Emvergeoning

Someone has been kind enough to upload a bunch of short, abstract Harry Smith films to YouTube (the lazy blogger’s best friend). Harry Smith is known to fans of folk music as the compiler of the Folkways anthology, an important document of early American folk. But his film work, inspired by alchemy and the occult as much as it was by modern art, is just as important. Kenneth Anger referred to him as the “greatest living magician.” But for Smith, the music he loved and the films he made went hand in hand. Many of these early films were screened during jazz concerts in San Francisco and New York. Smith said that he made the work for contemporary music, and talked about the films in terms of synaesthesia of color and sound. For this reason, his work is considered a precursor to ’60s psychedelic culture. You can read more about him and his work at the Harry Smith Archives. This particular film, Color Study, was made in 1952 (the music was added by the person who stuck it on YouTube):

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If you drive down South Flores on the edge of Southtown, you’ve seen it. Covered in graffiti and the citys answer to it (the subconcious art of graffiti removal) .. The Old Judson Candy Company sits high on the horizon near the intersection of Guadalupe and South Flores. (a few blocks down from South Alamo) . For years, this building was left virtually wide open to the world while it fell into disrepair, Lots of people & animals passed through it, including a large number of graffiti artists from all over the country (remember clogged caps 1,2,3, and 4?). As a result the walls inside are literally teeming with life .. About 6 months back, I introduced Future Worker Girl of Potter-Belmar Labs to the site, by showing her a random assortment of photos I had taken traipsing through the candy house early one morning. While I took the photos during a time that the building was literally wide open from the front, back, and sides.. It has since been carefully sealed off from all unwanted intruders. As a result of her new interest in the site, she proclaimed a gathering of data towards a renegade video projection onto the building. After last nights Bozo Texino film screening she popped the question on us, would we accompany her down to the sight of the old candy factory to view a projection of a melding of photos of the inside of the now sealed building on the outside? Of course.

The results were beautiful.

Future Worker Girl:

her “Something out of ghost-busters” vehicle.

Andy Benavides, Mike Casey. and visiting resident artist to UTSA, Chris Kubick view the projection from the bus stop benches.

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Sometimes you come across an artist web site that is so exhaustive you can spend hours dwelling in this visionary world, tracing out a career or leaping across decades of creative activity in an instant. The first site I found like this was Gerhard Richter’s elegant online document of his paintings, his Atlas, his editions, and even tours of select exhibitions.

Today I finally visited the Vasulkas’ site, which may not be as impressively interconnected as Richter’s, but presents and astounding document of their body of work, dating back to the early ’70s. Apart from a large number of videos and stills, their site provides PDFs of books and catalogs they have produced, photo documentation of installations, and an archive of the early years of The Kitchen.

For those unfamiliar with their work, here’s a little synopsis, courtesy Gene Youngblood:

Using the video synthesizers and image processors that were the user-built folk instruments of electronic culture, Woody exhaustively explored, demonstrated and categorized the “primitives” of electronic imaging. The visual manifestations of this research he called “artifacts” rather than art. But the material was so hypnotically beautiful that almost everyone else called it art—and it lived as art in the art world. Thus, a man who claimed to be uninterested in an art career became one of the seminal figures in the history of video art.

Steina, meanwhile, pursued two related paths. In a series called Violin Power, which began in the mid-70s, she “performed” video by using her violin to control real-time image processing. Later, she controlled laser discs with her violin in live performances. She continues to refine both techniques today. Her other body of work, called Machine Vision, involved robotic camera controls that removed human intentionality from the camera’s point of view. Together, then, the Vasulkas participated in developing (when they didn’t single-handedly pioneer) almost all the audiovisual possibilities intrinsic to video as an electronic moving-image and performance medium.

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This is the only film that should have ever been made about 9/11.

In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush cinematic truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. With excitement I began recording the first one to cd, mixing a new piece with a subtle random arpeggiated countermelody from the Voyetra. To my shock and surprise, I soon realized that the tape loop itself was disintegrating: as it played round and round, the iron oxide particles were gradually turning to dust and dropping into the tape machine, leaving bare plastic spots on the tape, and silence in these corresponding sections of the new recording. I had heard about this happening, and frankly was very afraid of this happening to me since so much of my early work was precariously near the end of its shelf life. Still, I had never actually seen it happen, yet here it was happening. The music was dying. I was recording the death of this sweeping melody. It was very emotional for me, and mystical as well. Tied up in these melodies were my youth, my paradise lost, the American pastoral landscape, all dying gently, gracefully, beautifully. Life and death were being recorded here as a whole: death as simply a part of life: a cosmic change, a transformation. When the disintegration was complete, the body was simply a little strip of clear plastic with a few clinging chords, the music had turned to dust and was scattered along the tape path in little piles and clumps. Yet the essence and memory of the life and death of this music had been saved: recorded to a new media, remembered.

As far as Sept. 11th goes, perhaps you had to be here and see it with your own eyes and experience the horror and the ghastly smell, and smoke, sirens, no television or telephone, F-16s strafing the city at ear splitting volume, the fear, agony and deep sadness, see peoples faces in the subway, the deep longing bonded look people gave each other, the lip compression signifying compassion, to understand the magnitude of what we felt here. This was the end of the world…and we were literally sitting up on the roof all day and into night watching without believing as NYC burned, and listening to the heartbreaking Disintegration Loops…I thought…it’s the soundtrack to the end of the world…I had been assigned the job without knowing the details, it was done, and here we are…The Greatest Show on Earth, Armageddon. We were all literally losing our minds in terror, each person looping onto what holds him or her together..clinging to that which could provide some kind of release or explanation..just as each of the individual melodies in the Disintegration Loops did…at their own pace, seeming to hold onto that which made the melody unique, while letting go of the unimportant sustains or gently adding rests incrementally before the downbeat…it really blew my mind.

I hadn’t really though t of trying to “achieve” anything. But perhaps, if the music enabled listeners to contemplate the temporal nature of life in this world and come to some small inkling or understanding as I did of a redemptive spirituality that animates us and continues on, then that would be an achievement.

— William Basinski

As far as I can tell, Otonson is the only place where you can still buy the DVD.

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At our annual sales meeting, the proposition that it is imperative for Emvergeoning to raise the sex-appeal ante received unanimous consent. So, to keep yall coming back, here’s a little T ‘n A courtesy Yoko Ono circa 1967 (for more moving images by Yoko, check her page at UBUWEB):

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Interesting festival excerpt from the brilliant sound culling machines known as Sublime Frequencies. Also watch the trailer for their film “Sumatran Folk Cinema.” I miss Thailand!!

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Yesterday was a drive down to Laredo with PBL and Mimi, where we managed to catch a glimpse of el otro lado, and about six hours of film, some experimental, some not-so-experimental. The host, Sound art space, is in a warehouse (natch) and features a gallery, frame shop, furniture shop, and a brand new toilet. The organizers culled work by students, amateurs, and professionals, local and international, so the range in quality was quite wide. At the high end I was overcome by Murray and Megan McMillan’s brief allegorical animation (Grasping Hand and Walking Method, available here), Dan Monceaux’s fluid and poetic exploration of the lives of two blind women (A Shift in Perception, available here), and one of PBL’s signature semi-narrative video collages (Pandora’s Bike, more info here). Ann Wallace, Gil Rocha, and Bertozzi & Shell also contributed strong work.

The folks at Sound are bringing some solid contemporary art to Laredo, and their upcoming installation by Murray and Megan McMillan looks to be a killer show. Keep an eye on these guys.

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This is an interesting video Bruce Conner made to go with a Brian Eno / David Byrne song called Mea Culpa. The song comes off a 1981 album called My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which is an interesting album, both artistically and historically. It’s a fairly early example of a record which stitches together samples and field recordings from such disparate sources as American talk-radio shows, Lebanese mountain singers and Muslim chanting (to name a few). But naturally, it wasn’t the first, and some feel that Eno and Byrne get too much credit. I’ve heard rumors that Holger Czukay from Can always felt that Eno had ripped him off. (He apparently played a pre-release version of his conceptually similar album Movies for Eno, who then rushed off to record My Life in the Bush of Ghosts with Byrne). While trying (unsuccessfully) to confirm this rumor, I discovered that Jon Hassell thinks he is the conceptual father of this album too. I guess it is a bit ironic to argue over who came up with the idea of musical appropriation first — but maybe I wouldn’t be saying that if Brian Eno stole my big idea…

UPDATE: Looks like YouTube took down the video. And that was by far the most interesting part of the post… You can watch a QuickTime version of it here.

UPDATE 2: The video is back. Sorry for the confusion

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