"MUTEK GROWS OLDER &
WISER" .. well .. or at least so goes the XLR8R
headline.
[[ perhaps "OLDER & DRUNKER" would be more appropriate. ]] In any case:
here's the youtube embed for the video I worked on with Ken Taylor. thanks to
everyone involved & to the vid editorial team for making it look sweet. LONG
LIVE XLR8R.
++ and some
more words on Berlin, specifically a call-out: where are the underground techno
DJs of this city..? or does everyone here take DJing to be a smoking sport &
think that their reserved 'air of boredom' is at all becoming .. ?
a few recent
experiences in Berlin clubs confirm my suspicion that the best dJs in the world
come not from the centre but from the periphery. most dJs here approach the
mixer like it's a barrel of uranium, a total poison for the fingers, or like
some kind of sacred apparatus not to be fooled with. as if to make matters
worse, these dJs seem to lack any sense of composition. they've got all the
right threads -- the general availability of quality music speaks volumes about
how *easy* it is to SOUND good with little or no effort -- but these dJs can't
seem to weave a tapestry with the silk threads given them. instead, by the end
of the night, you just have all these beautiful threads on the floor, stomped
all dirty and in a big mess. where are the tapestry weavers of sonic silk, the
journey shamans of sound?
indeed, no wonder
that right now Canadian artists & turntablists are at the top of their game
here: they have talent, and they truly love the music. for us Canucks, coming
from a country that has long left its electronic musicians at the bottom of the
heap, dJing & playing live is not a task to be belatedly performed, like a
perfunctory bowel movement, but a moment to be savoured, like good
sex.
i have yet to
encounter a single dJ in all of Berlin (not counting famous foreigners) who
knows how to make love to a crowd -- to stomp it, shake it, caress it, sweat it.
i hope to be proven
wrong.
++ i've
always thought that how someone dances & dJs (as well as cooks) reflects how
they make love. side note: given the inability here for a lot of people to
express rhythm, either as a dJ or a dancer, is this air of bored roboticism
reflected in how the German technoheads perform in bed ..
?
Deep, heavy clouds
rolling into Berlin @ the moment.
Also rolling in is
the final cut of over 24 hours of footage compiled during
MUTEK
2008. Thanks to the XLR8R crew for editing together mass amounts of shaky
footage into a delightful package that includes the Piknic Electronik Beaver,
Poutine, and Crazy Raver Dude Dancing. Unfortunately no footage of Underground
Resistance made it, but I will YouTube that another
time.
Michel, you invited me into
your cracklehaus, opened a world for me, and gave me and countless others the
space and time in which to breath and explore the world of sound with your
hands, fingers and bodies. We will miss you, and your laugh, and your spirit,
and your gestures, those swooping arms, and dramatic movements, that were the
true signature of your art. May peace be with you, in love,
namaste.
[this kind of cut-up image could
soon be illegal in Canada! don't chicken out!]
Those worldwide might not
know this, but Canada is posed to put into place new copyright legislation that,
according to Michael
Geist, would be worse
then the US' infamous DMCA. Check out Geist's first take on Bill C-61
here.
The first draft of
this bill was defeated in December '07 as an unexpected resistance grew amongst
us Canucks, with a large Facebook presence and a strong campaign to stop the
Bill. Unfortunately much has fallen on deaf ears, and the Bill, if passed, will
possibly make unlocking a cellphone illegal in Canada, as well as watching
out-of-region coded DVDs. In short, according to Geist, "the DMCA provisions are
worse than the U.S. and the consumer exceptions riddled with limitations as the
government promotes a strategy of locking down content and launching lawsuits
against Internet users."
Moreover, it will
be illegal to "distort or mutilate a copyright performance" -- as in remixing
will be illegal; hell mixing at all will be illegal. If you blend two
pre-recorded sounds together, that's illegal. Turntablism and radio-art and
collage will all be illegal. Mash-ups? Forget it. As for penalties? $500 for the
first infringement, then $5000, then $10,000. And that's per infringement, as
in, per MP3. You will be in jail for about 25 years to life with a debt the size
of the GDP if you have a hard-drive of shared songs, remixes, mash-ups,
transferred videos, an unlocked cellphone and a few Chinatown kung-fu
DVDs.
Right about
now I would highly recommend K.W.
Jeter'sNoir,
which is all about future capitalism and the extreme penalties for copyright
infringement -- to the point where, after one's spine has been removed (read the
book), one lives on as a ghost, can't even die to escape the law, and as a
ghost, must collect trash to pay back the massive amount of financial penalties,
which accumulate interest faster than the trash-collecting allows. It's an
endless purgatory, a living hell, and it's coming to a little capitalist state
near you! Steven
Shaviro provides an
excellent analysis of Jeter's novel in his book
Connected,
wherein he mixes it with trends in contemporary capitalism. Well, here you go.
(FYI in Jeter's novel, to be 'connected' means to be 'fucked' – the rich
are unconnected, and can go offline, while the Suits and the worker bees are
always online, always connected, and never able to escape the
info-copyright-corporate
economy.)
Today I
got an email from Ministers Prentice and Verner who are pushing this bill.
Here's their email.
Let 'em know what you think. Let 'em know a LOT. I
did:
==
Thanks
for your email but it smacks of a PR move for this hugely unpopular bill, and
for good reason -- Bill C-61 ignores the demands of Canadian ARTISTS, the
CONTENT MAKERS, and panders instead to the corporations that are currently
trying to lock down all culture and render it nothing less than a commodity to
be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
For
example:
>
- implement new rights and protections for copyright holders, tailored to the
> Internet, to
encourage participation in the online economy, as well as
> stronger legal
remedies to address Internet
piracy;
Yes, and
this is a problem! We don't need 'stronger legal remedies to address piracy', we
need a redefinition of piracy that leaves the door open for content creators and
an open sharing system to encourage creativity. We don't need "new rights," we
need to reduce the rights of copyright holders who, primarily being
corporations, have extended the reign of copyright far beyond what is
productive, useful or
ethical.
> - clarify the roles
and responsibilities of Internet Service Providers related
> to the copyright
content flowing over their network facilities;
and
As in : clamp
down on ISPs for allowing BitTorrent and other sharing networks endorsed by, for
example, the CBC..! This is like shutting down telephone traffic because people
talk about TV shows. ISPs should NOT be pressured in this manner, and sharing
networks should be *encouraged* rather than villified. That I cannot access
Canadian-taxpayer funded content from the CBC using BitTorrent due to the ISP
restrictions is a HUGE
problem.
And is
there any talk here of the CRTC breaking up the current monopoly we have in
Canada between Rogers/Bell/Shaw/Videotron, that is driving up Internet,
cellphone, landline and TV access prices, leaving Canada one of the most
expensive places in the world for
telecommunications?
> - provide
photographers with the same rights as other
creators.
Fine, what
of DJs? Audio-collage artists? Electronic musicians? The list goes way past
photography (which was invented in the late 19th century!). C'mon folks, get
with it. We're in the 21C now. Stop trying to turn back the
clock.
> What Bill C-61 does
not do: >
> - it would not
empower border agents to seize your iPod or laptop at border
> crossings, contrary
to recent public
speculation
The
border guards can ALREADY seize your laptop and copy all of your data -- as the
CBC has been reporting -- so what you are saying here is that nothing has
changed! Sure, border guards aren't *empowered* because they already are seizing
data!
>
What this Bill is
not: >
> - it is not a mirror
image of U.S. copyright laws. Our Bill is made-in-Canada
> with different
exceptions for educators, consumers and others and brings us
> into line with more
than 60 countries including Japan, France, Germany and
>
Australia
No, it
goes much farther than that, and is directly a pressure of the MPAA and RIAA on
Canadian interests. We all know this. The rhetoric is the same. The scare
tactics over camcording in Quebec, etc, are easy to see. Stop trying to pull the
wool over our eyes: this bill will open the door for the RIAA and MPAA to sue
Canadian
consumers.
>
Bill C-61 was introduced in the Commons on June 12, 2008 by Industry Minister
> Jim Prentice and
Heritage Minister Josée
Verner.
Who should
be tarred & feathered for selling Canadian culture to the corporations.
You will be
remembered for sending us all down the pipe, dear Ministers -- but then we
wouldn't expect anything less from the Harper Gov't: while Canadians at home see
their culture cleaved into pieces by corporations eager to sell & sue,
Canada abroad pretends it can fight more wars. We're just trying to be just like
our Southern neighbour -- and right when the old Bush regime is on its way out,
finally. Disgusting. We're running years behind with the cost of our
telecommunications and now trying to become like everybody else in the race to
the bottom rather than thinking creatively as to how to address the massive
technological changes that have already taken
place.
-- tobias c.
van Veen turntablist,
artist &
curator
>
For more information, please visit the Copyright Reform Process website at
>
www.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/crp-prda.nsf/en/home >
> Thank you for
sharing your views on this important
matter. >
>
> The Honourable Jim
Prentice, P.C., Q.C.,
M.P. > Minister of
Industry >
> The Honourable
Josée Verner, P.C.,
M.P. > Minister of
Canadian Heritage, Status of Women
> and Official
Languages and Minister for
> La Francophonie
* unfortunately I
have no idea as to what the hell is going on with the exhibition. The whole
thing seems to have fallen apart, if not into complete chaos (the organisers --
Toni Calderon, Imo Pico and Jose Mir -- apparently summarily announced on April
16th it was to be an self-organised artist exhibition, in order to absolve
themselves of responsibility?), and I have not heard anything reliable since
from either the curator or the organisers. See Wilfried's attack on what he
calls a 'scandal' of the 'TRIO INFERNAL' here.
If it's at all like he makes it out to be, I can only reiterate his frustration,
and I just hope the object makes it back to me safe &
sound.
\commissioned
by Turbulence communiqué
with the dead.
" Experiments in Electronic
Voice Phenomena (EVP) using two reel-to-reel machines in an attempt after
Konstantin Raudive & William Burroughs to establish contact with the dead.
In the 21C electromagnetic tape is an anachronism. Dead media unwinds time from
its spools. The dead are no longer human; and when the inhuman expire, do the
inhuman become more human than human, at the moment of death? Two
electromagnetic machines capture the unfolding of an era in which memory encodes
the loving caress of electron imprinted tape. Two tape machines in tandem share
their memories, silent at first but slowly amplified through continuous
re-recording & simultaneous playback. Time out of joint falls in & out
of tape sync; more inhuman than human loops the
frequency."
.. /
the
words open up a few
of the wires & inspirations that spirit into the work, from exappropriating
static machines for dynamic interventions (or rather fingering these machines to
quivering states) to digging up Burroughs & Konstantine Raudive. I feel like
the words reverse the old maxim (at least for DJs) that crate-digging is
grave-digging... Who knows what records are buried in the blank media? But I
digress. The piece itself is the place for further words. And for the
persistent, one will even find a slapshot at
MTL.
Turbulence has been
commissioning net & technology arts since 1996 (!), and before that
Turbulence (aka New Radio & Performing
Arts) was behind the
New American
Radio series of
national radio-art broadcasts. As the curators & minds behind Turbulence,
Helen Thorington & Jo-Anne Green deserve more than can be said here for
supporting up-and-coming artists in the technology arts and for providing
inspiration, infrastructure & wisdom ...
Part of my involvement
with the conference stems from a sound-art piece, [ 'til death do us a part],
investigating 'networked sound' commissioned by Turbulence... The twisted
evolution of the concept went through a metamorphosis for me as I pondered what
love might mean for machines, or that for machines to communicate, they must
begin with love (*by love I think I mean, something from the raw intensity of
anger to zen companionship -- somewhere inbetween is the erotic).
I didn't want to
tread into the digital realm, as so much of Work is a digital interface these
days that I wanted my human experience with machinic love to have the intensity
of a hands-on relationship. Thus I ended up turning to reel-to-reel machines
& the experiments of Konstantin
Raudive with blank
media in his attempt to record & communicate with the 'voices of the dead'.
(I had no idea at the time that John
Hudak was exploring
similar terrain -- though in the digital realm -- for his Turbulence commission,
Voices from the Paradise
Network.) This led to
a series of investigations of the sonic realm arising between two networked R2R
machines, a simple mixer and a DSP processor (to add spatialization and stereo
channel manipulation to sometimes mono signals). These investigations revealed a
performative realm, a space to improvise and develop a capacity to 'play' the
machines, or rather tweak & twiddle their hard knobs into spasms of ecstasy,
cries of joy &, at times, moans of despair. The machines sang to me &
each other, & I was drawn into the deadzone... the project launches live on
April 11th & I will blog it
here.
Thx
to nova
deViator, my trite
& caffeinated ruminations on CKUT
are paired with the likes of Artaud, Michael Hardt, Foucault, Bataille and Maya
Deren. With others thrown in for good measure -- afx, squarepusher & like
beatmanglers. At least I can claim to have actually performed with
hecate.
I be immersed in
new work. Documentation, recordings, some words
soon.
it all started a 17th of January,
one million years ago. a man took
a dry sponge and dropped it into a bucket full of
water. who that man was is not
important. he is dead, but art is
alive. I mean, let's keep names
out of
this.
[ ART IS A DEAD
MAN / tV] + the
interventions of Queen
Charlotte
January
17th is the birthday of art // when, approximately 1, 045 000 years ago someone
(well, a some-him) dropped a dry sponge in a bucket of water. The birth of art
was born in 1963 with Robert
Filliou of
Fluxus.
ART IS A DEAD MAN. Fillou's concept of the
Eternal
Network lives on.
We've stolen in, date after date. We've stolen it, time after time. The Eternal
Network, a kind of drop-in hospitality to the freaks of the world, the
pranksters of passion, comedians of aesthetics, the interconnected world of
telecommunications tricksters, radio guerillas, frequency pirates who occupy
& intervene in the airwaves & cables. In 1963 as now the channels of
communication are locked-up by the cabals of consumption. The Eternal Network
reoccupies telecommunications and sets the channel back to the fuzz.
Me, I prefer radio.
If anything because radio remains the primal and first medium of the 20thC to
transmit the unconscious. Subliminal messaging to the aural core. Since 1997
I've been involved in The Western
Front's
'24 hours of Radio
Art' through
CiTR
101.9FM (as co-host
of noiz-r) and lately CKUT.
Check out Anna Friz's history
of this era.
as I was
saying, at about 10 o'clock, a 17th of January, one million years ago, a man
sat alone by the side of a
running stream. he thought to
himself: where do streams run
to, and why? meaning why do
they run. or why do they run
where they run. that sort of
thing.
The 10th anniversary
of the Vancouver anti-APEC protest took place back in November, the 25th to be
precise, but even this late I wanted to post something in memory of what was a
formative political experience for what became known as the alterglobalization
movement and, in many ways, the precursor to the largely effective and
successful protests of Seattle WTO
'99 (the 'Battle of
Seattle'). By 'precursor' I mean not only that many lessons were learned from
APEC and translated to larger actions at Seattle -- what I want to spotlight
here are the media tactics which went on to inspire and inform what became known
as Indymedia.
As an undergrad
student at UBC back in '97 I was heavily involved with the
CiTR
101.9FM Nooze team.
As well as providing coverage for months leading up to the event, including
providing background on the issues involved, we reported directly on the actions
of APEC
ALERT, the anti-APEC
activist organisation that staged a series
of provocative and often Situationist-inspired actions -- including being there
when Jaggi
Singh, without
warning, was thrown to the ground by plainclothes policemen, dragged off into an
unmarked van, and thus pre-emptively 'arrested'. It's hard to imagine the
atmosphere at UBC today: half of the campus cut off by a barbed-wire fence;
helicopters overhead; snipers on top of the Chan Centre; the Student Union
Building freed to become a space for teach-ins and sleep-overs; an activist tent
camp in the park; armed vessels off the point; the Graduate Student Association
building behind razor-wire with GSA members denied security clearance for
flying the Tibetan
Flag;
Craig
Jones, law student,
arrested for holding signs saying 'Democracy' outside of Green College; and
CSIS agents
infiltrating every
organisation -- including our own Nooze team. As the subsequent
APEC
Inquiry discovered,
many of these actions breached the Canadian
Charter and presented
a grave betrayal of democracy in
Canada.
November
25th: N25. Live-to-air, we covered APEC direct from the melee with analog and
early digital cellphones -- a procedure largely unheard of with major news media
at the time. Because of our communication savvy (and blatant eschewing of
censorship and filtration, going direct to air, cellphone held to the sky), we
got the jump on all the major news media when it came to quickly reporting the
heavy-handed and sometimes violent response of tactical police units to the
protests. Many protesters started tuning into CiTR to hear what we were
reporting, as campus was so large, and by the end of the day, the strategic
blockades so spread out, that information was a scarce resource (the protest
'managers' with their bicycles had been arrested early on for exactly these
reasons -- to quash activist self-knowledge of the territory). So, Andrew Newman
on our team was there and broadcast live-to-air the infamous and crude actions
of RCMP officer Hugh Stewart who became known as
"Sgt.
Pepper" for his
indiscriminate use of pepper-spray -- a coup for the underground press. I
broadcast live-to-air the storming of the
fence.
But more
importantly, we were able to quickly transmit the ongoing action to the press
convention centre which was located in downtown Vancouver & quite aways from
campus. This direct contact and direct-to-air coverage meant that during the
sparsely attended press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien,
held much later in the day on November 25th, no other news outlet knew that the
protests had dissolved into a series of skirmishes with police (the activists
had realised early on that there were only three roads off campus for the
motorcade: with activists blocking each roadway, one of the arteries was going
to have to give).
Our information
allowed our secret weapon, Nardwuar the Human
Serviette to corner
Chretien. (Nardwuar is a punk_style gonzo-journalist who now reports for
MuchMusic, but already well-known for his crazy ability to dig up odd details on
celebrities and for asking Gorbachev 'which world leader has the biggest
pants?'). Nardwuar asked Chretien, in a round-about way, what he thought of the
use of pepper spray against protesters. Chretien, amazingly, hadn't been kept up
to speed by his own staff, and so he threw out the offhand wit, "Pepper? I put
it on my plate." What was a throw-away remark to an oddball journalist became
*the soundbyte of APEC*. The mainstream news then contrasted "Pepper? I put it
on my plate" with the footage coming in from the mainstream news camera_people
who, by this point, had been thoroughly doused in pepper spray themselves. The
result was public uproar, an inquiry, intense reportage, and many, many
questions as to the nature of surveillance and counterintelligence operations by
State agencies against not only political protesters and dissidents but public
journalists (such as CBC reporter Terry
Milewski).
In short, though
many don't realise it, CiTR provided the goods & stole the show. For our
efforts, we received a NCRA
radio award for broadcasting excellence but more importantly, the knowledge of
indie media power was quickly disseminated as part of the alterglobalization
infrastructure readied for Seattle '99. This is only one factor, of course --
one of the others being the connection made with Australia's anarchist media
group C@talyst,
who developed the participatory software that runs Indymedia online [1]. To this
day Seattle is the favourite buzzword of many leftist intellectuals who, without
pause, never saw it coming, weren't there to begin with, and now idealize it
beyond
belief.
//.
[1]
Murray, Enda. 'Sound Systems and Austalia DiY Culture: Folk Music for the Dot
Com Generation," in FreeNRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dancefloor, ed. Graham
St. John. Altona: Common Ground, 2001. pp.
57-70.
//. thx to
Sarah Efron, ex-CiTR Nooze Director, for posting online the APEC comp audio and
to the rest of the Team for inspiring times: Newman, JJ, A.Friz et
al.
locus .
suspectus issue 4 is
out -- featuring the piece ' digging up the corps of
BIOTEKNICA
', writ on MTL_based artists shawn bailey & jennifer willet. i dig a bit
into their investigation of cancer cells, the bioart of the eternal, the longing
to be found in the laboratory, the politics of the microbiological & the
aesthetic of the white-coated scientist. a copy can be had from the
website
for $6.95, a real steal, as the magazine is a work of print beauty, featuring
glossy colour & fine papering.
LISTEN!
SONIC ECOLOGY & THE
CITY /
ECOUTEZ! L'ECOLOGIE SONORE ET LA
VILLE . cabaret
numeriques & politiques de danse, performance et musique
. . 26_ octobre . 19H30 -
23H00 . gratuit . . @ la
SAT, 1195 St. Laurent
.
Artivistic
est une rencontre transdisciplinaire internationale de trois jours sur
l’interAction entre art, information et activisme. Artivistic émerge
de la proposition selon laquelle les artistes ne sont pas les seuls à
parler de l’art, les académiques de la théorie, et les
activistes de l’activisme. Fondé en 2004, l’évènement
a comme objectif de promouvoir un dialogue interculturel sur l’art
activiste au-delà de la critique, de créer et de faciliter un
réseau humain d’individus divers, et d’inspirer,
proliférer, activer.
// Artivistic
is an international transdisciplinary three-day gathering on the interPlay
between art, information and activism. Artivistic emerges out of the proposition
that not only artists talk about art, academics about theory, and activists
about activism. Founded in 2004, the event aims to promote transdisciplinary and
intercultural dialogue on activist art beyond critique, to create and facilitate
a human network of diverse peoples, and to inspire, proliferate,
activate.
For the
third edition of Artivistic, the expression [ un.occupied spaces ] was chosen to
stimulate new ideas in response to the hidden confusions caused by the infinite
networks of 21C globalization and neo-liberalism. [ un.occupied spaces ] dares
to link the charged issues of environmentalism, indigenous and migrant
struggles, and urban practices together through the angle of occupation. In an
interconnected world, critical thought and action cannot but become flexible and
uncompromising at once. To think with occupation consequently becomes a strategy
for approaching these issues in a way that will reveal their interdependence,
and fuel creative and tactical collaborative actions between
“co-artists” (artists and non-artists). Built around three
interrelated questions, the event consists of roundtables, workshops,
interventions, exhibitions, performances, and screenings at our temporary
headquarters at 5455 av. de Gaspé, #701 and in different venues and spaces
of Montreal.
// Pour
la troisième édition d'Artivistic, l'expression [ espaces
in.occupés ] a été choisie afin de développer de nouvelles
idées relatives aux diverses définitions et confusions provoquées
par les réseaux infinis composant la réalité
néo-libérale du XXIe siècle. [ espaces in.occupés ] se donne
le défi de rassembler des questions portant sur l'environnement, les luttes
des autochtones et des immigrants ainsi que les pratiques urbaines tout en les
abordant sous l’angle de l’occupation. Dans un monde
interconnecté, la pensée et l'action critiques se doivent de devenir
à la fois flexibles et intransigeantes. Penser en termes d’occupation
devient par conséquent une stratégie pour souligner
l’interdépendance de ces questions et permet des actions de
collaboration créatrices et tactiques entre "co-artistes" (artistes et
non-artistes). L'événement est construit autour de trois questions
interreliées et se compose de tables-rondes, d’ateliers,
d’interventions, d’expositions, de performances et de projections
qui auront lieu à notre quartier général temporaire au 5455 av.
de Gaspé, #701 et dans divers autres endroits à Montréal.