005_Reaction to Kenneth Goldsmith's "Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art"

In the article, Goldsmith discusses some of the major contributions to Sound Art in the past century. He jumps around fast from Dada sound poems to Sonic Youth to Christina Marclay, trying to diversify his favorite artists and their use of sound as an artistic medium. I want to focus on my two artists he mentioned: Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" and Lauren Lesko's "Thirst".

Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting In A Room" recognizes that interior architectural space forms and shapes the perception and reception of sound. In the piece, Lucier "utters a series of sentences describing exactly hat he is doing into a tape recorder in an empty room." After this, the sound is played back into the room and re-recorded over and over, until his language is abstracted past the point of recognizable English. This work is a good example of how 'sound art quietly absorbs technological breakthroughs into its practice, but rarely makes them their content." Often, in many "tech" art projects, a point of access into the work is code, instruments of tech, but here the tech is used as a tool, rather than a medium.

Lauren Lesko's "Thurst" is, what Goldsmith describes as, "edgy.. and an unusually beautiful soundscape." For this piece, Lesko uses her body as a machine to produce sound. She uses a contact microphone, inserts it into her vagina and walks around for 30 minutes. After listening to the work, it has a very physical and bodily feel, and I often felt physical reactions when listening with headphones. Body-driven sounds transfer physical responses and how the body becomes a personal instrument.

004_Sound Art

If anyone reads this blog except for Ryan, here are some links to sound artists I am into.

http://del.icio.us/jeffreykolar/soundart

http://del.icio.us/jeffreykolar/Sound

003_ Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Observations on the Long Take"

Pasolini begins his argument around the Kennedy assassination claiming that "the spectator-cameraman did not choose his camera angle; rather he simply filmed from where he happened to be, framing what he, not the lens, saw." He argues that this long take is an example of using film as a representation of the present is abstract and leads only to a subjectivity for the viewer. The idealized long take becomes more so an alternate or fantasy vision of the event as taking place in "past". In that, to even attempt a truism of the President's death on film refrains to subjective notions of "a multiplication of 'presents'" or simply put relative to the frame of the viewing/recording device. He pushes this metaphor further when relating this use of film as present-past-future knowledge to the death of an individual: "as long as he has a future, that is, something known, a man does not express himself." Pasolini's interpretation of death as an action of allowing others to "know" the person, works similar to the vision of the video camera capturing small moments (or long shots) trying to depict moments of present, past etc. Therefore, when one dies, the possibility of a future rests with the body. Film is similar, in that, once the moment is captured and becomes in a sense "dead", others can subjectively interpret it's meaning as a static object. This is not to say the long clip will allow of an objective truth, nor the body of a human. But in the least allows for a critical analysis of the film (or body) as a discontinuous object. I think his comparison does lack in technical means, although in a conceptual sense does help describe the possible uses of the camera as a capturing device or method to reveal a moment in time, regardless of it's place within a time line of past, present or future.