heading to Vienna on Saturday where we present the work-in-progress/monologue piece Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First which I wrote about briefly here and here. Performance is at TQW/Halle G on Saturday night at 20.30, full details are here. The performance is preceded by a video screening I've organised including great work from Vlatka, Jakup Ferri, Neil Goldberg, Mladen Stilinovic, Ivan Moudov and Anna Witt.
Somewhere back at the start of this notebook I wrote about a youTube clip of John Cage in action on some TV 1950's gameshow talking about and then performing a composition called Water Walk.
A few days ago I came across another amazing youTube clip of Cage, this one from an interview in a 1992 documentary by Miroslav Sebestik. It works best when you hear and see him - he has such warmth and delight when speasking about sound, but the start of the clip I really loved and wanted to transcribe.
"When I hear what we call music it seems to me that someone is talking and talking about his feelings or about his ideas or his relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on 6th Avenue for instance, I don't have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I Iove the activity of sound. What is does is it gets louder and quieter and it gets higher and lower and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things which I've.. I'm completely satisfied with that - I don't need sound to talk to me."
A BBC Proms/Televised version of 4'33'' is here too - works strangely well I think, if more dramatic than one might like. And for my money it's best to skip the pre/post commentary.
Knowing my interest in computer games, or more precisely my interest in descriptions of them (!) my friend Graham (via boingboing) pointed me to this great text. In it Metafilter user Aeschenkarnos gives the low down on Outside (AKA the real world), as if it were a massively multiplayer game:
...how does Outside actually rate? The physics system is note-perfect (often at the expense of playability), the graphics are beyond comparison, the rendering of objects is absolutely beautiful at any distance, and the player's ability to interact with objects is really limited only by other players' tolerance. The real fundamental problem with the game is that there is nothing to do.
In terms of game play the game sets few, if any, goals: the major one is merely "survive". What goals a player sets, are often astonishingly tedious to actually achieve, and power-ups and gear upgrades, let alone extra weapons, are few and far between. Some players choose accumulation of money, one of the many point systems in the game, as a goal, but distribution of this is often randomized and it can be hard to tell what activities will lead to gaining points in advance, and what the risks will be.
Other players choose to focus on accumulation of personal abilities, the variety of which greatly exceeds the capacity of any individual to accumulate; again, the game requires players to engage in years of grinding to achieve any notable standard with a skill or ability. Players are issued abilities and characteristics largely at random, and it is entirely possible for a player to be nerfed beyond any reasonable expectation of being able to play the game, or to be buffed to the point where anything he or she does is markedly easier. Unfortunately over time, player abilities tend to degrade, unless significant effort is made to keep skills up. This reviewer cannot emphasise this enough: Outside requires a huge time investment to build up player abilities, exceeding any other massively multiplayer game on the market by some three orders of magnitude.
The rest of the text is here, very smart and funny. Can't help thinking of my own book The Broken World at this point, since it takes the form of a walkthrough for an imaginary computer game, and which will be published in July. More of that before too long.
A Guardian piece here about Tom James and Tom Keeley, who were both involved in the Echo Cities, Venice Architecture Biennale 2006 project that Hugo and I also participated in. Telling the sad story of how Sheffield won't get to keep the iconic cooling towers out near Meadowhall, the Guardian piece also gives a grim view of the current scene in British urban regeneration (rebranding might be a more appropriate term) and public art. Tom and Tom have the analysis down pretty well. I was out that way in the city yesterday. Hard to imagine it with the towers down. They look amazing and it could have been such an amazing site for something.
"There is this assumption that local authorities are inexperienced when it comes to public art," she [Ann Gosse, the city council's director of culture] says. "It's not amateur night here. The council has a track record of producing stunning public art." She cites the newly renovated train station, with its array of complicated steel and stone fountains, and the well-liked Winter Gardens, an oversized wood and glass conservatory in the city centre, as proof that the council is well-placed to guide the process.
But this is exactly the kind of outlook that is the problem, according to Keeley. "Bins and benches might make the city nicer, but they are not public art," he says. "The council just doesn't get it and is not capable of creating something on the scale we want." He predicts: "It will be made of stainless steel, it will be a safe option, and it won't change anyone's perception of Sheffield."
A recent story in the local paper, the Sheffield Star, hints that this is not an unreasonable concern. Richard Caborn MP mooted his vision for the city's work of public art: a giant, stainless steel football. He told the paper: "It's an opportunity to celebrate what Sheffield has given to the world. We have the world's oldest football club and produced the first stainless steel."
James compares the idea to replacing the Angel of the North with a bottle of Newcastle Brown made of coal. "It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic," he says.
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