At the top of the year, I give you an overview in brief: |
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1.07.2015
allisonHOLT | WINTER 2015: Oilly Oowen... at the Smithsonian?
8.28.2014
The Minerva Foundation
Time is cramming itself into an infinitely small space at the moment, but I still think I'll be attending this Conference of Neuroaesthetics next week:
8.25.2014
allisonHOLT | SUMMER 2014 : Oilly Oowen at Djerassi
Dear Friends,
This missive comes to you from OOwen Labs' new home on Oakland's 5th Avenue marina, where things remain at full steam. I am currently psyching up for a September Djerassi Artist Residency: I’ll be experimenting with projection mapped video on objects and materials– scientific glass, vapors, liquids, crystals– to create models of multi-dimensional reality and human consciousness. It was incredibly gratifying last month to see Andreas Siagian and Budi Prokosa there, my Javanese nominees for the inaugural art-science residency!
CHOICE NEWS:
06 + 12.2014, Scott Stark + Oilly Oowen: our show at Austin's New Media Art + Sound Summit was a GAS, and Craig Baldwin has invited us to Other Cinema in December: The Texas Kick-Ass Sampler Show kicks off 30 years! of Artist Television Access.
06.2014, Bay Area Currents: Although Hypercube No. 1 was selected for this exhibition, I opted to premiere it alongside the full body of work it belongs to. More on this below.
11.2014, Mobius, Boston: This longstanding experimental art org is being very inticing at the moment. We are working on a November exhibition to premiere the fruits of my time at Djerassi.
Fall 2014, UCLA: Very excited to present to Victoria Vesna's class in the Art-Sci Department!
Spring 2015, Stanford: As part of a year-long event series at Stanford Art Institute, I've been invited to speak at a special LASER (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous), "Imagining the Universe."
2015, Optic Flare, San Francisco: This experimental media collective-- Scott Stark, Kerry Laitala and yours truly-- has been hard at work all year on The City Luminous, a commemoration of the pioneering light shows at San Francisco's 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. We're creating a series of projected light and sound installations, performances, screenings, and lectures in partnership with The Exploratorium, California Historical Society and Insight Digital, that will include The Beginning Was The End. SF in 2015 will be SPECTACULAR.
Thank you all for your support and I can't wait to see you out there.
5.07.2014
What Is It Like to Be a Bat?
What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Jane Winderen answers Thomas Nagel by making audible the inaudible.
"Even with fancy Hi-Fi equipment, the weak link is often our ears and their limited 20Hz-20,000Hz hearing range. As pointed out by Motherboard, artist Jane Winderen wants you to get a feeling for what it's like to be a whale or bat with her "Out of Range" album. To do that, she used special equipment to record bat echolocation signals, marine vocalizing and other sub- and ultrasonic sounds from glaciers, oceans, and forests. From there, she slowed frequencies as high as 100KHz until they became audible, then mixed them with other exotic sounds that are within our hearing range. The end result (below) is hypnotic 40 minute recording of sounds that normally pass you right by."
~Steve Dent, Engadget
4.30.2014
allisonHOLT | SPRING 2014
Dear Friends,
I hope that 2014 has been treating you all just right! As for moi, I am shoehorning this late Spring dispatch into an already extremely busy year…
In The Beginning Was The End news, I have just been advanced to the next round of jurying for Bay Area Currents 2014, at Oakland’s Pro Arts gallery, and will be doing a studio visit with the brilliant Dena Beard of the Berkeley Art Museum shortly. VERY exciting. In April, I presented TBWTE at an Anthropology of Consciousness conference in Portland, and at the fantastic 20th Annual Science of Consciousness Conference at the University of Arizona. Engaging research on quantum physics, neurology and brain imaging, cutting edge debate between thinkers like Donald Hoffman, Daniel Dennett, and Alison Gopnik… I was invited to present again at the Science and Nonduality Conference this coming Fall in San Jose, but first, in May, I’ll bring TBWTE to Margaretha Houghwout’s Visual Culture and Technology: History of New Media course as a visiting artist at UC Santa Cruz. Stay tuned…
Back in January, the inimitable Scott Stark and I collaborated on an expanded cinema performance at Shapeshifters Cinema for an unbelievable, standing room only audience. Our dual 16mm projection piece, Nocturnal Symmetries (sound by yours truly, using field recordings by Byram Abbott), was performed again live at the 2014 Crossroads Film Festival here in San Francisco, but hey, see it in Wisconsin! (before it secedes), at the upcoming Milwaukee Underground Film Festival juror’s screening! or Chicago’s Nightingale Cinema! This June, I’ll be heading out to Austin to do the full show at the New Media Art + Sound Summit (support NMASS here!), and I am more than honored to be collaborating with such a masterful and thoroughly cool human being.
One of my heroes, cognitive scientist Piero Scaruffi, invited me to return as a LASER speaker (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous) in June at UC Berkeley, but as this date coincides with NMASS I will be announcing my 2015 talk soon. Likewise, Counterpath Press in Denver, CO approached me to do a solo thing there this Spring, but this, too, is being moved into the future. More to look forward to.
Among several Springtime screenings, I had the pleasure of participating in the 2014 World Water Day Symposium, both at Artist Television Access in The Matter of Water, and at Oakland's MilkBar in Hydrologies + History: Water + Memory, and in ACRE TV's Test Patterns at Mana Contemporary in Chicago.
As always, thank you incredible people for reading, and for forever fueling my fires.
Thine true,
Allison
12.05.2013
Cash from Color, Light, Motion
The Foundation "... is devoted to fostering the efforts of artists working with non- traditional materials. These materials include physical sources of energy, light and sound, which are used in works that question and extend the boundaries of the visual arts." Mr. Bermant sounds like he was an interesting chap.
Huge thanks to my friend John Hood down at Hancock College for recommending me, and to my fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas.
 |
It's an Oowen-elevating, even levitating, situation. |
11.24.2013
Messieurs... C'est L'heure!
Absinthe Dream:
Last night I walked into a room full of people and somehow started feeding back.
Everyone covered their ears and looked at me in horror.
Me: "What-at-at?? UHWUHWUHWUHWUUUH..."
11.22.2013
11.20.2013
The Present Prize: FINALIST
Ladies and gents, I am one of three finalists for The Present Prize!
THANKS to everyone who voted for The Beginning Was The End. I find popularity contests extremely awkward and do what I can to avoid them; if I win this one it will be a lifetime first. And lucrative, to boot.
A verdict is due in a couple of weeks, so in the meantime I am still up against a couple of formidable superstars... I will keep you postered! Enormous thanks again to all of you who have supported my work. You are the best.
THANKS to everyone who voted for The Beginning Was The End. I find popularity contests extremely awkward and do what I can to avoid them; if I win this one it will be a lifetime first. And lucrative, to boot.
A verdict is due in a couple of weeks, so in the meantime I am still up against a couple of formidable superstars... I will keep you postered! Enormous thanks again to all of you who have supported my work. You are the best.
11.17.2013
In My Own Language
"The previous part of this video was in my native language. Many people have assumed that, when I talk about this being my language, that means that each part of the video must have a particular symbolic message within it designed for the human mind to interpret. But my language is not about designing words or even visual symbols for people to interpret; it is about being in a constant conversation with every aspect of my environment, reacting physically to all parts of my surroundings.
In this part of the video, the water doesn't symbolize anything. I am just interacting with the water as the water interacts with me. Far from being purposeless, the way that I move is an ongoing response to what is around me. Ironically, the way I move when responding to everything around me is described as "being in a world of my own," whereas, if I interact with a much more limited set of responses, and only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings, people claim that I am "opening up to a true interaction with the world." They judge my existence, awareness, and personhood on which of a tiny and limited part of the world I appear to be reacting to. The way I naturally think and respond to things looks and feels so different from standard concepts or even visualization that some people do not consider it thought at all, but it is a way of thinking in its own right. However, the thinking of people like me is only taken seriously if we learn your language, no matter how we previously thought or interacted.
As you heard, I can sing along with what is around me. It is only when I type something in your language that you refer to me as having communication. I smell things. I listen to things. I feel things. I taste things. I look at things. It is not enough to look and listen and taste and smell and feel: I have to do those to the right things-- such as look at books-- and fail to do them to the wrong things, or else people doubt that I am a thinking being, and since their definition of thought defines their definition of personhood so ridiculously much, they doubt that I am a real person as well.
I would honestly like to know how many people, if you met me on the street, would believe I wrote this. I find it very interesting, by the way, that failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit but failure to learn my language is seen as so natural that people like me are officially described as mysterious and puzzling rather than anyone admitting that it is themselves who are confused, not autistic people or other cognitively disabled people who are inherently confusing. We are even viewed as non-communicative if we don't speak the standard language, but other people are not considered non-communicative if they are so oblivious to our own languages to believe they don't exist.
In the end, I want you to know that this has not been intended as a voyeuristic freak show where you get to look at the bizarre workings of the autistic mind. It is meant as a strong statement on the existence and value of many different kinds of thinking and interaction with the world, where how close you can appear to a specific one of them determines whether you are seen as a real person, or an adult, or an intelligent person. And in a world in which those determine whether you have any rights, there are people being tortured, people dying, because they are considered non-persons, because their kind of thought is so unusual as to not be considered thought at all. Only when the many shapes of personhood are recognized will justice and human rights be possible."
~A.M. Baggs
I recently returned to teaching experimental video to teens (and younger kids) on the autism spectrum. When I tell folks what I'm doing, most respond with some amount of surprise, and almost all say something about how incredibly difficult it must be. In fact, it's something I find extremely satisfying and it actually feels pretty durned natural. The reason for that, I'm finding, is that I empathize with these kids: I'm beginning to locate where I may lie on the spectrum myself.
Although there seems to be some controversy over the authenticity of A.M. Baggs' diagnosis, which is more than a tad perplexing, she's one articulate woman who I hope to have the chance to meet someday.
10.29.2013
The Present Prize
I was nominated for a couple of interesting art awards in September, one of which goes to Bay Area artists with a research focus, The Present Prize.
This is decided by public vote, which is very nervewracking.
I am one in a formidable bunch of fellow artists, so... If you want to see more sublime, uncanny, culturally important work come out of OOwen Labs in 2014 well then get thine mouses clicking, good people!
We need all the help we can get.
Pleasethankyou.
You can vote often and until the end of day NOVEMBER 15th...
10.14.2013
Because It's Free Anyway
. . .
nothing got wild here, the west didn't get wild until the white man
got here. And then it got very wild. And so what we had was a clash of
values and perceptions. So when our Chiefs talked with these men,
these leaders, who we met from another hemisphere, their discussion
didn't mesh, they passed one another. They weren't talking about the
same thing. So when they sold the island of Manhattan,
or, shall we say, when the Dutch "bought" the island of Manhattan, the
Indian said, `I wonder why he's giving us all this, because it's free
anyway. But he's a nice fellow so we'll take it and we'll share this
with him too.' So the next year as the Indian came back to hunt and fish
in this great hunting ground Manhattan was. . . there was a fence and
they said `What's that?' They said, `Well that's the fence, I have just
bought this land.' And they said, `What do you mean, "bought"?'
And so began the conflict.
...This conception of private ownership--of property, of the blood and sinew of Mother Earth, of people, of life, of ideas--came from the euro-centric world-mind. This kind of mentality is not only destructive, it is devolutionary. It is NOT appropriate. The indigenous mind operates from the basis of "Is it appropriate?" The euro-centric mind has only ever asked "Is it possible?" In our species' present collective memory, such a world-mind did not exist here on Turtle Island as it did across the Atlantic prior to 1492. What a truly radical "way of life" was operative here as of 1492 compared to what had been happening on the european continent for millenia. The descendants of those people and that "way of life" still exist and endure here. They still struggle to live by their ancient, sacred precepts and teachings. How MUCH people like myself with a euro-centric upbringing can learn and come to understand and appreciate by teaching ourselves all we can about this more balanced and connective way of being and sharing. We must all begin to reconnect with the practice--in a daily manner--of asking the question "Is is appropriate?" This will open us up to and reconnect us with the intelligence of the heart and will offer our species the most potent healing opportunity to again be aligned in a positive, constructive manner, with our infinite potential to transcend our own self-created and self-learned limitations and boundedness. There are an infinitude of dimensions of being beyond this physical time-space world we have been taught to regard as being "all there is." The ability to conceive and be aware of such dimensions comes through reconnection with the intelligence of the heart.
~Oren Lyons, Los Angeles, October, 1990
Happy Columbus Day
And so began the conflict.
...This conception of private ownership--of property, of the blood and sinew of Mother Earth, of people, of life, of ideas--came from the euro-centric world-mind. This kind of mentality is not only destructive, it is devolutionary. It is NOT appropriate. The indigenous mind operates from the basis of "Is it appropriate?" The euro-centric mind has only ever asked "Is it possible?" In our species' present collective memory, such a world-mind did not exist here on Turtle Island as it did across the Atlantic prior to 1492. What a truly radical "way of life" was operative here as of 1492 compared to what had been happening on the european continent for millenia. The descendants of those people and that "way of life" still exist and endure here. They still struggle to live by their ancient, sacred precepts and teachings. How MUCH people like myself with a euro-centric upbringing can learn and come to understand and appreciate by teaching ourselves all we can about this more balanced and connective way of being and sharing. We must all begin to reconnect with the practice--in a daily manner--of asking the question "Is is appropriate?" This will open us up to and reconnect us with the intelligence of the heart and will offer our species the most potent healing opportunity to again be aligned in a positive, constructive manner, with our infinite potential to transcend our own self-created and self-learned limitations and boundedness. There are an infinitude of dimensions of being beyond this physical time-space world we have been taught to regard as being "all there is." The ability to conceive and be aware of such dimensions comes through reconnection with the intelligence of the heart.
~Oren Lyons, Los Angeles, October, 1990
Happy Columbus Day
9.11.2013
The Oowen @ USF LASER, 2013.09.09
By the nice opportunities and invitations that have come my way from this in the past day or so, I must have done better than I thought. Tech
woes with USF's machine threw me, but I'm posting Piero Scaruffi's documentation for you here anyway. Thanks for checking it out.
Full, brilliant line-up:
Full, brilliant line-up:
- Allison Leigh Holt (Visual Artist) on "Hybrid Reality in Javanese Culture"
- Margot Gerritsen (Stanford Mathematics) on "Linear Algebra: the incredible beauty of a branch of math with a bad reputation"
- Bernie Lubell (Kinetic Artist) on "Intimacy and Entanglement"
- Helene Mialet (UC Berkeley) on "On Stephen Hawking and his extended body"
8.25.2013
allisonHOLT | LASER talk @ USF, 09.09.2013
In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a LASER presentation (Leonardo Art / Science Evening Rendez-vous) on The Beginning Was The End. Join me Monday, 09.09.2013, 7PM
at University of San Francisco's Fromm Hall.
Many thanks to Piero Scaruffi for the honor of being included amongst some formidable folks. Hope to see you there!
Many thanks to Piero Scaruffi for the honor of being included amongst some formidable folks. Hope to see you there!
7.14.2013
The Inhuman
"I had a feeling today I'd like to express, which was: It seems, say, the American Indians have been around for 10,000 years; say that mankind has been around-- "Man"; not the monkey but the monkey-become-man-- for 20,000 years... It seems to me that, like, the experiment called Man has not *failed* but has come to a point where, what we call "mankind" and "humanity" and all these catchwords, is gonna have to change. Because you can no longer say, "That was an inhuman act," because the definition of humanity, by its facts, is unlimited. Men can do ANYTHING."
-Peter Bergman, The Firesign Theatre Radio Hour Hour, "The El Droog Symposium," 1970
6.25.2013
The Oowen in ANTIDOTE
My dear friend Michael Manning has a gorgeous new release featuring illustrations based on moi:
Writ Large Press will soon be releasing Portuguese author José Luís Peixoto's ANTIDOTE (translation by Richard Zenith) with Michael's cover art and illustrations. Can't wait to see... The book signing at The Last Bookstore, Downtown Los Angeles (06-21-13) likewise looks like it was fabulous; take a peek on Facebook (images of yours truly appear mostly later in the set) and on his Dream Sequence Productions site, which includes preliminary sketches.
Writ Large Press will soon be releasing Portuguese author José Luís Peixoto's ANTIDOTE (translation by Richard Zenith) with Michael's cover art and illustrations. Can't wait to see... The book signing at The Last Bookstore, Downtown Los Angeles (06-21-13) likewise looks like it was fabulous; take a peek on Facebook (images of yours truly appear mostly later in the set) and on his Dream Sequence Productions site, which includes preliminary sketches.
6.14.2013
Sound and Vision
Feeling pretty euphoric after spending the morning listening to and reading Maryanne Amacher's amazing research with psychoacoustic phenomena.
In a couple of hours, I'm heading down to Stanford to show the TBWTE diagrams to some folks, including an engineer doing neat things with light and metamaterials.
According to her, they're pretty close to making an actual cloaking device, i.e., making objects disappear.
Sound and Vision.
In a couple of hours, I'm heading down to Stanford to show the TBWTE diagrams to some folks, including an engineer doing neat things with light and metamaterials.
According to her, they're pretty close to making an actual cloaking device, i.e., making objects disappear.
Sound and Vision.
6.13.2013
Wrapping My Mind Around the Head of Maryanne Amacher
PSYCHOACOUSTIC PHENOMENA IN MUSICAL COMPOSITION
Some Features of a "Perceptual Geography"
Maryanne Amacher, 1977
"A major part of all musical experiences is the fact that we create "additional tones" in our ears and brain in response to many of the acoustic intervals in the music... Even though the existence of responsive tones are well established in modern psychoacoustics, they continue to be regarded as a subjective aspect of musical composition. Academic music theory and criticism have not yet confronted how "additional tones" can be developed consciously in the composition of music, i.e., their role in the technique of musical composition.
The response tones we create as a result of the acoustic space we are in, matter to me as a composer. Tones in 'the room affect our mind and our body. The latter respond by c~eating new tones. What I am calling "perceptual geography" is the interplay, the meeting of these tones, our processing
of the given. I distinguish where the tones originate, in the room, in the ear, in the brain, in order to examine this map and to amplify it musically. I want to listen more carefully, to what are innate and perhaps even distinctly human capabilities. This involves developing a music which more clearly
lets us "hear" some of these responses, lets us "know" that given acoustic intervals are indeed affecting responses in our ears and brain. It is a music which emphatically ~ attention to what is happening to us.
...
I find it useful, when" 1st order superpositions" are stimulated, to think of the listener responding-not to the real world primary sources-but to certain EXTREMELY RESONANT INSTRUMENTS within the anatomical structures of the inner ear. We "hear" tones, other than the given acoustic tones, being created in our ears, as the membrane vibrates in response to the given acoustic tones. The second group of intervals in the study produce sensations of tone and! or pattern modulations which are not present in the cochlear fluids at all. These exist in the brain, originating from the interaction of neural signals, after they have been combined at the medullar or midbrain levels. The processing here is more intricate than the previous resonant responses. When" 2nd order superpositions" are stimulated, we "listen" to what our auditory system--CAPABLE OF DETECTING EXTREMELY SUBTLE CHANGES IN THE FORM OF THE VIBRATION
PATTERN--perceives as it responds to the given acoustic tones. This is a very special. beautiful feature to consider! In effect we "hear" an evolved sensitivity, extracting information on details of the vibration pattern. (Subjective pitch originates here.)
...
An interplay is cultivated between musicians and tone sensations. It is intricate. Frequently-subtle tunings, close interval relationships. Complementary timbres tinge to a greater or lesser degree. The musicians embellish, improvise with human-given tone responses.
Our responses to the basic intervals perhaps are distinctly human ones. They exist in all musical experiences. They are basic, mechanistic in that they go on without us-whether we know it or not. In the music I am describing, simple tones now bring attention to what goes on without us.
We listen to it. Musicians weave tones around our response tone as they are being created. Energy is created in the interplay. It feels itself. Grows an arm. Starts to learn. Rapport is cultivated. It gets smarter. A counterpoint exists: music explores what has been supressed, and with its curious changes, strange levels of mood, mind, provokes new responses, our response to it.
Right now our subtleties barely exist for us-they go on without us-like the "additional tones" adjuncts of our actions in the environment. We do not listen to them. They belong to the "machine" we dare not acknowledge. That wonderfully complex, gentle, subtle Gorgon, responding every ·moment, with its intricate abilities-mysterious beyond our comprehension-we dare not look. The riddle remains. One of human potential. "What is responding every moment for us, but we are not allowed to respond to it?" Image in stone? Man in control?
From the point of view of biological evolution, von Bekesy compared the basilar membrane to a piece of skin with an ENORMOUSLY MAGNIFIED "TOUCH" SENSITIVITY. I take the implication of this analogy very seriously. To evolve, we will create more consciously with such extremely sensitive endowments, increasing the subtlety in our responsive energies. We do not acknowledge our subtleties, much less appreciate them. So much in our envirorunent requires keeping them on but says pretend it's not responding, don't let outside or inside touch you. (Music played at such intense levels, although primitive, represents a need to at least feel some of this capability in action.) To evolve with our sensitivities, we must learn to feel with them, in intricate subtle situations. The interplay between musicians and response tones with their corresponding shaping features is intended to stimulate rapport between dormant energies. I think we can approach some of these experiences, gently through music."
Live Toronto 1981 room recording: https://soundcloud.com/
You can help "preserve and make Maryanne's research, ideas and questions widely accessible to the world creative community in a living and dynamic way," via my own fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas: https://www.fracturedatlas.org/s/campaign/558.
I'mAmacher is, hands down, the most like-minded artist I've run across since PKDick.
Many thanks to Jon Leidecker for such a quality reference. And massive expansion of mindspace.
Some Features of a "Perceptual Geography"
Maryanne Amacher, 1977
"A major part of all musical experiences is the fact that we create "additional tones" in our ears and brain in response to many of the acoustic intervals in the music... Even though the existence of responsive tones are well established in modern psychoacoustics, they continue to be regarded as a subjective aspect of musical composition. Academic music theory and criticism have not yet confronted how "additional tones" can be developed consciously in the composition of music, i.e., their role in the technique of musical composition.
The response tones we create as a result of the acoustic space we are in, matter to me as a composer. Tones in 'the room affect our mind and our body. The latter respond by c~eating new tones. What I am calling "perceptual geography" is the interplay, the meeting of these tones, our processing
of the given. I distinguish where the tones originate, in the room, in the ear, in the brain, in order to examine this map and to amplify it musically. I want to listen more carefully, to what are innate and perhaps even distinctly human capabilities. This involves developing a music which more clearly
lets us "hear" some of these responses, lets us "know" that given acoustic intervals are indeed affecting responses in our ears and brain. It is a music which emphatically ~ attention to what is happening to us.
...
I find it useful, when" 1st order superpositions" are stimulated, to think of the listener responding-not to the real world primary sources-but to certain EXTREMELY RESONANT INSTRUMENTS within the anatomical structures of the inner ear. We "hear" tones, other than the given acoustic tones, being created in our ears, as the membrane vibrates in response to the given acoustic tones. The second group of intervals in the study produce sensations of tone and! or pattern modulations which are not present in the cochlear fluids at all. These exist in the brain, originating from the interaction of neural signals, after they have been combined at the medullar or midbrain levels. The processing here is more intricate than the previous resonant responses. When" 2nd order superpositions" are stimulated, we "listen" to what our auditory system--CAPABLE OF DETECTING EXTREMELY SUBTLE CHANGES IN THE FORM OF THE VIBRATION
PATTERN--perceives as it responds to the given acoustic tones. This is a very special. beautiful feature to consider! In effect we "hear" an evolved sensitivity, extracting information on details of the vibration pattern. (Subjective pitch originates here.)
...
An interplay is cultivated between musicians and tone sensations. It is intricate. Frequently-subtle tunings, close interval relationships. Complementary timbres tinge to a greater or lesser degree. The musicians embellish, improvise with human-given tone responses.
Our responses to the basic intervals perhaps are distinctly human ones. They exist in all musical experiences. They are basic, mechanistic in that they go on without us-whether we know it or not. In the music I am describing, simple tones now bring attention to what goes on without us.
We listen to it. Musicians weave tones around our response tone as they are being created. Energy is created in the interplay. It feels itself. Grows an arm. Starts to learn. Rapport is cultivated. It gets smarter. A counterpoint exists: music explores what has been supressed, and with its curious changes, strange levels of mood, mind, provokes new responses, our response to it.
Right now our subtleties barely exist for us-they go on without us-like the "additional tones" adjuncts of our actions in the environment. We do not listen to them. They belong to the "machine" we dare not acknowledge. That wonderfully complex, gentle, subtle Gorgon, responding every ·moment, with its intricate abilities-mysterious beyond our comprehension-we dare not look. The riddle remains. One of human potential. "What is responding every moment for us, but we are not allowed to respond to it?" Image in stone? Man in control?
From the point of view of biological evolution, von Bekesy compared the basilar membrane to a piece of skin with an ENORMOUSLY MAGNIFIED "TOUCH" SENSITIVITY. I take the implication of this analogy very seriously. To evolve, we will create more consciously with such extremely sensitive endowments, increasing the subtlety in our responsive energies. We do not acknowledge our subtleties, much less appreciate them. So much in our envirorunent requires keeping them on but says pretend it's not responding, don't let outside or inside touch you. (Music played at such intense levels, although primitive, represents a need to at least feel some of this capability in action.) To evolve with our sensitivities, we must learn to feel with them, in intricate subtle situations. The interplay between musicians and response tones with their corresponding shaping features is intended to stimulate rapport between dormant energies. I think we can approach some of these experiences, gently through music."
Live Toronto 1981 room recording: https://soundcloud.com/
You can help "preserve and make Maryanne's research, ideas and questions widely accessible to the world creative community in a living and dynamic way," via my own fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas: https://www.fracturedatlas.org/s/campaign/558.
I'mAmacher is, hands down, the most like-minded artist I've run across since PKDick.
Many thanks to Jon Leidecker for such a quality reference. And massive expansion of mindspace.
6.03.2013
MANIFESTO
Architecture and war are not incompatible.
Architecture is war. War is architecture.
I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no "sacred and primordial site." I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me to my own falseness, my own pitiful fears: I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then "melt into air." I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky.
I cannot know your name. Nor can you know mine.
Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.
--I fell in love with LEBBEUS WOODS, 06.01.2013, 12:45AM, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
5.30.2013
"No Upload Drinks From Outside"
After chasing them a while, I inserted the flat salmon into the disc
drive on my laptop and watched as the fish slowly emerged on the screen.
It wasn't the image of the fish, but more the presence or its
impression-- I did it with all the others (maybe 9?) before I wondered
how I'd use my computer again, or if I could hit escape and eject
them...
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