notes taken at the Archiving Australia's Experimental Music session by Carla Teixeira from the National Film & Sound Archive on Thursday 01/09/2009 at This is Not Art 2009 festival. (+ links & info found whilst writing these notes up)
Call Me Your Experiment was a workshop held in Newcastle's Civic Park on Friday 02/10/2009 as part of the This Is Not Art 2009 festival
Alison Currie explained her project, but I missed the start of the workshop so I might have misunderstood the whole aim. What I gathered was that we had to learn and perform a dance when our mobile phones rang. Her idea was that mobile phones often interrupt us and the ring tone could be used as a song to dance to, and slow us down from being a slave to the mobile and answering too quickly. It was a type of mobile phone flash mob. We were given the song 9-question_it.mp3 via bluetooth - her friend had written it. A few of us played the song on our phones at the same time - or slightly different times, so there were some nice phasing sounds.
The music sped up in the middle of the dance so we had to do the steps quicker towards the end. Alison said she was surprised - happily - that everyone picked up the steps within the short amount of time during the workshop.
I thought it was fun - it was good to do some stretching & exercise in the park in the sun too. but I think my battery would have been flat or the caller had hung up the call by the time I'd finished the dance if I had received a call. :)
here's a quick video of Alison teaching the steps & demonstrating the dance :
Alison Currie is an independent dance artist interested in creating work for alternate spaces, and unsuspecting audiences. Her major project 42a will tour nationally in 2010. Adelaide's Experimental Art Foundation page has some details of Alison Currie's 42a's 2008 performance.
There are many factors that influence Isadora's video processing
speed, including the speed and type of your processor, amount of RAM
installed on your computer, hard disk speed, the format in which the
video files are stored, and several other factors. This section
details several tips to help you get the very fastest frame rates from
Isadora.
Tip 1: Use the fastest computer you can
Much of the code inside Isadora is optimized for these the SSE /
Altivec processors that are part of most contemporaray Intel or
PowerPC chips. Using these processors will result in significant speed
increases when compared to G3 or non-MMX processors.
system configuration
- linux 5.3
- vmware server 2.0.0.0 build 156745 (64 bit)
- vmware ESXi wouldn't install as it appears my (home) motherboard/cpu are not VT compatible
(virtualization technology)
- see hardware compatibility list on ESXi FAQ page
- vmware utils page - check if processor supports VT 64 bit
- installed QNX 6.4.1 RTOS (real time operating system) VM (virtual machine) (32 bit)
I watched this video during lunch today on the Subversive Yarn site - the guy has made a home made knitting machine from an old printer and a picaxe microcontroller. as I watched it working - I haven't really seen a knitting machine before that I can remember - I wondered if you could convert a manual typewriter into a knitting machine. replace the metal letters w/ latches. then type words into stitches.
you'd probably end up with experimental knitting not flat rows but I think that'd be beautiful
/ideas
they also have a link to this Sleeping Beauty installation by Nadine Sterk - it's a lamp shade that is knit in realtime when you power it on - I think this is one of the most beautiful & useful exhibits I've seen in a gallery installation. amazing
I've been reading & flipping through some of the knitting books on google books. apparently they're going to start offering free downloads for public domain books soon, using the EPUB format (not pdf). not many of the knitting books seem to be in the public domain yet though but I will keep looking.
Constituent imagination: militant investigations//collective theorization - by Stevphen Shukaitis, David Graeber, Erika Biddle, AK Press
page 209 - Knitting and Global Justice Activism is a great chapter on some of the "revolutionary knitting" groups and their ideas: knitting used to 'slow down' in this modern world, diy textile production, knitting as a binary code (K & P) - like learning a programming language (mathematical knitting), plus more...
Knitting for Good!: A Guide to Creating Personal, Social, & Political Change - by Betsy Greer - has a nice intro on how the Riot Grrrl movement helped women take back diy/craft (part of third wave feminism). and how women now have the choice to craft as well as work - it's no longer just your "grandmother's domain" and is not the only option for women any more. knitting as meditation. lots of other ideas - these are some of the things I've thought about knitting & craft too. just being able to make things is a great thing
I'm starting to knit for the I heart Kings Cross art project : http://iheartkx.wordpress.com - the knitted pieces are going to be tied to poles and trees as part of an art project in Kings Cross (Sydney) in october. I'm not really following a pattern of stitches - they said make it ~30cm wide and anything up to 3metres, the longer the better. so I'm just changing stitches and needles and colours as my mood decides. seeing how a mix of smaller (12mm) and larger (25mm) stitches go together. using 3 strands of yarn (8ply acrylic) to thicken it up. so far I like the textures. reminds me of Australian chocolates - cherry ripe, mint slice or maybe peppermint crisp. (I think I have chocolate on the brain tonight ;)
I bought some 15mm bamboo needles at lunch today. and saw some thicker yarn at lincraft. bright colours and the threads are different widths - like the silk yarn. but this is 50% wool & 50% acrylic. it's nice to knit up. maybe I should have bought a few balls of each colour though as the stripes will be narrowish.
was a great group of knitters in the park in Kings Cross today. all knitting for the I heart Kings Cross project. learnt some new stitches and spoke to lots of cool people. we'll be there every sat in september. was great that some people just walked by and sat down and joined in - including a woman on holidays from Taiwan who has a knitting group there. she was a fast knitter too! it was pretty windy towards the end - I think I'm wearing half of Kings Cross now as the wind stirred up the dirt iheartkx.wordpress.com
wow district 9 was great. it highlighted most of what's wrong with humans & on so many levels. I preferred the aliens to those humans. [1] who were the real human beings in that story. it was almost a Philip K Dick plot. [2] wikus seemed to become more human only when he became an alien. [3] I need to see it again to see if he could speak their language prior to becoming one of them. I got the feeling he couldn't. lazy humans. [4] [from twitter]
[from 23/08/2009 notebook entry]
saw District 9 today at the cinema. it's pretty gruesome in parts and was interesting that it was set in South Africa - Johannesburg. it was also interesting how they paralleled some of the human's attitudes towards the aliens - the "prawns" with the white/black apartheid struggle prevalent in South Africa. there was definately an apartheid towards the aliens. they were even living in shanty-towns / slums. I thought it was interesting that the Africans treated the aliens as badly as the whites had/have treated them in the past - like nothing was learned from it. I suppose after so many years, the ideas are in-grained into the population's mindset. there was a Nigerian gang running the black market in the slums - I wondered if this referred to Nigerian internet scams too.
the transition of the human, Wikus, into a "prawn" after exposure to the alien fluid/fuel was also interesting because at the end of the movie he looked just like the other "prawns". so I wondered if originally the aliens had had human form, and were morphed into the "prawn"-like form with hard crustacean coverings on their body in order to cope with the climate on their planet. it was mentioned that their planet had 7 moons - so I think this would cause very disruptive weather conditions. and perhaps they were closer to the sun - or another sun.
I felt sympathy towards the aliens and was hoping they'd get to go home - particularly after the Christopher & his son and friend characters were introduced, because they seemed to be more "human" that the actual humans in the film. I didn't notice if the humans could understand the aliens' language throughout the film - eg during the evictions in the slums. the aliens seemed to understand what the humans were saying, so they were the ones to attempt to learn the new language / culture. the humans just seemed to want to dominate the aliens. once Wikus became merged with the aliens he was speaking with them and seemed to pick up their language pretty quickly as time progressed. I think I need to watch the film again though to take more notice of this.
initially when the aliens were harvesting the fluid and I saw the affect it had on the humans, I thought perhaps they were trying to collect the fluid to harvest / convert humans with it to increase their own population for some reason. but then I heard how it had taken 20 years to harvest the small amount they had, and it was used for fuel to help them get the control module of the ship back to the mothership so they could go home.
the humans didn't treat the aliens well because they looked different, and they behaved different. I thought it was almost ironic that the black Africans were saying things about the aliens, that had previously been said about themselves. they hadn't learned from the past - but instead, humans had just found another species to pick on instead of picking on parts of our own species. I wondered how the relationship between whites & blacks had changed since the arrival of the aliens - I can't remember noticing this in the film so I'll have to watch it again to see if it was raised. I suppose after such a long time, the ideas were ingrained into all the people there.
I thought it was a very similar plot to a Philip K Dick book. the questions about what is human - what does it mean to be human. and the protaganist, Wikus, being an every day working man put into an unusual, unworldly situation, and seeing how he coped, or didn't cope. watching as he seemed to become more human, with more compassion at least towards the aliens, only after he'd started to morph into an alien himself. it was only then he communicated civilly with them, and listened to their concerns and tried to help them in their quest to go home. even if it was also partly because they'd said they could reverse his bodily & DNA changes and make him human once more. I think he was better off remaining as one of the aliens. he seemed like a nicer "person" as an alien. I think it begs the question - who was more human? the "humans" or the "aliens". the MCU company army guys seemed more alien - devoid of compassion, coldly killing aliens and enjoying themselves way too much.
a relaxing weekend of feeling sick :( then dvds, walks, unexpected phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in a while, chasing a pair of pigeons off the balcony (I think they want to lay eggs), going to the cinema to see district 9 - first time in months (since watchmen) - and finding a new alternative bookstore, reading & notebook writing.
today I bought the Celestine Prophesy dvd. I'd read the book when it came out years ago. but on the way home I had one of the synchronicities it talks about. I filmed these birds, then once I got home watched the movie and remembered the 'energy flows' it talks about and the give & take of energy/power. the video of the birds was a good example of this - I saw the energy flows between these birds, though it was a feeling, I didn't see the energy clouds around/between them. there were 2 pieces of food on the ground - I couldn't see what it was, though it looked like a couple of twisties. the magpie was guarding both - not letting the little bird have any. I was standing about 5metres away on the footpath, and zoomed in the video (which is why the quality isn't the best - the n95 video is better if you don't zoom). after I stopped filming, the magpie looked towards me and the little bird skirted around behind him and ate the smaller twistie/piece of food. lucky him! so, either it was the shift in energies. or probably the magpie saw me move as my hands moved down after I finished filming. :)
I don't worry about copyrighted music either. I figure if you're combining video beauty (even internal personal memory beauty in the videos) and sound beauty it's only creating even more beauty and can enhance the music too so it's a compliment to the artist imho. and as long as you're not making money off them I don't see the harm. I think of it as the visual mixtape of this age. I know the artist's perspective of copyright and have lots of music artist friends. but I think as long as you're respectful of it, it's all good. maybe others would not agree.
