Re Alec Baldwin's joke about Filipina Mail-Order Brides

I've posted this as a comment on facebook, but I decided to post it here to go on record as saying that: Alec Baldwin has NOTHING to apologize for. He jokingly made a reference to a real and current state of affairs. The same congressmen who made/are making speeches in the Batasan should apologize to US for perpetuating an economic climate that enables/encourages marrying strange foreigners as an viable/credible  life option. To put it crassly (but quasi-Biblically) they remind me of the dissolute maton who pissed his life and patrimony away at the sabong and pool tables, leaving his daughters to fend for themselves. One day he hears someone making a joke about how his daughters' only job options are as nurses, maids, japayuki, and gets fucking wounded. How dare the drunk dishonor his daughters, and worse, the Family Name! "THIS CALLS FOR AN IMMEDIATE DISCUSSION!" 

Every year or so, there's another Immediate Discussion about some actress or actor or something making some crack on American TV. Kate Winslet. Something about roaches.  That line in Desperate Housewives about our doctors that gave birth to a god-damn petition that got more signatures than one condemning monks, fucking HOLY MEN, getting shot in the streets in Burma. Jesus, can we just get the fuck OVER OURSELVES! 

Speaking of which, we should pause to think about the existential/political commentary that a mail-order bride makes. It's possible to see it as performance art on the samurai level, compressing your life into the blade of a single gesture: "You know what? I'm just gonna go out and marry a old white psycho sheepherder that I met on the internet! It sure beats life here!"

Thousands of these bloody-edged jokes a year, and the government still stands. Jesus.

The Accidental Cinematographer

Yeah, yeah, another post on the Kho videos. In my defense however, this will not be about their content. The videos' creation and dissemination are so blindingly immoral that it's understandable that no one has focused on its form, but dammit, I couldn't help thinking that some of the stuff actually actually looks good (!) visually and cinematically. Perhaps I should explain that I've always been a fan of low-res media. I like the low-rent neighborhoods of anti-HD: Super-8, Betamax and VHS and the more recent format of 3GP phone video. I'm not exactly sure why. Brian Eno once wrote that once a recording medium is supplanted by another medium, the flaws of the old medium become prized as aesthetic phenomena. Some of it probably has to do with things that we can't see, but which we associate with what we CAN see (eg a certain type of graininess, color, etc), just as we associate ideas of speed and efficiency with, say, chrome. Super8 is associated with rock, Derek Jarman, Jonas Mekas, the 60's, all sorts of romantic rebel imagery. Still, I am entranced by the completely unverifiable idea that we might be perceive the paucity of detail as a kind of minimalism executed on the level of the pixel. We might perceive low resolution as doing something in the photographic realm that Japanese sumi-e does in the realm of painting: as performing a kind of figurative distillation. Nowadays we also have video compression for that extra patina of image degradation, which, serendipitously, also does wonders for modesty. Maybe compression artifacts can't hide Kho's dick, but they do a great job of smearing the details of female genitalia. The girls could be wearing bodysuits for all the detail visible in the videos.

I like what the locked camera captures, particularly the way the subjects' heads fall out of frame as they hold a position, removing explicit detail while still giving the sense that the act is proceeding apace; and like how the absolute absence of music and muffled voices give only fragments of information that we are forced to cobble together. The fragmentary nature of the available information gives the effect of having a substream of jump-cuts in the frame. (Hm! Intra frame information montage? Gotta explore this idea more somewhere else.) I'm not kidding, the shots could be inserted into something French. Dammit, Kho may have just popularized a new way to shoot and frame sex scenes.

Of course, it would have to be justified why the lens gets suddenly wrapped in the digital equivalent of gauze when a couple gets frisky. On the other hand, we've gotten inured to the use of handheld cameras for practically any subject. It might be that we'll learn to see this kind of distressed compressed-for-the-web video imagery as appropriate to the subject matter. I'm thinking of the brief period of time when the Paris Hilton video caused us to perceive a green-tinted closeup shot with a wide-angle lens as a "sex shot." That association evaporated rather quickly, but I suspect that Kho's approach might actually become useful as vocabulary.

Mrs D's party: Uh-Oh

Have to say that the preparations (as documented by Aquiles Zonio of the Mindanao Inquirer) for Pacquiao’s mother’s birthday leave me a little disturbed. The writer writes “No, she is not Imeldific,” meaning that Dionisia Pacquiao is not Imelda Marcos herself, but one can’t escape the feeling that if Mrs. D is not Imeldific (proper noun), the preparations definitely sound imeldific (adjective).

Five different gowns, each costing in the tens of thousands of pesos. Louis Vuitton handbag for P150,000. P15,000 shoes. Excess, display, love of designer labels, the usual imeldific pomp and glitter. Interesting that while Pacman himself seems to be a quiet, humble soul who seems to genuinely believe that it is crucial to his well-being that he remain a simple man at heart, he is surrounded by every sign of a full-bore trapo machine dedicated to impressing to all and sundry that Pacquiao is NOT a simple man, a tao, but a full blown Panginoon. In our semifeudal culture, the landlord is Lord of The Land, the Panginoong May Lupa, a rarefied being whose exotic and excessive tastes are a stamp of his power. You get the idea that somewhere in Camp Pacquiao, some sense that Pacquiao is extraordinary is trying to manifest and express itself, and is doing so in the usual, monstrous, drunken way of nouveau panginoon. The huge entourages. The huge houses. The armed bodyguards: pomp and circumstance, shock and awe. I’m just waiting for somebody to haul out a couple of cases of Petrus, or maybe have Fat Bastard in a Baby Huey costume jump out of a cake like in the Marcos video.

I’m not suggesting Pacquiao or even Mrs D. came up with all the trappings. More likely there are some close friends/confidantes/ hairdressers/backstabbing politicos in the camp who believe with absolute conviction that they could give to Paquiao A House Befitting a Man of His Stature, or to Mrs D. The Greatest Birthday Party General Roxas Has Ever Known, and who have by sheer force of personality managed to corral control of the budget. However, it seems to indicate that at the very least, Pacquiao either believes that his own aesthetics of simplicity are personal preferences that need not apply to anything else/anyone but himself; or that he cannot control or guide Camp Pacquiao. Money and power attract people, and a mass of people jammed/falling/struggling into a space will sort themselves into some kind of structure, negotiating orbits, turf, responsibility, procedure. Who knows what the hell is going on in there, but it doesn’t look like a party.

Fuck The Customs

Occasioned by the fucking book blockade.
Check here and here


William Gibson flash. A pirate book resistance. Pdfs, xerox machines, printers modified with local ink cartridges and a black market flourishing out of suitcases, balikbayan boxes and diplomatic pouches. Descendants of rebel monks-- scribes copying the books of Aristotle for posterity as Europe falls to the Inquisition and the Dark Ages. Bradbury's To The Chicago Abyss. Memory and resistance. De Niro's rebel plumber adapted and updated. Mmm, maybe Ronnie Lazaro as a guerrilla publisher with a modded inkjet-and-laptop running off sunlight and batteries in a kariton with a Millenium Falcon sticker buried amidst graffiti and industrial burloloy. Wearing a scapular with the picture of Antonio Calipjo Go and hunted by a Talibanesque confederacy of murderous dunces. Final crane shot spiraling out of a sucking chest wound as our hero lies dying on a sidewalk in Bangkal, apelike centurions dancing around him, except elsewhere in the city a twelve-year old swears vengeance and continuity over a sheet of carbon paper. Closeup of Lazaro's hand inscribing the opening words of Catcher in The Rye with his blood even as he slips into the dark. Fuck the Customs and know the names responsible: Customs examiner Rene Agulan and Customs Undersecretary Espele Sales.

4 Channels of synchronized HD!

Am setting up the system for the work of Michele Theunissen (A South African artist based in Australia). It's a four-channel video installation using full HD video. She shot it on 16mm, digitized it to full 1920 x 1080p HD. So that's four screens full HD video projections playing in sync. Will be using 4 networked Macintosh Pros to handle the heavy-duty pixel crunching required. Gotta be the first HD video installation in the country. It'll be set up at MCAD, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Design at the ground floor of the College of St Benilde, the weird crystalline building on Vito Cruz. Opens April 30 this coming Thursday. They're showing a Lav Diaz film at 2PM, cocktails at 6 PM.Dunno how many days they can rent a suite of four projectors. Anybody interested in the video installation better come to the opening April 30. ;-)

First Blood

Might as well say it: Impossible that it's a coincidence that Nicole recants and gets a visa within the week that Obama calls GMA. Sounds like some kind of Hollywood bullshit, I know. Could presidents really horsetrade over the phone? Lissen, end this Junk The VFA grandstanding crap and let's talk. Let our guy go and we'll give the girl a visa. Nicole, VFA, Smith, US Visa. Counters in a game that's ended with Marines in Mindanao, Smith exonerated, Nicole getting a visa, and GMA getting a personal call from the poster boy of America Redeemed. Not as good as a photograph with the man but better than nothing. Everybody happy. Win-win. 'Course Filipinas wind up looking like a bunch of lying, visa-grubbing sluts, but what can you do. De Quiros defends Obama by saying it's not Obama's fault if Filipinos don't look after Philippine interests. It's not Obama's job to look after Philippine interests. Precisely. That's why we can't go jumping into any parades for the man, no matter how cute he and his family look on TV . Yeah, he's the anti-Bush, yeah he's black, yeah he wants to get out of Iraq, but none of that means he wants a new deal for the Philippines. None of that would mean his deal would be a good deal for us anyway. Like I said, Obama is not my President. Obama is not our president. He's still a goddamn American president, the CEO of a globe-spanning, military machine backing imperialist economics.You can't blink when you're dealing with the bastards.

Excerpt from a new video work: Tiempo Real

Tiempo Real = "Real Time".  I made this for Manila Transitio 1945 -- an event held on March 7 2009 to mark the "liberation" and annihilation of Manila. Screened it looping on a wall of the building known as the American Barracks in Fort Santiago. The wall is old, stained, and riddled with bulletholes, which really tied into the themes of the piece . Unsuspecting passersby were doing double takes thinking that they saw ghosts inserting themselves into the images. I was particularly happy to eavesdrop on common city employees discussing the video among themselves, arguing where a given image was taken, how the effect was created (one guy described the crossfade in photographic terms --as a picture "developing" over time) who among their colleagues was the one sweeping by Postigo gate, etc etc.  

Eric Lyon, a teacher and programmer, relates this story:

During an exchange of ideas between Karlheinz Stockhausen and several younger
electronic musicians (Witts 1995) Stockausen observed, ”I
heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I
think it would be very helpful if he listens to my work Song
Of The Youth, which is electronic music, and a young boy’s
voice singing with himself. Because he would then immediately
stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he
would look for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and
he would not allow to repeat any rhythm if it were varied to
some extent and if it did not have a direction in its sequence
of variations.” Richard D. James responded from a different
perspective, ”I didn’t agree with him. I thought he should
listen to a couple of tracks of mine: ”Didgeridoo”, then he’d
stop making abstract, random patterns you can’t dance to.”

Brilliant exchange. Love the way Richard D. James (ie Aphex Twin, a spectacularly talented electronica composer) makes the point that Stockhausen is judging his (James) music by inappropriate standards by deliberately making a parallel error and judging Stockhausen by techno standards. 

Old man Stockhausen still labors under the impression that the road of musical progress lies along a single historical trajectory mapped out by the serialists. That serious music should  avoid steady time signatures and harmony and look for new forms of serial variation. James refuses to be intimidated, and asserts the right of new musical form and traditions to exist not as primitive or retrograde traditions, but simply as different traditions that may value/focus on/emphasize variation and creativity on different fronts. African drumming may be very poor harmonically, and have no narrative structure to speak of, but it's very complex rhythmically and great to dance to. Classical Indian music is monophonic, but has complex beat cycles, exploits microtones, and boasts a wealth of scales. And so on.

In the Beginning was The Stick

...most modern technologies can trace their development back through history to the common Stick. Writing implements, (Pens, pencils, charcoal, burnt sticks) Nuclear Weapons (Missiles, Cannons, Guns, Crossbows, Arrows, Sticks.) Skyscrapers (Buildings, houses, huts, thatching, the Stick) and Artificial Intelligence (computers, calculators, the abacus, notched Sticks) are all derivatives

--Orinoco--

"A Filipino Obama"

I've already read two articles talking about a Filipino Obama. One of them, in the Free Press, even gives advice to wannabes how to BECOME the Filipino Obama! I was wondering why the tone/structure sounded familiar, and then it hit me: Nestor Torre. Former catholic gradeschool teacher masquerading as a film critic. Always wrapping up with morals of the story, or pointing out possible lessons to be drawn.

Let's think this from the other end: What did it take to make an AMERICAN Obama? Why haven't both parties fielded Obamas in all their elections? Why didn't the Republicans have anybody that even had a tenth of the Obama's power to inspire? Why did they settle for a scary white lolo with a comatose anorexic for a wife? The answer is because it's very hard to get/become an Obama. It is especially hard for anybody already formed by and mired in the practices and assumptions of traditional politics (trapo culture) to become "an Obama." This is the equivalent of someone like Tony Bennett looking at Johnny Rotten, suddenly thinking Hey, punk is the way to go and thinking maybe he could reissue Mona Lisa with guitars. A bunch of the younger/thinner politicos could binge on canthaxanthin, and wear skinny black suits, but that's about as far as they could get towards Obamahood. Back in the 80's it seemed one in three female politicians was doing Cory hair and glasses, but nobody ever became "another Cory".

Aside from actually having studied law in Harvard, and become the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review (as opposed to, say, playing professional basketball, goofing around on noontime TV, being the son of a mayor or playing a lawyer in a movie) Obama gives the sense of having reinvented for himself what a politician could be. He has something of a prodigy's innocence. One can imagine a bunch of mentors coming up to him and telling him, "Okay, so you wanna be a politician? First you gotta get in good with this guy Daley he runs the Democratic machinery in Chicago, then you gotta please the gays, but without alienating the evangelicals, then you gotta get the black vote, but without alienating the whites..." And Obama says, yeah, well, thanks, but I'll pass, and then does something else. He has a talent for (to quote the painter Peter Schmidt) "not doing what nobody else thought of not doing before."

The phrase infuriates me because it dismisses the idea of substance itself. To think one can become anything at all with a few hints and tips and tricks is the nadir of superficiality. "How to be the Filipino Richard Feynman: 1) Try not to get hung up on doing Quantum Chromodynamics like everyone else. Visualize. Look for shortcuts. "

Just because America has one doesn't mean we can get one too. Why would we even think that? It seems to me that the only way you can think that is if you first assume that we are a copy of American reality. Are we?

I would like to be inspired too. I want the Shadow to lift, to hear someone say something that doesn't put me to sleep or make me throw up. But let's not talk like a Filipino Obama is something we ought to be able to whip up in a jiffy or something. It makes us sound like a bunch of idiots.

Documentation of the Robot Gamelan

Well, finally put together the video documentation of the interactive robot gamelan quartet --the ISEA 2008 project I was blogging about early this year. Footage is a bit noisy. I know (in theory, anyway) that for stuff like this, the video documentation should be considered the final artwork, but I have to say that thinking and dealing about documentation always seems like a huge mountain after all that physical labor making the work itself. Besides, part of the reason I got into making the robots was because I wanted to get away and make some art using physical matter instead of data and pixels in the first place.

A Discomforting Quote

--discomforting anyway, to anyone who tries to make objective correlatives out of mechanical functions. But funny:

Inanimate objects can be classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost.

The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose. As a general rule, any object capable of breaking down at the moment when it is most needed will do so.

--Russell Baker--

Russell Baker was an American columnist, most famous for distinguishing between being solemn and being serious.

International Herald Tribune!

All right! The International Herald Tribune covered the ISEA show. They got most of it right except for saying that the gestures were captured by photosensors and that I was "half mathematician" The online version's here. They also have a slideshow (with 3 great photos of my work) that you can access via a button on the second page or by clicking here. Appeared in the realspace paper too, with a photo of my work as well! Page 10. Woohoo!

More on ISEA

Above is a video of me and Corey Manders (who is contributing the gesture-recognition technology to the piece) fine-tuning the gesture tracking system. You can actually see the headless ghosts triggering the notes by moving their white-tipped drumsticks. The piece has since premiered at the opening but I haven't been able to digitize the footage yet. Incredible opening. I didn't know it until a couple of days ago, but this is ISEA's 20th anniversary. So it's a big festival. Over 500 delegates! Speakers include Lawrence Lessig, the inventor of the Creative Commons. The Singapore Tourism Board funded the buffet, so there was red wine that never ran out, servers with (among other things) huge trays of satay and some kind of salmon salad in those little Chinese porcelain spoons. A whole LOT of people managed to get drunk on red wine, which doesn't happen very often in Singapore, as they tax the shit out of alcohol. They opened the exhibit to the public at 9PM during the Night Festival, so there were huge crowds of ordinary people plowing through the space. Must have been 15-20 people in my room at any given time. Weird group dynamic electricity in there as people watched one guy interacting with the ghosts playing the gamelan. When the interactor would get off the platform, you could feel the twin drives of curiosity and self-consciousness building and warring in the audience until something would reach a limit and one brave soul would step up to bat. Really, really, really fantastic experience.

Chako flew in especially to catch the opening, which made it a real culmination for the three months we spent apart. (Thanks, babes). A bunch of Pinoys came and formed a kind of ambassadorial contingent. Old Mowelfund compatriot Yeye Calderon, his friends Nelle and Al Torres, (apparently the former personal chef of Kris Aquino), Lee Gibson and her husband Scott, Edsel Abesamis and his wife Sarah, plus some friends like the Malaysian photographer Nico Ong and his wife, and Ivan Thomasz, an old friend from the Singapore International Film Festival. A couple of the I2R guys who I had gotten close to were there too, their significant others in tow: Tze Jan Sim nd Chong Chieh Tseng. Varghese Paulose brought his whole family along! It was nice to be able to tell his daughters how grateful I was for his help, and it was really good to be there with everybody, there at the light at the end of the tunnel. Al and Yeye in particular took a kind of proprietary pride in the piece and became impromptu museum guides, explaining to everyone who stepped up how the piece worked. Woohoo!

Oyeah, finally got some time to surf the ISEA site again and found that the blogger JoelOng posted an interview with me here:

Couple of typos and things, but on the whole I think he really put it together well. I was afraid I'd kind of rambled during the interview.

ISEA Update: Robot Gamelan Beaters

So far the concrete (actually wooden) results of my two months in Singapore:





Above are two shots of the beaters for the Kenong (3 units from a set of 10)



Above is the Kendhang Ciblon (medium-sized drum) and one of the 2 beaters I made for it.



These weren't even the biggest gongs in the full-scale gamelan I borrowed them from.


The beater for the Saron Panerus.



Another angle.



Closeup of the solenoid mechanism. About as simple as you can get. Many thanks to Professor Jan Mrazek, the the head and teacher of the NUS gamelan group (Czechoslovakian, but an absolute Southeast Asia geek), for his very generous loan of the instruments, and to Varghese Paulose, the head of I2R's fabrication laboratory, without whose enthusiastic and welcoming support I wouldn't have been able to move a single step on this project.

Duh-Day

Made a breakthrough realization today. The solenoids were louder than the gongs, so I thought the solution was quieting the solenoids. Forgot that you could also make the gongs louder. And how do you do that? With MASS. There's a reason the traditional mallets are so heavy: it's because heavy sounds good. Moral of the story: Respect vernacular technology. If they've been doing/building it that way for a couple of hundred/thousand years, it's because there are sound physical reasons to build them that way. Jesus.

Stupid, stupid, stupid! But any day you realize how stupid you've been is a day you've gotten a little smarter, so I suppose that it's a good day in that sense.

The image shows the solenoids and the mallets. On the left is a denuded tennis ball on a stick. This was modeled on/inspired by the padded balls they traditionally use on the gongs. On the right is the new beater I kludged together after the light came on. String wrapped around a good SLAB of wood (from the wood stash of Yeye Calderon, a painter/old Mowelfund comrade now residing in SG. Salamat, Ye!). Mass made all the difference.

Another interesting detail. When the tennis ball mallet hit the gong the first time, it made a nice, loud sound. If it hit the gong again, before the gong had come to rest, sometimes it would make a loud sound, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would even damp the gong. Eventually realized that it was a matter of phasing. If the mallet hit the gong out of phase, the waves it generated in the metal would cancel out the waves already there. Apparently, the solution is just to use really heavy mallets, so that they pack enough punch to damp the existing vibrations AND generate a whole bunch of new ones. Like I said, duh.

I bow in the direction of all the long-dead creators of gamelan instruments, and their acoustic/engineering/physical solutions. I follow in the footsteps of giants.

PS ISEA has its own dedicated blogger (nice idea). He's Joel Ong, whose job it is to write up and photograph the festival and process. His stuff can be found here.

ISEA Update

ISEA update. Raining like 3.67 motherfuckers here so I can blog without feeling guilty. Didn't realize I had such a protestant/confucian work ethic. This is a video of the prototype mechanism I built for Quartet- the intallation I'm building for ISEA 2008. Photosensor on the screen registers the white block on the end of the image's drumstick and activates a solenoid that strikes a lever and hits the Javanese xylophone. Hope to be building 15 more of these. But quieter! The damn solenoid must be 5 times louder than the xylophone!

Gave a talk the other day at the I2R (the research center that's facilitating my work, also known as "I squared R" and the Institute for Infocomm Research ) to a roomful of engineers and progammers, including Corey Manders, my chief collaborator for the computer vision and conducting interface, and my host Dr. Farzam Farbiz of I2R's Signal Processing group. Must have been over 20 people in there if stage fright hasn't magnified the crowd in memory. Great reception, nice feedback. Presented my work as a history of investigating/seeking non-cinematic ways to use moving images. So I mentioned Volume Control, /mutation and Spinning Jimmy. Forgot to mention Shift Register, Damn!

Dr. Farbiz asked a classic question: what is the engineering significance of the work? (I2R is an honest-to-god research center that invents stuff to sell, so every research initiative has to be justified in terms of technological significance and business model). I said that there was no engineering rationale I could currently think 0f that would justify using images to control machinery. It is much less efficient than using computer programs . Thus, I said, to a pure engineering intelligence, the work was meaningless, or at least redundant. However, I said, it means something to humans, who conceive images as powerless ghosts, to see that idea violated in physical space. (Of course, I didn't put it this succinctly during the question-and-answer period). The artwork revises, and makes visible, our preconceptions, at a visceral level. This opened up a nice little discussion among the programmers and engineers about the uses and meaning of art.

Of course, the pure engineering intelligence does not exist on this earth. A pure engineering intelligence would find it illogical to wear clothes on a hot day, and find swimming trunks and underwear indistinguishable. A human engineer, on the other hand, finds the idea of going to work naked, or of wearing underwear to the beach, unthinkable.

This capacity for finding things unthinkable is a symptom of culture, and therefore of humanity, that which is immersed and defined by cultural ideas. This is the side of us that art speaks to. Art makes the overlooked and unthought visible, thinkable, palpable.

Possible definition: Artworks are multivalent and unfinished signifiers. They invite us to speculate about their significance. Thus the viewer builds the finished work in his mind, for himself, by augmenting the signifier with his own signifieds.

PS the page describing my stuff on the ISEA website can be found here.

Conducting Ghosts in Singapore

New project! In 2007, I pitched Quartet, a project I proposed to ISEA, The International Symposium for Electronic Arts, a new media arts conference and festival in Singapore. My proposal got selected and so I am now an artist-in-residence at the National University of Singapore, and with a tenure till early August.
(http://www.isea2008singapore.org/exhibitions/air_info.html)

I will be developing Quartet in collaboration with the Institute for Infocomm Research (abbreviated in print as I2R and in speech as "I squared R") -- an honest-to-god commercial research center, where the people invent stuff for a living. I'll be working with Corey Manders, an ex- professional saxophone player who fucked off from music, became a computer engineer and is now in I2R's Signal Processing Department trying (among other things) to make computers see.

For Quartet, I will be making video images play instruments in the real world. I2R will help me make an computer vision interface so that a person will be able to conduct the four video-instrument tandems by waving his arms in the air. (Mwahahaha! It's alive! Krakaboom! )

I'll be incorporating the circuits I used to make Spinning Jimmy, the conceptual-kinetic video installation I made for Visual Pond's End Frame exhibit. To recap, Spinning Jimmy had a video loop of a man lifting a sandbag over his head. A sensor detected each lift of the sandbag and moved a little crank that caused a thread to be wound upon a spool. (So I now have in my house a spool of red thread that was wound by a ghost in a television monitor. I should make a whole bunch of these and sell them in little glass boxes or something. )

For Quartet, I'll be using the circuits to play a stripped-down 'punk gamelan' ensemble, (essentially four gamelan instruments I will rip out of a full-fledged Indonesian orchestra) and write a bunch of algorithms that will hopefully create something interesting to conduct/listen to.

So the work might also be seen as a development of Volume Control, the visual score I developed some years back and which was most recently played by Tengal's Gangan Ensemble during Teddy Co's three-screen video-music extravaganza Sinemusikalye last March 16 at the Remedios Circle.

Below are links to Sinemusikalye, but I think you have to be on Multiply to view the sites.

http://earthmedicine.multiply.com/photos/album/58/Sinemusikalye,
http://tengal.multiply.com/photos/album/49/SINEMUSIKALYE

So yeah, Quartet : Spinning Jimmy Meets Volume Control!

WOOHOO!

A Comforting Quote

The frame of mind in which interesting things germinate is often more confused and desperate than organized and confident.

--Randy Thom

Noise and Causes

Some thoughts occasioned by the last NMAM gig (Minus Ten Decibels--- happened at the screening room on the 2nd floor of Mogwai at Cubao X last April 30. NMAM = New Media Arts Manila). Successful and not. Successful because most of the stuff was half decent to experience, and not successful because we couldn't play as softly as I'd hoped. Minus Ten Decibels was supposed to be an evening of quiet noise. Blums and I had actually hoped people would have to lean forward, searching for the sounds, but that was not to be. Aside from most of the performers apparently having difficulty wrapping their heads around that idea, the hubbub from the bar below was just too loud. Minimum volume was determined as the minimum volume level required to drown out the bar. Ah well. Maybe next time it can be held in a library or something.

Performers

Me, Autoceremony (Jing Garcia), Caliph8, Malek Lopez, Nun Radar (Pow Martinez) and Tengal performed sound, Jason Tan and Blums Borres performed video, which included insectoid footage created by the Lord of Mogwai, hizzoner Lyle Sacris.


Noise for a Cause?

A member of the audience, Atty Adrian Sison, asked if NMAM had ever thought of linking the shows to some kind of social theme, which made me bark a bit. I should have gone up and apologized, but I have to give it to him. He knew it was a legitimate question and he didn't back down. I eventually calmed down and gave him my 2 cents on the idea, which might be worth posting here.

I am against associating sound art with social/environmental/topical causes. And two reasons are that:

1) Doing so destroys the ambiguity of the work. The easiest way to "tame" new or unfamiliar forms is to link them to themes like poverty or hunger or imperialism. Then anything discordant in the work becomes the emblem of social iniquity, injustice, rage, or whatever. The work becomes a vessel for a set of prefabricated meanings. I prefer that the sounds and images in these works stay as sounds and images, or at least, that they remain available as signs/emblems for other meanings. Who knows. Keep social justice out of the picture long enough and maybe some of Lirio's robot cat solos might start to sound like love songs, heh heh.

2) The easiest way to convince people that you or the work are "serious," is to link the work to things which people agree are serious: things like poverty, rice shortages, tsunamis, etc. I don't like it when artists do this because it's an easy thing to do. Also, it's an easy way to pass off bad art, because the seriousness of the theme camouflages the formal flaws, making the flaws harder to see.

Pugad Baboy

I used to love the strip because Pol Medina used to be funny, creative, clever. His characters used to go into the future, parody batman, make surreal puns, etc. Lately he's run out of ideas or passion but he's been masking it with political commentary. Polgas and Mang Dagul drinking beer and talking about corruption in the Philippines. Topical, maybe slightly satirical, but most of the time, not really funny or even clever. Most of the time, it's kind of boring. I'd have to call this turn of events as artistic failure. Good causes are easy masks for bad art to wear.

Fine, what about good art? Say you put together a bunch of noises that actually have a beginning, middle and end, that have interesting dynamics, etc etc. Is there anything to be lost by associating it with, say, the Jonas Burgos kidnapping? Mingus did that a couple of times I think. He titled one composition I really liked as "Free Cellblock F, 'Tis Nazi USA" or something. Just tacked an incendiary title on the thing. He said he did it to make people think. Well, I dunno. When I listen to that piece, I just basically forget about the title and soak in the jazz. And another way of expressing that fact would be to say that I need to forget about the Nazi USA shit to be able to hear the damn horns, which would be another way of saying that linking sounds to sociopolitical themes make the sounds harder to hear.


Enough said. I want to thank everybody who came and soaked it in, and also our sponsors Intel, Globe and Sony Ericsson for feeding the performers and making the gig happen. Several people came up to me later and said they really liked the Q & A, so let that be a hint to anybody who reads this and shows up at the next gig: Speak up. People like it. ;-)

Cheers!