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20180726

Visited Luke Moldof’s gig which is a part of the Pennies From Heaven #4 series organized by the Control (store) and Bánh Mì Verlag. We were taken on a sonic journey. Transitions between scenes were fluid. The trip highlighted at 4th July fireworks, the noisyness of which was pulled to sonic focus. The gig started with a horse eating / stable ambient sample.

Gender as Colonial Object – The spread of Western gender categories through European colonization (2018) Lucas Ballestín. A good follow up to last Sundays reading group discussions.

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20180725

Envision Yourself as Fossil in the Future – consultation.

  • First we discuss what noise is. We listen to field recordings,  samples of white or pink noise, the sound of our hands rubbing against each other and talk about what these noises sound & feel like.
    • Example. We try to visualise the shape and texture of our hands through the noises they make when rubbed against each other.
  • We discuss what media is. Information can be stored into different substances. Substances change when information is recorded. What we hear when listening to recorded sounds is how the media changed when information was stored to it.
    • We listen to blank recordings and amplified silence.
  • We try to imagine how traces of this time are transmitted to the far future. Some of our messages will travel so far that they will be considered fossils when they reach their audiences.
    • A FM transmission might get stuck and orbit the sun, to be heard/experienced a millennia from today.
  • We think about noise. How the sound of noise bounces from surfaces it hits and changes. Samples of its grains map out every sound that has existed and demarcate every sound that will exist.
    • We listen to entropy. Let’s try to imagine shape of our hands through the sound of our hands rubbing against each other.
  • When we listen to noise carefully: We can hear sounds of today – The way they will heard in the future.
  • This is how we can discover our fossilised remains in the future.
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20180724

Participated in the Performance Philosophy Reading Group organised by the Center for Performance Research. We read Work(s) and (Non)Production in Contemporary Movement Practices (2016) by Hetty Blades and discussed it with a small group. The event was hosted by Antonio Ramos, a dancer who works an artist director of a group called The Gangbangers. The text was very complicated, it attempted to define separate components of movement based praxis, which make up a dance (art)works and to examine how these components relate to labor (is rehearsal work?, is documentation work?, is performance work? etc.). The text attempted to make a clinical dissection of dance (art)works but it got tangled in loose definitions. Due to the complexity of the text, discussions were unfocused.

Rode at the Kensington stables today. My horse was called Bingo and I got to use a Western Saddle. The trip was fun, slow but fun. A passing bicycle spat on the ground as a protest. It was cool to see horse statues from the back of a horse. Also got some insight to inner-city horse politics. I learned about the New York State Horse Council.

ISCP discovered the Parks Enforcement Patrol that might develop into something. I applied to be a Parks Enforcement Patrol Mounted Auxiliary volunteer.

Participated to the Artists at Work: Modupeola Fadugba and Yen-Ting Hsu talks at ISCP. Hsu took us on a audio journey trough rural Korean villages (got to hear the rhythm of a tatam-mat knitting machine), the trip ended on a ride on the L-train to underline the course of modern development (I talked about SOW with her after the performance). Fadugba presented a series of paintings which depict synchronized swimmers. It was interesting to think about swimming from a collective/shared bodybuilding perspective and to learn about the The Harlem Honey and Bears synchronized swimming team. The event felt rigidly scripted.

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20180723

Sonic Arts Union: David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley (in memoriam) concert series at the Issue project room was a positive experience. It was exiting to see Mumma perform live. The event served as proof of the grandeur of the New York electro-acoustic scene and movement. The sounds came from a niche and approaches to music were theoretical but the event still attracted active audiences, who engaged with the pieces. Robert Ashley’s 1993 work Love Is A Good Example was the most easiest piece to approach (I should start making spoken word pieces). David Behrman’s Long Throw was a nice ending for the evening but it felt too picturesque. The blues guitar riffs were too much for me.

Joined the On Whiteness: The Reading Group on Saturday at Helena Anrather. The event was hosted by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan of the Native Art Department International. We read a mixture of texts, the longest was Andrea Smiths’ Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy in which she defines three axises trough which white supremacy engages with non-whites:

  1. Slavery/Capitalism. After slavery ended, the Prison Industrial Complex started.
  2. Genocide/Colonialism. Indigenous people must disappear so that their land can be claimed with out opposition.
  3. Orientalism/War. US need to be in war with “exotic countries” so that they can proof that “exotic” are not US. US is defined by war, it needs conflict with to exist.

The text also defined heteropatriarchy as a building block of  White-America: When nuclear families are set as a norm, it becomes easier to implement hierarchical organisational models upon indigenous communities. She identifies “family” as a technology and argues that in Christian-Americas emphasis on family (and the families right for privacy) results into a lack of interest in public, shared infrastructure: Suburban mindset is a disinvestment. The discussions centred on the topics of forced whiteness and passing. Learning about passing from the indigenous perspective was particularly interesting: Indians are often treated as white because white supremacy want to see indigenous people disappear, to claim their lands.

During the reading group the problematic case Andrea Smith claiming to be a Cherokee were not discussed. More on these issues: Open Letter From Indigenous Women Scholars Regarding Discussions of Andrea Smith (2015). Discovered the Native Land map, a mapping system made to further acknowledgement of indigenous presence in America. Trough this source I learned about the Lenape  and the Canarsie who’s land I now live on. The Lenape article is an interesting read.

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20180719

Booked a trail riding session for next Tuesday 1pm!

Making art with plants, is abstract art – It requires an understanding of concepts and approaches derived from cell biology and theories concerning the climate (that there is oxygen etc.). People cannot build relationships to plants because our interdependency is an abstraction. You can respect a plant but the plant will never respect you – Which means that there is no mutual respect in the relationship.

Respect is a relationship, in which the well being of separate entities is rooted on a shared awareness of specific problems and skills an other entity has (face-to-horse-face). This supports the well-being of both entities: A horse needs human guidance for navigating contemporary landscapes (maps, social networks), a human needs the horses skills in moving in complicated terrain (four hooves, sensory awareness).

In this relationship both entities constantly contest each others limits, to set parameters for the collaboration. When entities work together, the work is a social process (the outcome is the surplus of a successful relationship). One entity cannot surrender decision making to the other, both must engage at all times (relaxation is an important form of engagement). This is what Arja Sulin is saying when she shouts: “Absolute focus!!!” to kids learning to ride. Following this logic it seems that people don’t necessary build relationships to each other either: Words develop institutions which make-us-make-sense of each other according to a predefined logic. This would mean that the only respectful relationships we can form are to animals with whom we cannot negotiate with using words. Weird… Lovecraftian?

Post-Capitalist Ecologies: Energy, ‘Value’ and Fetishism in the Anthropocene (2016) Alf Hornborg. The article has a chapter called “The Money Artifact as the Root of All Evil”, how cool is that? He’s citing Andreas Malm (who coined the term Capitalocene).

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