Dan Graham – Rock My Religion
Download Rock My Religion (450Mb, AVI)
From UBUWeb
Sketchbook Archive
From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks
An excerpt from the introduction to Leonardo da Vinci’s published notebooks, available at the Project Gutenberg website.
Seeing that I can find no subject specially useful or pleasing – since the men who have come before me have taken for their own every useful or necessary theme – I must do like one who, being poor, comes last to the fair, and can find no other way of providing for himself than by taking all the things already seen by other buyers and not taken but refused by reason of their lesser value. I, then, will load my humble pack with this despised and rejected merchandise, the refuse of so many buyers; and will go about to distribute it, not indeed in great cities, but in the poorer towns, taking such a price as the wares I offer may be worth.
Brian Eno – Thursday Afternoon
Now available on DVD. Be ready to turn your monitor or laptop on its side…
/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/brianeno-thursdayafternoon.flvVia UBUWeb
I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now
The original 1969 recording of I Am Sitting In A Room by Alvin Lucier.
Lucier records himself narrating a text, and then plays the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have a characteristic resonance (e.g., between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are gradually emphasised as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself. The recited text describes this process in action – it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice…”, and concludes with, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.
Audio from UBUWeb’s Alvin Lucier page
Quote from the good Wikipedia article about Lucier
Alvin Lucier’s official website
The psychoacoustics of modern conflict
A minimalistic improvisation by Lebanese trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj ’duetting’ with the Israeli Air Force as it bombards Mazen’s home city of Beirut. Recorded by Kerbaj on the balcony of his flat in Beirut on the night of 15/16 July 2006. Silence, space, explosion, boredom, scuffling – the psychoacoustics of modern conflict (it’s very quiet – turn your volume up).
From muniak.com via Mudd Up!, the old version of the DJ Rupture blog
Image from flickr.com / mazenkerblog.blogspot.com
In Ancient Dramas, Vital Words For Today’s Warriors
For as long as there have been wars, there have been warriors who survive — and yet become as much casualties of battle as those who died.
In fact, some think that the Greek playwright Sophocles was writing, in military dramas like Ajax and Philoctetes, about what today we call post-traumatic stress disorder — and that his plays were performed by veterans, for veterans, in part to help them heal.
Now Sophocles is finding a military audience once again. The venue? A Marriott hotel ballroom, where 300 uniformed men and women sit watching, box lunches on their laps…
