Last Friday saw a great performance by Malte Steiner (Elektronengehirn) at the Open Ear event in Cardiff. Malte sent a very interesting proposal a few months ago and it was via this I discovered that some of his work focuses on the use of spam, the refuse of the internet, for generating content for art work.

First Person Spam (images above and concept video below) is an interactive installation which employs a 3D gaming environment where all the imagery is taken from image based spam emails. The 3D world is purpose built for this spam images, a world where advertisments pervade every part of the architecture:

As an undesired side-effect of the globalization and one of the few businessmodels which survived the dot.com hype, unwanted advertisement email services, known as spam, are an important factor of net traffic…First Person Spam is my second work about this aspect of modern communication and abuse of infrastructure. I started to collect the most interesting material which I received and construct in this installation a virtual architecture made of spam. This environment is a hell of billboards and reminds of the grassroots activities of anti advertisement agencies of the 60s.

In some respects similar to Jodi’s game art such as SOD, First Person Spam creates an immersive space where the space itself is art. Here however the space is not an abstraction of code instead it’s a reflection of the globalised, networked western economy.

More videos of the installation can be seen here. More work using spam by Malte Steiner includes Spam.

John Wild (here and here) is someone I stumbled across on youtube (actually he stumbled across me but that’s the joy of social networking) who works a lot with invisible transmissions / networks and their effects as source to create sound or imagery within video, installation or performance contexts. Invisible Geographies 50MHz-6000MHz (image above top left) are:

psychogeographical experiments in datspace [sic]

which:

consist of looped video footage of geographical locations overlaid with field recordings of microwave communications recorded at the same locations.

Below are two example of Invisible Geographies 50MHz-6000MHz at Hogs Back and Harlesden.

The Messenger (image above top right, video below) is a work along similar lines which:

shows video footage of the 15 foot gilded angel, which turns in the wind, atop of Guildford Cathedral, concealing a mobile phone mast and several antennas. The Video footage is overlaid with field recordings of microwave communications been transmitted from the Angle.

Other related works by John include The Conduit (image above bottom left) and Digital Babble (image above bottom right). While strictly speaking only one of the works mentioned here is a performance, The conduit, all four have a performative element to them which reveals the invisibility, pervasiveness, noisy and chaotic nature of broadcast transmission networks.

At the moment I am planning an event simply titled Network with a collaboration I am a part of, Open Ear, which is directing much of the research I’ve done here into a form other than my writing and my own practice.

I will be creating a new performance work especially for this event (early days yet) but feel it’s important to make connections between artists diverse work dealing with networks in a performance context and to contextualise my own practice. It’s problematic on several levels as it’s essentially self-curating and as an academic (my double live) I’m sure I will will also be criticised as self-publishing, a crime punishable by death by RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) in England (well sometimes it feels like that) and that’s something I have to deal with.

As an artist however, and that’s what I am first and foremost an artist who employs research for his own practice and not a researcher who practices art, I don’t have a problem with this. For me organising this event is a continuation / progression of the research I pursue demonstrated in other forms and hopefully beneficial to anyone who might attend. This is something which is now being loosely termed as knowledge transfer within academia, essentially do research and disseminate it in a form that is not the classic publish route. Not only does it provide a healthier recognition of the many outcomes to research but it also helps to widen participation within higher education (oh how I love these academic buzz words). To me there seems like a natural progression from writing about artists work so that I am more aware of what’s happening, documenting the research and sharing it so that others can use it as a resource (including my students so if that’s not good practice as an academic what is?) to now actually curating an event where people can come and see the work which should smoothly create a tangible link between theory and practice.

Is self-curating as an artist a bad thing? It definitely can be, but at the same time it can also give a unique point of view into a particular topic / theme / practice that a curator will simply not have the depth of knowledge to do justice to. Most artists self-publish unashamably, if they didn’t we would never see their work. Since my work is going to only be a small part of this I feel the benefits cancel out any real negatives here but time will tell.

Anyway because I’m putting a lot of energy into this, posts over the next few weeks will hopefully tend to move in the direction of performance work to help me focus.

The event I was curating with Paul Adams Snd:arc- as part of the Open Ear collective is now documented online on our website. As part of the evenings performances I performed a work entitled RE:soundings (video below). Every sound produced during the performance was captured and manipulated live from radio signals. Both location and surrounding architecture dictated reception of signals, their quality and use. The version here is a recording of a view of the stage performance. See an alternative view of the performance here.

Live improvisation by Paul Adams, Andy Birtwistle, Garrett Lynch and Matt Wright (video below in two parts).

More videos of the nights performances and experimental films can be seen here.

Here are some excerpts from performances I was involved with on friday night (06/10/06) at the Orange Street Music Club in Canterbury, England. Although it could be said this is the first of many works which this research blog is intended to support, from my part this was an impromptu performance and in many ways reworking of ideas in Grimace, Looping Portrait #1 and C.a.r.n.e.t. . .d.a.b.o.r.d in a live context.

Visuals are created through the use of a small network of video cameras through a surveillance monitoring system. Feedback was mainly employed on the night from a monitor and the projection screen although this was occasionally cut in with shots of the audience and musicians.

Tuba by Matt Wright. Visuals by Garrett Lynch.

Audio by Matt Wright & Paul Adams. Visuals by Garrett Lynch.

Audio by Matt Wright & Paul Adams. Visuals by Garrett Lynch.

More videos are available on youtube under my profile. More work supported by this weblog research will be available soon.