This has all of the elements of a great pcomp performance: technology that is tailored to your own gestures and movements. Even if all of the sound is pre-recorded, the responsiveness is immediate and the performance is totally seamless. Beautiful, hilarious, incredibly well-done:
One huge inspiration in the conception of my NIME instrument is the classic drum ensemble. Below are several examples of how ensemble drumming has manifested in different cultures, all drawing from almost exactly the same basic elements. Well worth a listen even if it’s just to shake your ass.
Brazil’s Ile Aiye:
Switzerland’s Top Secret
Japanese Taiko Drumming
My personal Ratatat timeline:
2004:
2005:
2006:
2007:
2008:
2009:
…and you wonder what the point of making anything beautiful is.
Directed by Eric Wareheim (Tim & Eric) in association with Warp Records and Warp Films. Music by Flying Lotus. Co Directed/ Animation by Devin Flynn. Co Directed/ Edited by Eric Fensler. More info at dancefloordale.com
This is a test for a project I am thinking of developing throughout the semester for Gabe Barcia-Colombo’s Video Sculpture class and Greg Shakar and Hans-Cristoph Steiner’s NIME class involving synasthetic visualizations of intricate pieces being performed by live ensembles. It is heavily based on Mark Rothko’s bars, and the music is Debussy’s Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Minor.
PRINCETASTIC. Audience participation at its best.
PERSONA
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about how persona affects our experience of music, since performance is still (and today maybe even more so) an essential part of how we experience music, even in recorded form. Since the idea of time-shifting musical performance stemmed from the desire to be able to hear master performers anywhere at any time (think piano scrolls or the early days of radio), it makes sense that the person performing the music would be considered an integral part of the formula that makes for successful music.
If you play music long enough, you realize that the limitations of music are fairly rigid, even if you go to the microtonal or abstractionist level. Rhythm, harmony, melody and other elements are far more limiting than they appear, especially given the explosion of genrefied music in the 20th century, but ultimately what defines the difference between a lot of the bands we like may not actually be attributed to the music, but to the performer. And what makes a performer great? Persona.
For the obligatory wikipedia definition of persona, see below:
A persona, in the word everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for “mask” or “character”, derived from the Etruscan word “phersu”, with the same meaning. Popular etymology derives the word from Latin “per” meaning “through” and “sonare” meaning “to sound”, meaning something in the vein of “that through which the actor speaks”, i.e. a mask (early Greek actors wore masks).
I like to define persona as making people forget that you take shits too, but I think my definition complements the above one quite nicely. Assuming a role that begs for the audience to join you in the performative journey you are going to embark on together requires that the performer seduces the audience into submission, which almost always means donning a persona that makes you larger than life.
Though we just lost Michael Jackson, his life a tragic allegory of what happens when you allow the persona to mingle far too closely to your personal life, I think the better example is Prince. The thing that is so remarkable about the above performance is how refined his persona is. This is a guy, one motherfucker of a guy, who can take his entire 30-year repertoire of synthy, futuristic, hyper-polished, ground-breaking jams and pare it down to an acoustic guitar under the guise of a more intimate experience with Prince. But it’s still PRINCE, Artist Formerly Known as a Symbol who in spite of not having all of his normal theatrics (see below), is still donning a façade that everyone in the audience knows and is familiar with. And because he has been donning this mask for so long, it doesn’t take much to remind you that he is Prince, even if it’s just an acoustic guitar, some old songs and some playful banter. But just remember, Prince shits just like everyone else.
Neon is a medium well-explored by artists in the 20th century, with many drawn to its immediate, almost innate connotations of commercialism. Neon signs are almost universally associated with retail stores, where simple messages of business draw consumers eyes to pertinent information: OPEN, CLOSED, FOR SALE, LIVE SEX, etc. The messages are overt in and of themselves, but the communication of these messages in the medium of neon adds an equally overt layer of almost subliminal communication to the interaction between consumer and retailer. Because of this, it makes a certain amount of sense that artists would be drawn to subverting the medium by appropriating it for their own purposes, be they explicitly anti-commercial or not.
As neon as an almost impossible medium to work with after it has been fabricated by industrial means, neon in an artistic context must be conceived of and executed as a custom fabrication. Therefore the artist must be ready to justify their use of the medium by virtue of the fact that any message rendered in neon will be immediately scoured for meaning and interpretation by a viewer, maybe even more so than other media. And in many ways, the medium of neon is highly constricted by the fact that it is so closely associated with the elements of commerce, so every message becomes examined in this context.
A pioneer of the use of neon in art is Bruce Nauman, whose works often challenge the banality of the messages normally associated with neon. Sometimes Nauman’s pronouncements in neon are dramatic, possessing grandeur and profundity, as with his piece The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths, displayed below. Other times, his works provide almost a comical vanity that is accentuated by the medium, as displayed by the second piece below.
For our first assignment for Video Sculture, building a light sculpture, Li Li and I (Ari Joseph) were interested in recycling a fully-functioning neon sign that I came across last year, to respond to the tradition of using neon in sculpture. The sign, brightly illuminating the words “BUY SELL TRADE”, seemed ripe for reinterpretation. Working with the sign brought the added challenge of transforming a piece of found neon, rather than having a custom message fabricated.
The resulting work, Transact, is a response to the explicit nature of the message portrayed sign. Ironically, the sign came into our possession through a transaction that seems outside the universe of possibility given the initial intentions for the sign. When we found the sign, there were three possibilities: buying, selling and trading. Li Li and I worked to obfuscate the original sign by frosting it over, and hiding its original message on the backside of the piece. When viewed from the front, the viewer is left with one transaction option they were not initially presented with, “FREE.”
