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Video Positive, one of the UK's foremost festivals of visual art specialising
in video and digital media art, takes place in Liverpool. To its credit
it tries to do this in the expanded inventive field, avoiding a narrow
interpretation of video by showcasing a range of work in both visual
and non-visual media. The Other Side of Zero is the last incarnation
of Video Positive, as the organising body, The Foundation For Art and
Creative Technology, opens a new centre in Liverpool in 2002 and shifts
to being an international centre from an organising agency. This last
festival heralds the beginning of a new era for FACT and allows it to
make the shift to a new curatorial approach that looks set to broaden
the scope of its activities.
In this context it made sense to present a range of audio and web-based projects
at the recent festival alongside the single-screen films and video installations.
As these web-based and audio works are available online and on audio CD, you
don't have to visit Liverpool to access them - one of their strengths is that
they can be investigated in your own time.
One Bit Louder at the Bluecoat Gallery housed examples of a number
of web-based works that make use of and experiment with the space available
through the audio network. They offer possibilities for rethinking approaches
to online activity and networking. Radioqualia's Frequency Clock web
project integrates internet-based radio with other modes of communication.
It describes itself as "...a new online radio station aiming to open
an electronic portal into the eccentricities of antipodean radio space".
It involves the establishment of a global mini FM network connected to
the internet with an interface that allows net radio programmes to be shared
and broadcast over the FM network. It aims to open up dialogue and generate
partnerships between existing networks and communities and to expand the
scope for innovation across forms of radio. Jan Robert Leegte's ~leegte,
a striped down minimal combination of online audio and visuals, sets up
a bare environment devoid of all superfluous information where the viewer/listener
is left to either meditate on their expectations of digital interfaces,
become mesmerised by the slowly developing work, or, with a slow server,
to loose patience and leave, which is a real problem on some PCs. Other
work included Christoph Kummerer's lovely gameboy pocket noise,
a subverted reprogrammed gameboy, and mail2midi's lo-ser, which
allows the participant to send an e-mail which is then converted to a midi
signal played at lo-ser's base and streamed back to the user via
the internet. These works attempt to push the boundaries of what is understood
to be possible with digital media.
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[left] From radioqualia'sFrequency
Clock (1999)
[right] From Jan Robert Leegte's~leegte (1999)
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One of the highlights of the festival was Colin Fallow's CD ZERO, part
of an ongoing series of CDs he has curated since forming Audio Research Editions
in 1998. It contains 46 one-minute sound works on the theme of zero by international
sound artists, experimental composers, noise-makers and other audio creators.
It is a chance juxtaposition of artists working thematically and aims to stimulate
interest in, and dialogue around, sound art.
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[left] From Jan Robert Leegte's~leegte (1999)
[right] Audio Research Editions'ZERO (2000)
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The content or inspiration ranges from hidden sounds, sounds that are abstracted,
low-tech aesthetics, a sense of the threshold between one state and another,
and distortion. Some works are stripped-down, reduced, returned to zero, to an
end in themselves, such as The Groceries' The Oth Harmonic, a shuddering
duet for Tibetan singing bowl and guitar that builds layer upon layer onto the
harmony until it becomes so thick it is reduced to one smooth perfect continuous
sound; and Aidan Mark Humphreys' Basit - cloned samples of bowed bass
shifted, dragged and filtered through often dramatic ranges, yet seeming as one
whole entity. There were the more conceptual works where the recording is a vehicle
for song or spoken word such as Petri Kuljuntausta's There was nothing in
the room - " there was nothing in the room no furniture, no paintings,
no printings..." he repeats, linking to William Furlong's Timeless which
takes the first work spoken on Audio Arts magazine by Caroline Tisdall in 1973
- the word timeless. It is repeated and repeated until it merges with itself
reducing to zero and referring to Ad Reinhardt's black square paintings. Many
contributions are greatly enhanced by the sleeve notes, particularly Dusan Bauk's
story of the millennium bug that found itself below zero centigrade.
The tractor beams, transformers and di-lithium crystals of yesterday's utopian
vision of tomorrow's technology returns in works such as Rene Beekman's vox
et praetera nihil, and Longstone's Least Significant Bit. Reminiscent
of all those sounds and movies we grew up on, that taught us the sounds of the
future, the unnatural and the extreme, to hear these pieces is to hear the flickering
sound of the future coming back from the past and to wonder again about the utopian
dreams and nightmare visions of the technology of the future.
There is, in much of the work, a concern with recording the soundscape of the
world at a particular moment, sometimes mediated through digital technologies
to focus, pare down or expand the sound. Leif Brush's Windribbon + DSP,
Loren Chasse's a pile of sticks transferred one by one, to a pond, Brandon
Labelle's Sounding Degree Zero, Warren Burt's Alterations Around Water
- Zero (water in different stated of freezing at different distances) are
some of the works involving recording sounds often unnoticed or outside the normal
audible sound spectrum. Greyworld combine the heard and obscured sounds of the
happy shopping world with musak and easy-listening pop into a hypnotic creation
worthy of The Stepford Wives. Frank Coleman's witty one-minute torch song, Cutting
Halves into Infinity, and Dr Sonic's Fat Zero, an interrogation of
the cynicism of the space race, attempt to mark or recall the moment of a journey
or transgression, a cycle of beginning and ends reducing to zero. Max Eastley
and Peter Cusack's Zero Day to Zero Night explores the space between abstraction
and identifiable sounds.
Max Eastley is known for his creation of synthesised organic objects that interact
with the shifting, changing environment, that meditate on understandings of natural
and artificial. There is a rare delicacy and focused intensity to Eastley's work
which sweeps to the edge of consciousness and recognition. Sounds flow one to
another in intricate patterns reminiscent of the rhythm of life, the sounds of
empty spaces, the shuddering intensity of silence, and combine in a response
to the existing, fluctuating environment. Concerns echoed in the work and writing
of Brandon Labelle, whose instruments constitute a landscape of found collected
electric and 'natural' sounds, contact microphones and paper. His, along with
the work of many of these sound artists, entreats listeners to chase the identity
of the sound as it strokes the surface of memory drifting within grasp before
slipping away. Yet, try as we might to reach for the clarity of recollection,
it evades our searching, folding and retreating into the darkness. Unrecognised,
yet utterly familiar, many of these sound works weave patterns and vibrate against
the membrane of recognition, never piercing the surface. The combination of sound
sources seems to be reflecting, reacting to, and reassessing the reverberating
world that surrounds us. The contact microphones, placed on surfaces to excavate
the inner sounds of rooms or objects, reveal sounds in the background of every
day; the sounds around us, behind us and beneath silence.
What relevance have the performers on ZERO to video art? What relationship
has their work to innovation in digital arts, with its lack of moving images,
its
unusual and minimal use of electronic technology, its physical relationship to
the instruments and to the sound itself? It is precisely this relationship with
the evidence of the human, the touch, the voice, the natural materials, and the
irreverent approach to technology that is necessary to explore and question our
relationship with new digital technology. It is this relationship that allows
the work to interrogate the relationship of sound with vision and our relationship
with the future of technology. This innovative work is not at the mainstream,
established forefront of technology development because it is radical in its
approach challenging our assumptions and expectations. It deliberately blurs
the boundaries that allow us to separate "artificial" from "real".
Our approach to digital technology is built on our historical relationship with
computers and video technology. Part of our understanding of computer technology
is that of order, control and precise measurement. Although a few mainstream
films such as [dhatch] or The Matrix have tried to move
into more radical representations of digital space, we are still entrenched in
material, architectural visions of digital space such as the cult film Tron and
Robert Longo's 1995 visualisation of the Internet 2021, in the film version of
William Gibbon's book Johnny Mnemonic. Against this, many of the above
artists push their use of technology into an area where control is lost, opening
up space for natural phenomena and chance. Away from the screen and the visual,
away from the linear, structured visions of digital space, collections such as ZERO and
projects such as radioqualia and ~leetge offer alternative approaches
to understanding digital space and strategies for exploring digital technologies.
The projects can be found via:
http://www.fact.co.uk/
http://radioqualia.va.com.au/
For information on ZERO and other Audio Research Editions projects contact are@livjm.ac.uk
ZERO can be ordered from FACT or at Bluecoat Chambers, School Lane, Liverpool,
L1 3BX, ph. 44 (0)151 708 0474, info@fact.co.uk -
price [sterling]11, postage world-wide [sterling]3.
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Alice Angus [Pisces Monkey] is a writer and curator. She initiates and
produces collaborative projects that open up different kinds of space
in which artists can experiment and develop their practice and in
which new
audiences can experience contemporary conceptual art, film and performance.
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