sound, playing and then, ando and ito

Christine Sun Kim, a sound artist: 

so I am thinking a little bit about sound, mainly because I recently made a piece about sound, sort of, and it is something I really don't know much about. It feels like technology to me, that scary thing he writes about in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the it that 'romantics' are so terrified of... Because:

- I don't know how I am supposed to approach it. Differently from painting, which I am also not familiar with, I would... well, now that I think about it, maybe it's not that different. Learning something you are not already familiar with... 

SONIC EXPERIMENTS:

sound entering not only through the ears, but through the whole body and the psyche (Christine Sun Kim paraphrased); she writes about owning the sound and erroding the barrier between those who know it and those who don't. 

Which is why I wanted to make this into a weaving:

melbourne tryouts

pics by me, weaving by me

sound by Hans

can I understand it better, then.

DESTRUCTION OF ONE'S OWN ART

scenario: the weaving is slowly becoming unravelled through the sound: my sound and my brother's sound, or my re-make of it, potentially? or melbourne tryouts very loudly and very slowly, coming through speakers that agitate one thousand needles, pricking and pricking the fabric again... 

which reminds me of Kafka's In the Penal Colony:

thousands of needles piercing, making a pattern, torturing? unravelling, or rather, making it come apart; UNDO is a much better word, as it removes it a bit from the fabric, and many things can be undone, but not many things can be unravelled.

something my friend wrote to me about some time ago

Wait. Five months. Molecules all change. I am other I now. Other I got pound.Buzz. Buzz.But I, entelechy, form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms.I that sinned and prayed and fasted.A child Conmee saved from pandies.

I, I and I. I.

I am not sure why, but seems relevant. another friend:

wild sound and room tone

tadao ando

and i am thinking about Tadao Ando, and here is a writing by Toyo Ito from a NUNO NUNO Book, which I wrote about before:

"Transparency, however, is not always so light and clear. We Japanese have willingly surrendered any opacity of self so as to blent into today's society. We live see-through lives, undistinguished from anyone else in an extremely streamlined regulating system. Urban Japan has become a convenience store peopled by instant snack foods wrapped in plastic and lined up on a shelf. We are more signs, wholly transparent, devoid of any scale of value. What's more, this mediocre transparent existence is entirely comfortable. And yet, as the individual in contemporary society turns ever more transparent, architecture and the city are becoming conversely more opaque.

One major characteristic of the contemporary city is that each space is utterly cut off from the next. Interiors portioned room from room, walls everywhere. Such perhaps is the destiny of social control: a vast homogenic cityscape is fragmented into places with almost no spatial interrelationships. This is especially true in commercial spaces, where divorcing the interior from the external environment facilitates dramatically 'staging' the premises. Spaces thick with shining products are clearly set up, when seen from a slight remove, on the basis of their uniformity and particularity; spaces seemingly so idiosyncratic are merely the accumulation of introspectively inflated fragments of homogeneity - this is today's city."

Yes, so that's that.

my friend who wrote about 

wild sound

and

room tone

gave me a book about sound... which i have only read a little about. now i will put this thought on pause, return to it when it has gone farther into my mind.

Three Transparancies

From SUKESUKE

Excerpts from an essay by Toyo Ito

1 Fluid Transparency:

To stand before a giant fish tank at the aquarium is to experience the curious sensation of being two places at once. With only a clear wall in between, 'here' on this side is dry land surrounded by air, while 'over there' on the other opens an aquatic world. Not so long ago, aquarium tanks were relatively small affaird, peered at through windows like openings in the wall.

Today's aquariums, however, have impossibly huge tanks where awesome volumes of water press at us with awesome force through layers of acrylic tens of centimetres thick.

To see through walls like this represent a major paradigm shift, as different as architectural elevations and cross-sections. When looking through a window, the view beyond is inviolate, self-contained. Not so with a transparent wall: an environment that ought to permeate everywhere suddenly cuts off at an invisible boundary, leaving its sheared face fully exposed. A visit to the aquarium in days gone by was like going to the circus; now one is fully immersed in the experience.

Lee Kit and casualty? failure? everyday?

I saw Lee Kit at the Osage Gallery when I was living in Hong Kong, and I recently stumbled across the photographs I took during the opening in 2010. I don't remember what I thought about it at the time, but now it feels very relevant.

Each cloth is hand-painted, and they have been used for 'mundane' or everyday activities, such as washing a window, or being hung up as curtains, or being slept on, in a bed. 

When I saw these photographs again I realized that yes, this is perfect, this is exactly what I want to do! 

In particular in terms of mundane everyday objects which have been made so particularly and beautifully. Just the idea of using a hand-painted cloth to wash a dirty window - why would you do it? It seems like a waste, but I like that so much. It is not so much invisible labour as it is something else... Failure, maybe? To use something in a way it should not be used. Of course, by putting them in a gallery setting they become those art objects again, and I don't know what to think of it (I suppose I like it. Ridiculous not to). 

But yes, I like the idea of failure, failure to do something, failure to realize something. A failure to use this object as it was meant to be used, or a failure to revere a beautiful piece of art, but rather, you sleep on it. That is the other thing I am so attracted to: sleeping on the cloth, making an impression of it. It makes me think about Do-Ho Suh's Home-series, where memory is embedded in the cloth, but it works in a different way. He uses the fabric to depict these interior and exterior spaces, and we can even walk around inside of them. Lee Kit, it seems, uses it more as a kind of... wasted labour. I am interested in this, this 'waste of labour' (no, definitively not about invisibility of labour), but I am even more interested in the memory we can embed into cloth. When I weave, the weaving is not finished when I take it off the loom or even when it is shown, and now it has traveled and lived with me for almost half a year, and I still have not 'used' it for anything. But I want it to be something, so I am sending it to Jordyn, and then we will see what happens.

Later on, I would like to make another weaving, and design it specifically so I can make pillow cases out of it. I think it will be a very simple design and form, probably white cotton plain weave, but the size will be so that I can get a set number of pillow cases from it. 

I feel like I am returning to things I used to think about, and ideas that began germinating when I was in Hong Kong, and I didn't think I would. I was trying to find back to the form of what I was making, but instead the ideas looped back on themselves.

(all the photographs are taken by me)

Thoughts on Bill T. Jones at the Chicago Humanities Festival

Bill T. Jones spoke at the Chicago Humanities Festival! And I went to see it! I have not seen anything he has made, as a matter of fact, but I knew it had to be good, as trusted friends ensured me of his... genius, or something of the sort? 

Image found here.

It was a great talk, or conversation. I don't know what to make of what they were talking about - it spanned from his growing up to the trauma narrative (which I didn't know about before yesterday) to self-management, or rather directing ourselves to be managed by someone, and also the fact that the conversation happened on the South Side of Chicago - but I want to write about what it made me want to do, which I had largely forgotten since this summer! 

(or what I want to think about and write about and make work about)

- ritual and memory, and how we distort memory, or how memory is distorted time, crumpled up in all sorts of weird ways; I recently had a strange discovery of my own memory being "false," meaning that I do not entirely trust my own memory of something anymore; things happen that make us reconsider the present, the future, and also the past, which is quite scary. where do we put the trust in time?

> this above point is connected to beadings, since they are about memory, for me. what do I remember of this one person, or this one moment, and how do I change it? since I work on it for so long, does my memory of it change during the process, and how can I see that?

- ritual and repetition; DANCE, WEAVING. Textiles and movements are already married faithfully in my mind, and they live together there, but now I need to take it out of my fingertips, somehow. 

- labor of love? labor-intensivity? invisible labor? ; in relationships, family relations, love relations: how do we labor and how is it seen? I like to think about love although I am afraid of it.

- music, and more so, sound. I need to read the Whitechapel-book Jordyn gave to me about sound, alongside with Memory, Failure and Chance. how can I express my brother's music in a weaving? how can I express someone else's labor through my own? will write more about this as weaving progresses and project is revealed. 

- organizing the dance workshop at Låke summer 2014. will write more about this when I am more certain of things, but don't want to eat my words later.

- technology, weaving, dance, performance. list over people to research: Bill T. Jones, Lee Blalock. list to be expanded as research deepens. 

- a dance as a treatment; sterilization in the meaning of being free from bacteria, and cleanliness, sterility.

will come back to this.

Piercing through skin

Fine, I already wrote about beading and even about this specific editorial (I think?), but I really needed to show this again. I wrote about it, I believe, in the context of a harness, but I wanted to write about it again in correlation with beading and pearls and embellishment (such a delicious word, I have to think about it more, roll it around in my mouth, and so on).

Images found here.

There is a sort of Smaug-TLOTR-creepiness going on in the image at the bottom, but pearls and embellishments and the model totally looks like Tilda Swinton as The White Witch in the Narnia-books, and MESH FACE MASK, and just, so many beads... I think about armours and covers and part of me wishes I was in fashion but I know I would slowly kill myself and then starting to hate clothes... But now all I want to do is embellish clothing so it is really, really heavy and not like the soundsuits, but to make the beads abstract the person wearing them, and change them, somehow. 

The beadings on paper are only covering faces and body parts, but I want to cover something else entirely in clothing: the face is not so interesting, and I am not too keen on masks (it just... no, not for me, I think), but the rest of the body. Embroidering