About
A programme of events timetabled by Edward Dorrian from both submitted and invited proposals made to Five Years, addressing the concept of the Field Recording. All events will be staged and recorded inside the gallery.
Friday 05/02/10
6-8pm Seth Guy: Various Artists
7-8pm Matthew Lee Knowles & Andy Ingamells: Sixty_Six_Events
8-9pm Cinzia Cremona: The Other Person
Saturday 06/02/10
12-2pm Duncan Whitley: Sound As Research As Art
2-4pm Madge: Learning To Breathe And To Singâ¦Strauss, Here I Come!
4-6pm Alice Cooper: Stage 12
Sunday 07/02/10
12-2pm Gary Kempston: Sound
2-4pm David Berridge, Compulsive Holding, Marianne Holm Hansen,
Tamarin Norwood, Matthew MacKisack:
Art Writing Field Station
4-6pm Investigation Three: 34/71 Broadway Market
Saturday 13/02/10
12-2pm Patrick Loan: Observations/ Performance No. 1 (Hohe Warte Stadion, Vienna)
2-4pm Rob Flint & Christine Sullivan: Sound Proof
4-6pm Paul Buck: Gutting The Issue
Sunday 14/02/10
12-2pm Melissa Bliss: What Do We Want? Justice! When Do We Want It? Now!
2-4pm Kate Wiggs & Joanna Austin: The Conversation Continues
4-5pm Islington Mill Art Academy: Conversation With Pippa Koszerek
5-6pm Irina Danilova: 59 Orgasms
Asaki Kan: That
Saturday 20/02/10
12-4pm Deborah Ridley: Deconstructing Piano
2-4pm Matthew Lee Knowles & Andy Ingamells: Sixty_Six_Events
4-6pm Shelley Parker & Paul Purgas: Proximity
Sunday 21/02/10
12-2pm Michael Schuller: Navigational Notes
2-4pm Ana Cavic & Renée O'Drobinak: open conversation with Edward Dorrian
4-6pm Sebastian Craig: 3.29miles Public
Additional work available throughout - Oorbeek: You Oorbeek
In the summer of 1933, Thomas A. Edison's widow gave my father an old-fashioned Edison cylinder machine so that he might record Negro tunes for a forthcoming book of American ballads. For us, this instrument was a way of taking down tunes quickly and accurately; but to the singers themselves, the squeaky, scratchy voice that emerged from the speaking tube meant that they had made communicative contact with a bigger world than their own.1
On the table, a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels of recorded tapes. Table and immediately adjacent area in strong white light. Rest of the stage in darkness.2
Documents such as tape-recordings of improvisation are essentially empty, as they preserve chiefly the form that something took and give at best an indistinct hint as to the feeling and cannot of course convey any sense of time and placeâ¦3
â¦improvisation effect is clearly derived from the interview format of cinéma-vérité. Against the composed and representational scenarios of fiction film, ciné-vérité was read as a breakthrough to the freshness and immediacy of daily experienceâ¦. In Godard's films the interview is the moment in which the fictional characters are tormented⦠full-face, head shoulders against a dazzling monochrome wall, they reply with hesitant assent or inarticulate half-phrases to the demand that they formulate their experiences, their truth, in words. The truth of the interview however, lies not in what is said or betrayed, but in the silence, in the fragility of insufficiency of the stammered response, in the massive and overwhelming power of the visual image, and in the lack of neutrality of the badgering, off-screen interviewer. It is in France/ Tour/ Détour/ Deux/ Enfants that the tyrannical and manipulative power of this investigative position is most clearly exposed.4
One remembers those times when the moment in a field recording situation is just right. There arises an intimacy close to love. The performer gives you his strongest and deepest feeling, and, if he is a folk singer, this emotion can reveal the character of his whole community. A practiced folk song collector can bring about communication on this level wherever he chooses to set up his machine. Ask him how he does this, and he can no more tell you than a minister can tell you how to preach a great sermon. It takes practice and it takes a deep need on the part of the field collector - which the singer can sense and want to fulfill. 5
An audience expecting a conventional concert or lecture is put on a bus, their palms are stamped with the word LISTEN, and they are taken to and thru an existing sound environment. February 1966 - Consolidated Edison Power Station 14th Street and Ave. D, New York City; March 1967 - Hudson Tubes (subway) 9th Street Station to Pavonia; July 1968 New Jersey Power and Light Power Plant, South Amboy, New Jersey.6
- All research is crisis. What is sought is nothing other than the turn of seeking, of research, that occasions this crisis: the critical turn.
- This is hopelessly abstract.
- Why? I would even say that every important literary work is important to the extent that it puts more directly and more purely to work the meaning of this turn; a turning that, at the moment when it is about to emerge, makes the work pitch strangely. This is a work in which worklessness, as its always decentred center, holds sway: the absence of work.
- The absence of work that is the other name for madness.
- The absence of work in which discourse ceases so that, outside speech, outside language, the movement of writing may come, under the attraction of the outside.7
1 Alan Lomax Saga of a Folksong Hunter: A Twenty-year Odyssey with Cylinder, Disc and Tape HiFi Stereo Review, May 1960.
2 Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape (Faber and Faber 1958)
3 Cornelius Cardew: Towards an Ethic of Improvisation, in Treatis Handbook (London: Peters, 1971), xx
4 Fredric Jameson In the Destructive Element Immerse: Hans-Jürgen Syberberg and Cultural Revolution
5 Alan Lomax Saga of a Folksong Hunter: A Twenty-year Odyssey with Cylinder, Disc and Tape HiFi Stereo Review, May 1960.
6 Max Neuhaus LISTEN: Field Trips Thru Found Sound Enviroments: Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond- Michael Nyman (Cambridge University Press Second Edition 2004 First Published 1974)
7 Maurice Blanchot: Speaking Is Not Seeing The Infinite Conversation p.32 (Translation by Susan Hanson . Theory and History of Literature, Volume 82 . University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London . © 1993 . Originally published as L'Entretien infini. © 1969
