chris caines

There is a project in western Sydney at Blacktown Arts Centre that I’ve been involved with for a while called CODED, a series of projects loosely based around contemporary art approaches to coding, tagging and writing in place. There was a Sydney Writers Festival panel back in June last year that I participated in & now there is an exhibition to which I’ve contributed an audio installation piece called Orbital.

Orbital consists of four train of thought monologues by drivers on the Sydney orbital motorway network, visitors walk the floor map of the network a camera sensor system triggering playback of the audio pieces around the space.

Installations are not my usual thing & thanks go to the curator Sophia Kouyoumdjian and the installing team at BAC Tim & Bo for the fantastic help they gave. The show is there until the end of march and all the artists involved have done great work, so please drop in if you are in the area. It opens next Thursday the 4th at 6pm. I’ll post video and audio here after the documentation shoot happens.

A couple of years ago I went to a conference dinner in Melbourne at the 100 Mile Cafe (now sadly deceased) which had excellent fare & as the name may suggest to you, sourced all ingredients from a 100 mile radius (160 kms or so). This as you’ll probably be aware is an expression of a widespread slow food/eco/sustainable trend in cooking and eating that has been building steam for a couple of decades. I’ve been increasingly sensitive to food miles recently & just as a way of easing us into the idea the other night while grocery shopping we decided to at least stick to not buying any imported items.

We’d just come from a very long and hot dinner party and were a bit drunk & it sounded like a fun exercise. It ended up taking till supermarket closing time & required some changes, but not where I’d thought.

In fruit & veg the imported lemons (from the US) got substituted with local limes, but there was no way around the lack of local garlic. We got the spanish garlic (because the chinese stuff is pretty bad) just as a temp measure until I can find some australian garlic somewhere. For some reason non-imported garlic has been unavailable in supermarkets in Sydney for at least a few years now, the chinese stuff (or spanish or mexican) has become ubiquitous. China now makes 70% of world garlic amazingly & the garlic frenzy there is remarkable. The last time I had any australian garlic to my knowledge was on holiday in the NSW north coast last year, it was elephant garlic for roasting and well worth the $20 a kg we paid.

One place I thought we might find some problems was toiletries and sure enough all Colgate products are made in Thailand, happily though Macleans is local, so our dental hygiene regime will survive. Breads, rice, pasta, cereals were all OK (with the exception of risotto rice) and it took a few substitutions to get some tinned veges that weren’t from Italy.

There were a couple of major stumbling blocks, namely european tea, coffee & chocolate. The Italian coffee, English tea & Swiss chocolate we normally consume in copious amounts all contain double food miles having been grown in India, South America & South East Asia then shipped to europe for processing & packing and then re-shipped out to places like the Sydney supermarket we were looking at them in. We found substitutes, but not great ones, research will hopefully throw up some better options or tastes will have to change.

So, of course just restricting the shop to Australia is hardly radical (though still requiring compromise) and there are questions about whether its really better to be getting things from W.A and excluding N.Z which is quite a bit closer. I’m interested to see how hard it would be to restrict just to NSW/ACT & just how hard it might be to find out how to do that.

I was lying on the couch at the beach shack the yesterday, reading after having just had breakfast, when my phone rang. It was a journalist from Adelaide radio wanting comment on something related to mobile phones.

“You are a expert on mobile phone culture right?” he said.

I told him I was driving and would ring him back later, he gave me a number I didn’t write down. I felt a little ashamed to lie to him, but also a little self righteously glad and I realised then how my attitude to dealing with journalists and the media had changed over the past few years. Even though I’d worked at a few other Universities, after starting at UTS 5 years ago I came onto the media radar strongly, firstly around blogging and then around mobile cultures.

Even when these calls started running at five or six a week (and I felt like I had to spend time preparing for the radio and TV spots) I felt like this is what academics were supposed to do. Contribute to the public conversation, be a public resource in some small way speaking through the media. Which is how I ended up on 2UE during the Cronulla riots debating the content of the text messages flying back and forth. But also how I ended up in the Courier-Mail entertainment section before Christmas pontificating on the way young people interact with the world through mobile devices.

I’ve stopped returning the calls now, disillusioned with the idea that participating was doing anyone any good except for the media companies hungry for free content from “experts”. For a while I had an ABC-only policy to callbacks but even that got tired after a while. In short I was worn down by the ceaseless inanity of the requests and the conversations, the clueless journalists with no idea about what they are asking or who they are talking to, keyboards clattering away in the background as they soundbite your impromptu spray delivered from the office chair.

The guilt I still feel about having taken this attitude is related to two things, firstly if no-one participates in the endless spectacle for these reasons all you end up with is people with a particularly crazy axe to grind like Hetty Johnson. These people make great media fodder, always up for an outraged/combative quote. And the second reason is that media is of course a kind of public space, especially in terms of broadcast media where public airspace is used under publicly granted license. It feels wrong not to contribute in some small way if you have the opportunity, leaving it to the news pros and the axe grinders they feed on, but for me at least I’d prefer that feeling than opening the floodgates again.

Down here in the beach shack we do a lot of laying about on the couch. And when the weather and sunspots align right we can pick up 4 snowy channels on the old TV, we’ll watch whatever is most visible as a rule. So it came to be last night that we saw the first of a BBC doco series, “The Seven Ages of Rock”.

I realise that once having a great civilization or empire and then having it no longer can be hard for a society to process no matter how much time passes. Often you’ll see the more nationalist elements using the great legacy as a rallying call for a return to supremacy, Italy during the Mussolini years or Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years for instance.

For Britain this tendency gets acted out most noticeably through the BBC, its world spanning ubiquity an echo of empire. The documentary productions especially follow the intrepid British explorer model bringing insight and a civilising influence to the world. Always the authoritative voice pronouncing whatever is before them as the biggest, oldest, deepest, hungriest, most dangerous thing in the known world.

And so it was with the 7 Ages program which proclaimed Rock to have started in 1965 and to be invented by English people by combining an African American legacy unknown to clueless Yanks with native British ingenuity. As well as ignoring every other part of the world, the only American featured as a bit player in the Rock story was Dylan, portrayed as a minor folkie until being galvanised by the electric sound of the British invasion.

It continued on with the Boomer history of the 60s we’ve seen thousands of times, intercutting Vietnam, etc. While trotting out the usual suspects as talking heads (though I’m always entertained by Keith Richards). I wonder where they go now from here constructing a British history of popular music, the next episode previews with Pink Floyd & Bowie featured heavily point the way forward, the sun never sets on the BBC.

The other night I finished reading “The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll”, the book of recent collected criticism by Robert Forster of the Go-Betweens. I know the Go-Betweens are no more after Grant McLennan died so suddenly and unexpectedly a few years ago, but because they spent so long in hiatus as a band after they dissolved in the early 90s and reformed ten years later I’d already grown used to thinking of both of them as members of the band whether it was active or not.

The book is mostly a collection of music columns for The Monthly, I heard Robert talking at the Brisbane Writers Festival about how trepidatious he was about becoming a critic after one of the editors of the magazine called him out of the blue with the offer to write about whatever caught his fancy. He’d had one piece published ten years earlier and that was it. He described at the festival how he’d started writing no less than thirteen opening pages for a novel over the years, but now thought the short form of these collected pieces suited him much better and he’d finally come to a form of writing he could embrace.

I’ve been a fan of Robert & The Go-Betweens since starting high school so not being a regular Monthly reader I would have sought out this book no matter the quality. But the reviews are good and as a musician he brings something to the table you don’t read much of in cultural criticism, a sympathy for the creative drives and impulses, compromises and failures that rule musical production and a sense of the strength of feeling artists can have about each other’s work. Some of the more unlikely pieces are the best. The reading of the career of Delta Goodrem, the appreciation of The Monkees, the review of the most recent AC-DC album and the evocation of Brisbane in the live review of the reformation of the original Saints.

There are two pieces that are kind of eulogies for Grant that end the collection and are quite moving if you’ve followed them both over the years. If are interested in the band and the relationship of these two seek out the live DVD from a few years back called That Striped Sunlight Sound, the extra disc is a long loungeroom interview with the both of them and the dynamic between them is revealing and entertaining to watch.

I just finished reading the Peter Carey novel that came out 18 mths or so ago “His Illegal Self”. Probably the 8th or 9th of his I’ve read, a perennial holiday reading favourite.

One thing that strikes me is how often Bellingen and that nsw north coast area comes up in his writing. I know he lived in the area for a while in a 70s style alternative community & it seems to be a rich touchstone that he returns to again & again. Some of his earlier books like Bliss & Oscar + Lucinda were partly set there (that great opening scene from O + L with the church floating down the Bellinger river) & in the years since he has been living in the US American characters increasingly visit Bellinger Valley. Memorably in the 80s artworld setting of “Theft, A Love Story” & in Illegal Self a setting very like Bellingen in the 70s is transposed up to the hinterland behind Noosa Heads.
Increasingly his view of the area and the people is harsh and flinty eyed (particularly toward the more feral hippies), but as always with Carey vital and energetic. Perhaps I should go back and read the earlier ones again but my sense is that he gets better with each book. He has this great ability to obscure details from the viewpoint of different characters forcing you to join the dots when you see the same situation partially from the viewpoint of another character. It’s a masterful trick one of the things I enjoy most reading him.

I now have the new one “Parrot & Oliver in America” in the pile to read after Roberto Bolan “The Savage Detectives” (which is an astonishingly good novel set in mid 70s Mexico City), one of his historical novels which are not usually as successful for me, but nonetheless looking forward to it.

We watched Moon last night down here in the holiday shack, the surf a constant pounding white noise and the moths flying into the projector beam up onto the fibro wall. It was directed by Duncan Jones, famously the son of David Bowie & is his first feature. It is a weird collection of 70s sci-fi riffs joined together into what feels like an elegant though unadventurous cover version.

The look and feel is equal parts Silent Running, Dark Star, Solaris, 2001, Alien and the TV series Space 1999 and the later Star Trek series. It is also owes a lot to the stories of Phillip K Dick and Thomas Disch, even early Arthur C Clarke. It doesn’t do much with these ingredients except join them together and re-present them, though it does so with conviction and heart. One thing you can see them going for that doesn’t quite work is the tone of mystery and horror contained in some of these source films. Finding out what happens (which I won’t reveal in case you haven’t seen it) feels quite procedural, though gripping in a low key way.

Still, it is great to see someone trying to do something psychologically challenging with science fiction as it is rarely attempted in cinema post Star Wars with any of the depth you find in the written form. Clint Mansell did a fairly over the top score, heavy on complex synth textures which I enjoyed and was prominent in the mix filling lot of the space left by tracking shots across empty moonscapes.

The months leading up to this past new years it seemed everywhere you went people were compiling best of lists from the year & the decade. I always discover a bunch of new music & movies (book lists are not so good) trawling through these but rarely feel compelled to offer one of my own. Perhaps this is because in any given year my favourite bits of media weren’t released in that year or I find it difficult to apply any sort of hierarchy of devotion to the things I was absorbed by through a calendar year.

The other night we were at home watching Where The Wild Things Are and a little way in we realised that one of the central beastie characters was being voiced by James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano). Not only that, but the hairy big headed Wild Thing (called Carol) was acting exactly like a slightly more childish version of Tony and the Soprano element was the best thing in a fairly ordinary film.

Later browsing through best of cinema lists from the 2000s I realised that none of these films had the impact of the TV series I’d watched over past decade, particularly the past five years. Nothing had the power, humour or pure narrative immersion of shows like The Sopranos, Deadwood, 30 Rock, The Wire, Mad Men, Love My Way, The West Wing or Breaking Bad. For me no cinema of this period came close.

Partly this is because these series watched the way we and a lot of others watch them (as box sets or file collections) are in some ways a new form. Thirty sometimes forty hour feature films. Usually with multiple episodes watched back to back, disc after disc devoured in a sitting. Aside from epic theatre (Wagner’s Ring Cycle for instance or the Mahabharata) or the experience you can sometimes have with a novel this isn’t a common media consumption experience. Although it is becoming more common with gaming as games become larger and more fictionally immersive.

It took us six months to watch the Sopranos on DVD during the first half of this past year and nothing is as effective (or affective for that matter) as getting to know characters over that timespan in building narrative immersion. One of the other things that makes these story worlds so compulsively watchable is that unlike most cinema I can’t predict what is going to happen next. Partly this is the effect of the episodes being written in real time as production happens, but also the passage of time in world events and the simple fact that actors, writers, directors change, move on and in some cases die while a series is being made.
All of this is not to say that there weren’t great movies made during the past decade (I have a list of 30 or so I loved) but that it seemed increasingly less vital as a form. Some of my favourite cinema experiences from this time were so because they were large scale immersive spectacle blockbusters (Avatar being the most recent example) and massive size and seat shaking sound is one thing my loungeroom can’t do.

The wonderful Golden Live performers. Videos below in order or appearance on the night. Roger Mills & performers with Idea of South, Emily MacDaniel & Emma Ramsay as well as Alphabet Soup the first collaboration between Nick Wishart & Miguel Velenzuela.

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Norie Neumark & Maria Miranda have just posted the video from the installation they did at CarriageWorks earlier this year that uses one of my songs from the Beardwagon CD.

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I’m organising a performance night for the Golden Eyes festival next Tuesday night with some fantastic performers, come along if you are in Sydney town. See blurb below for details.

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Golden Live – A performance night for the Golden Eyes Festival

8pm Tuesday the 20^th of October 2009. Bon Marche Studio. UTS

The bi-annual Golden Eyes Festival of Media Arts has been held at UTS for over 20 years. This year it will also include a performance night showcasing the very active AV performance scene among undergrads, postgrads and staff at UTS.  Three groups of performers will be presenting on the night in the wonderful purpose built Bon Marche Studio at UTS with 9.1 sound and high resolution digital cinema projection. Performers will be: Emily McDaniel & Emma Ramsay, Roger Mills & Neil Jenkins as well as Nick Wishart & Miguel Valenzuela.

Entry to the Bon Marche Studio is on Harris St, Ultimo on the ground floor of UTS Building three. http://www.uts.edu.au/about/mapsdirections/citymap.html

8pm Tuesday the 20^th of October – The event is Free. Duration approx 80 mins.

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Emily McDaniel is an Aboriginal artist, curator and educator from the Wiradjuri Nation. Her work traverses performance, new media, film and sound installation. This year she has begun curating and coordinating Refraction, a UTS Media Arts performance night that encourages the next wave of artists to get amongst it. She is currently completing her BA in Media Arts and Production.

Emma Ramsay works across many platforms of art including sound, video and installation. She is a founding director of Sydney based ARI Quarterbred, that promotes cross disciplinary practice and developmental support for emerging artists. She is currently completing a Masters in Media Arts and Production.

Emma and Emily have been collaborating for over a year and have recently exhibited and performed at Electrofringe. Their practice tries to achieve a good feeling through sonic spirituality, by fusing installation with performance and lo-fi with hi-fi. Although they can be placed under the umbrella of new media, sometimes, they just like to leave the brolly at home. Golden Live will see the two of them collaborate with stunning visuals and epic sounds to create a cockle warming sound that will make the little hairs on your spine stand on end.

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Idea of South – Roger Mills & Neil Jenkins

Exploring ontological notions of southernness, Idea of South is a three part radiophonic composition combining live networked terrestrial radio and Internet streaming. It is a musical sound journey integrating spoken word, live processed trumpet, violin and location recordings contributed by sound artists and phonographers throughout the southern hemisphere. It was originally broadcast simultaneously over Radio 2SER, FBi Radio and Shoutcast stream in June 2009, and will be performed for Golden Live as a six channel mix with a live visuals by artist Neil Jenkins.

Performers are:  Roger Mills – Trumpet, Hogi Tsai – Violin, Bernie Maier – Spoken word, Visual Mix – Neil Jenkins.

Roger Mills is a composer, sound artist and writer whose practice focuses on networked collaborations, internet performance and radio. He has worked internationally as a composer & sound designer, and is editor of the online sound art magazine and net label Furthernoise.org. Roger is currently an HDR student at UTS, researching improvisation in remote online collaborations and founder of the Ethernet Orchestra.

http://www.eartrumpet.org

http://ethernetorchestra.netpraxis.net

http://www.furthernoise.org

Neil Jenkins is an artist whose practice is heavily engaged with

electronic media and the Internet. He creates highly interactive works

that often require a live internet connection and the participation of

its audience to function and exist.

http://www.devoid.co.uk

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Alphabet Soup, is a new audio/visual performance by Nick Wishart + Miguel Valenzuela

Using a hacked Speak n Spell and other circuit bent alphabet toys, animations,a cube, some code and an asprin,  Nick & Miguel will attempt to reassemble language into a sonic & visual feast.

Think R2D2 on acid!

Texas Instruments released the Speak n Spell toy in the late 70’s and are now the holy grail for circuit benders. Containing one of the 1st commercially available speech chips, these wonderful toys can be retro fitted with a MIDI input kit allowing the phonetic sounds to be triggered by keyboards and sequencers.

Nick Wishart – Working in music, sound and multimedia his main area of artistic practice is in the development of Physical Interactive Systems. Combining his skills in electronics, tactiles, MIDI, interactive devices, audio production and circuit bending techniques, Nick creates interactive multi-media installations and circuit bent instruments that form the basis of the all toy band Toydeath.

www.toydeath.com

www.cell.org.au

Miguel Valenzuela has been making video art since 1996. He has exhibited at Artist Run Spaces such as Mekanarky studios and Newman Lane Gallery, as well as in various public spaces around Sydney. He is currently researching multidimensional interactive video/sound art and its associative dimensions with regard to social norms, laws, formalities and their relative elasticity.

http://fmgrande.blogspot.com/2009/02/film-art.html

Its not like I have any idea what is going on in the world of poets, but I’ve heard 7 months after the fact that the Tim Wright I know whose jib I admire the cut of won the Judith Wright Poetry Prize for this epic. Very belated congrats Tim.

There is one of these Doepfer analogue synth modules in the studio at work, used for teaching synthesis concepts. I’d been meaning to learn how to use it and play around with it for ages but didn’t do it till just recently. I think for the first time after years of using virtual analogue and various types of hybrid sample sound devices I really began to understand the practical basics of designing sounds this way and I can understand how it can get pretty addictive. Firstly, compared to software it feels quite out of control and you can never save anything so unless you record as you go (or are willing to document patches) its all pretty in the moment. Secondly, it’s quite a lot of fun. I spent a few hours burbling away with it the other night, forgetting all worldly cares. The Doepfer is quite cool and germanic sounding, a cliche I know but I even thinks its true of Native Instruments products, compared to the only other analog synth I’ve ever played (a Moog).

Unfortunately I can’t drag it home to my studio, so back on the software instrument trail I’ve found something very similar.

Somehow Fab Filter Twin 2 pictured above here captures that weird fragile instability, that feeling that you are playing with modulated electric current that is more the attraction of the real thing than the sound for me.

Ken Robinson at TED a couple of years back on the difficulty the edu machine has with creativity.