Phenomenology Rules

(Long post)

At the beginning of October I went to a three-day conference in Melbourne called "Time, Transcendence, Performance". Not something that I would normally do, but my installation Cloud Drum was in the art show associated with the event. All the works dealt with some mixture of time and performance in some way, and since mine involves two time scales and is interactive it fitted in quite well.

The conference was organised by Stuart Grant, Jodie McNeilly and Caroline Vains, assisted by lots of people; Jeff Stewart looked after the art show, among other things. The conference took place at three locations: Monash University's Caulfield campus, Dancehouse in Carlton, and ACMI at Federation Square. There were also events in Second Life. At times it seemed that threre were three or four separate conferences going on, and I missed out on all the Federation Square events, including Stelarc's opening talk. Also at Caulfield there were multiple parallel sessions, so I only saw a fraction of the conference. It was certainly a large and complex event, with a sizeable international participation. Of the parts I saw, although the tight schedule became a bit frayed at times, as far as I can tell things ran pretty well.

I don't think I have met a card-carrying phenomenologist before, but there were quite a few around the conference. It was pretty clear that "time" in the conference title didn't have a lot to do with physics, but rather with personal experience. Heidegger and especially Husserl came up repeatedly. (I realise that there is an argument that time as conceived by physicists can be derived from phenomenology, but I don't know how it goes.) There is a whole language here that I don't speak - this is not a criticism, just a comment - so quite a few of the presentations went over my head. There was a sub-theme of comments on intense experience, described by one speaker as "moments of stillness".

As well as theory, there was practice. The main performing artform people were concerned with seemed to be dance, and there were performances at Dancehouse, some quite striking, in the evenings. I'll just mention "Zeno's Overcoat", performed by Peter Fraser (dancer) and Dale Gorfinkel (musician). There were also two talks I attended where the speakers described their personal experiences very vividly. One was by Ian Maxwell (Sydney), describing his baptism into the Greek Orthodox Church, which came about because he wished to marry a Greek woman; the other was the last paper of the conference, given by Alphonso Lingis (U.S.A), which consisted of a series of vignettes of various experiences he has had over the years, with appropriate music. Although both of these people were talking about specific experiences, they somehow managed to give them a universal character.

I'm not sure what I've taken away from the conference, though I found it enjoyable, and there were lots of interesting things. There is a whole world of phenomenology, it seems. Indeed, I did have a sense to some extent of two parallel worlds, with phenomenologists occupying one and cognitive scientists (who were not represented here) the other. From what I can work out, the phenomenologists opened up these questions first, but a lot has happened since. This isn't a criticism of Stuart Grant, as the conference already had an impressively wide scope. Also, I understand he has plans for bringing together phenomenologists and cognitive scientists at some time.

The conference also pointed out to me a specific difference between the humanities and the sciences. I saw somewhere (I don't remember where) a comment that in science, successful work becomes anonymous, in that it is absorbed into textbooks and nobody except the odd historian feels the need to go back to the original writings. This certainly fits in with my past experience in science. The conference was on the humanities; there were constant references back to the writings of Heidegger and Husserl, and other originary thinkers. Also, the history of science is a small sub-discipline, whereas it seems that many (most?) humanities scholars are part-time historians of their disciplines. Again, a Mathematics department is full of mathematicians; the parallel would be an English department full of novelists or poets. Not only is the history of science not much practised in science departments, but criticism or analysis as understood in the humanities is not much practised either. This isn't a question of wilful blindess; it must be a consequence of the different ways knowledge or understanding is secured in the different disciplines.

I'm not gong to rush in any further where angels fear to tread.

Trocadero - Followup

There is to be a massive group exhibition, "Wallpaper 08", at Trocadero Art Space. For me this is a follow-on from my exhibition there in August, as I will be showing some new high-resolution prints generated by the program I wrote for Cloud Drum.

The exhibition dates are 10-27 September, and the address is Level 1, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray, Melbourne (near Footscray station).

Later: My contribution is six new images from Cloud Drum. There are something like 50 artists involved in this show. When I put my works up, about half of the artists had installed their contributions. It should be a pretty amazing show. The opening is on Saturday 13th September, 4-6pm.

Exibition at Trocadero Art Space

My installation Cloud Drum will be at Trocadero Art Space in Footscray, Melbourne, 30th July to 16th August. My piece is in Gallery 2.
Address: Level 1, 119 Hopkins St, Footscray.
It is a short walk from Footscray railway station.
Gallery hours: The gallery is open Wed - Sat, 11am - 5pm.
I will be there on Thursdays during the exhibition.

The opening is on Saturday 2nd August, 4pm - 6pm. All welcome!
This opening is an event on Facebook.

Click for Map

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body.

ACMC 2008

Recently I attended the 2008 Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, 10-12 July. I think this is still the only musical event in the region that combines refereed academic papers, artist talks and a festival. A real benefit of the conference is hearing talks from people whose work is then performed in the concerts. This isn't meant to be a detailed review, just a mention of some highlights for me.

The conference was held at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, which was a great venue, with the talks, concerts and so on held in rooms adjacent to central atrium of the new part of the Conservatorium. It was smoothly organised by Anthony Hood, Robert Sazdov, Ivan Zavada, Sonia Wilkie and a team of helpers. I couldn't get to everything, but I still attended about 20 talks and 6 concerts in three days. Additionally, the conference linked in with Liquid Architecture's Sydney leg, the Liquid Architecture gigs providing late-light events for ACMC. Such late-night events have become a tradition for ACMC, but this is the first time Liquid Architecture has been involved.

The keynote speakers were Robert Normandeau from Montreal and Roger Dean from Sydney. Robert is a very well-known "acousmatic" composer. He devoted a lot of his keynote speech to a detailed discussion of his piece StrinGDberg. This piece was the last one in the concerts, and was certainly a highlight of the conference.

I had to miss part of Roger Dean's talk, but the part I did hear was fascinating. It was concerned with empirical psychoacoustic studies of various musical attributes, using electro-acoustic music as test materials. It seems that almost all such work is conducted using instrumental music, and Roger saw advantages in using music less familiar to many participants.

A few other talks that struck me: Warren Burt's comparing electro-acoustic composition to Sufism (given by video,as Warren couldn't attend); Ros Bandt's on her installation Sea Lament based on sounds associated with Japanese woman abalone divers, and especially the whistling noise they make when they reach the surface; Toby Gifford and Andrew Brown's talk describing a simple but effective method for detecting percussive attacks very quickly when they are buried in other sounds; and the talk by Andrew Sorenson and Andrew Brown entitled "A compositional model for the generation of orchestral music in the German symphonic tradition". Why would one want to do this? It turns out that the generation is in real time, with obvious application to games. Instead of trying to solve completely the problem, say, of chord progression, they so far have rough and ready versions of all the main musical components. The results weren't at all bad.

From the concerts I have already mentioned Robert Normandeau's StrinGDberg. Of the other tape pieces I would mention the long and compelling piece Ombres, Espaces, Silences by Giles Gobeil, composed in stereo and ably diffused over the conference 16-channel system by Conservatorium student Henrique Dib. Remarkably, this was Henrique's first public diffusion. Also the 1969 piece Continuum, by the pioneer Tristram Cary, known for his work on Doctor Who, and a long-time resident of Adelaide, who died recently. This work held up extremely well.

Among the live performances I would mention the engaging Hands on Stage by Chi-Hsia Lai, using a small table with a translucent top, a webcam underneath, and microphones attached. The webcam interpreted shadows cast on the table as control information for sound manipulation, and additionally we saw projected a modified version of what the webcam was seeing. Another novel interface was the electronic sitar of Ajay Kapur, coupled with a head-mounted controller. The work, Anjuna's Digital Raga, was very enjoyable. Unfortunately I had to miss the workshop that Ajay gave about his work.

My favourite audio-visual work was Brigid Burke's Strings, involving complex projected images, live bass clarinet (played by Brigid), and electronically transformed sound. I also mention the strange work Po[or Symm]etry [Dra]in[s] [E]motion[s], by Mark Havriliv and Josh Dubrau. It consisted of an electronic chat session between the two performers, projected up on a screen and accompanied by sounds. But the chat messages were being transformed by a computer program, resulting in received messages looking like the title of the work.

I only engaged with two installations apart from my own Cloud Drum, Colin Black's "extended environmental guitar", which was documentation about a 15-metre long construction installed in remote locations associated with the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt, and Ros Bandt's Sea Lament mentioned above.

Of course there was a lot more. It was good to meet with old friends, but also good to see quite a few new faces. This is the sixteenth ACMC, and there seems to be plenty of energy in the community.

Installation at ACMC

I have an installation called Cloud Drum at this year's Australasian Computer Music Conference in Sydney, July 10-12. It is based on the vibrations of an idealised drum, as is Triangular Vibrations, but Cloud Drum is real-time, interactive, black-and-white, and a much gentler piece.