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.

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.

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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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.

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

New short video piece just completed tonight. Its a collaboration with John Cheeseman who wrote a short text based around the title Flags of Convenience that I’d had laying around for a while. I used the text as a stimulus for some imagery and another text I wrote to animate in counterpoint to the spoken text from John. I recorded John & Jes Tyrrell reading his text over the phone and then spent an inordinately long time composing some sound to underpin an edit of the voice text. The sound didn’t fall into place for me until I used it as material for a performance at the launch of an issue of Runway magazine where somewhere in the live mix I worked out how to deal with the unruly textures. You can download a 1280 x 720 mpeg4 version of it here (just right click and save as), its 150mb. Or see a low res streaming version below.

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I was part of a panel at the Sydney Writers Festival ten or so days ago, it was part of a project I’m involved with in western Sydney called Coded that has a strong element of locative art & writing involved. Even though it was conceived of as a panel discussion it was advertised as a reading & as that is the sort of thing people do at writers festivals I read some bits from an old locative story project for mobiles called “go this way” and some stuff from a newer work developed to be heard as readings on the Sydney freeway network. The panel was organised and Coded is produced/curated by Sophia Kouyoumdjian.

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Thanks to Jes for kindly shooting the video & stills. This is just the bit where I was doing my rambling. Whole thing was two hours, thanks to the Writers Festival for putting on something a bit left field for them & to Blacktown Arts Centre for hosting.

Great review of the new Vampire series tearing up the book charts & a prediction about the bubble bursting in the commercial contemporary art scene.

As you can imagine looking at the picture this 1920s satnav device worked by manually scrolling the map on your wrist device as you progressed. From Strange Maps, further details here.

At Yucca Mountain in Nevada where much of the nuclear waste generated in the US is being stored they’ve had the problem of how do you signpost the danger surrounding this site in a way that will still make sense when English, the USA and all of our cultural references are gone. While the waste continues to radiate.

Its a hard problem thinking about how to address a future so far ahead as to be effectively alien. The material will remain dangerous for at least 10, 000 years. Here is a first draft at some signage, still a bit culturally specific I think.