Subject: Leonardo Electronic Almanac vol 11, no 1, January 2003 Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2003 12:00:01 -0500 From: "MIT Press" Reply-To: To: / ____ / / /\ / /-- /__\ /______/____ / \ _________________________________________________________________________ Leonardo Electronic Almanac volume 11, number 1, January 2003 _________________________________________________________________________ ISSN #1071-4391 ____________ | | | CONTENTS | |____________| _________________________________________________________________________ EDITORIAL --------- Not Necessarily "English" Music: Britain's Second Golden Age By Nicholas Collins FEATURES -------- < Special Section: Selected items from Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 12 > LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS ------------------------- < Holes-Lining-Threads > Reviewed by Luisa Paraguai Donati < Writings by Vilem Flusser > Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen < One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity > Reviewed by Claire Barliant < Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century > Reviewed by Chris Cobb LEONARDO JOURNAL ---------------- < LEONARDO Vol. 36, No. 1 (2003): Table of Contents and Selected Abstracts > OBITUARY ------------- < In Memory: Rich Gold, 1950-2003 > LEA NEWS -------- < Coming up in LEA > _________________________________________________________________________ _______________ | | | EDITORIAL | |_______________| _________________________________________________________________________ Introduction LMJ11: Not Necessarily "English" Music: Britain's Second Golden Age In the early 1960s, Britain---its empire in tatters, its economy listing heavily---moved into a position of musical leadership not experienced since the Golden Age of Byrd and Purcell 4 centuries earlier. Alongside Spam and chewing gum, American GIs had bequeathed a legacy of jazz and blues records that were obsessively studied, learned note by note by young British musicians. When the flow of vinyl finally reversed, the "British Invasion" hit the U.S.A. like a bomb. Britain's cultural shift from the "small, brown, sad paintings" that artist Joe Tilson described as the art flavor of the 1950s [1] to the shiny electric guitars that symbolized the 1960s also triggered an extraordinary outburst of quirky, inventive, thoughtful experimental music. From Profumo to Thatcher, new music in the U.K. flourished in an atmosphere of inspired inclusivity and utter disregard for the niceties of critical success, popular acclaim or the historical record. Merseybeat [2] provided musicians with fame and wealth (and musicologists with handy dissertation topics), but this other "English Music" has remained strangely unacknowledged and under-documented. Back when Chuck Berry was in jail, Little Richard back in church and Buddy Holly in heaven, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were needed to re-introduce Americans to their own music---American musicians imitated British musicians imitating American blues. British Pop bands revived the tradition of the songwriter/singer that had gotten lost between the cotton fields of Mississippi and the corridors of the Brill Building [3]. The best of the British bands offered a perfect balance of interpretation and innovation, juxtaposing a respect for diverse musical traditions with bursts of true originality (e.g. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band---a record that could only have been put together by a band that once played "Bésame Mucho" and "Twist and Shout" in the same set). The British experimental music that emerged in the mid-1960s owed as much to this new Pop sensibility as to the dominant European modernist style---as David Toop writes, "after all the rigorous, radical and exclusionist music theories that slugged it out during the twentieth century, English music allowed things to happen" [4]. Composers got up on stage to play, rejecting the classical distinction between creator and interpreter; they drew on musical material and ideas outside the high-art canon, including Pop and "World" music; they appealed to ears raised on Pop because they made use of Pop instruments and Pop sounds, rather than confining themselves to the acoustic orchestra; their rhythms were often closer to Bo Diddley than to Boulez; and while Pop hooked you with guitar riffs, this music was built on "brain riffs," clever ideas that held your attention in a way a tone row never could. In Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, composer and critic Michael Nyman presents British music in the context of parallel American and European activity, and points out the influence of John Cage and Christian Wolff in particular [5]. But British music displayed idiosyncrasies that separated it from these other, better-documented movements. This music abounds with seemingly paradoxical juxtapositions: composition and improvisation; professionals and amateurs; Maoism and Merchant Ivory [6]; bloodless systems and halcyon sentimentality. In the essays presented here a handful of names keep cropping up, sometimes as "composers," sometimes as "players," sometimes as "organizers," sometimes as "critics"---musical functions shifted fluidly in a relatively non-hierarchical musical society. Few of these composers demonstrated the stylistic tenacity of, say, LaMonte Young---radical changes of tack seem commonplace. To quote Toop again, "this willingness to abandon a fixed sense of place or identity, within the cultural map is a legacy that remains with us today" [7]. Imaginative and witty, this second "Golden Age" was nonetheless patently uncommercial. It could not compete with Pop for shock value, and was overshadowed (in the American press at least) by the easier-to-catch wave of American Minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Nyman's 1974 book (mentioned above) still stands as the best single reference. In recent years the work of Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra have been the subject of several articles and concerts. But much of the music still remains unfamiliar, even to younger British composers. In this volume of Leonardo Music Journal we aimed to document this reclusive chapter of musical history, follow up on the current activities of its original participants and trace its influence on younger British artists. Among the contributors to this issue, Michael Parsons, Eddie Prévost, Ranulph Glanville, Lawrence Casserley, Hugh Davies and Stuart Jones were all active participants in the emergent scene of the 1960s and 1970s; their recollections overlap one another to create a Rashomon-like portrait of the time, with each writer's denouement pointing in a different direction. Sarah Walker extends several of these tag endings to weave an overview of recent music by veterans of those earlier days. Walker's essay highlights the centrality of the piano in British experimentalism, while Matthew Sansom focuses on the role of improvisation. Cornelius Cardew emerges as a key figure in the evolution of numerous musical movements in Britain [8]. Coriún Aharonián analyzes the conflict between Cardew's radical political beliefs and his avant-garde musical background, addressing contradictions that many still find quite hard to reconcile many years after his untimely death in 1981. Alvin Lucier contributes an affectionate portrait of his former student Stuart Marshall (1949--1993). A visual artist by training, Marshall returned to England after studying with Lucier and taught for several years in art schools before shifting to video and film production. He served as a bridge between the American and British experimental traditions and between the musical and visual worlds, and exerted a subtle but profound influence on a generation of younger British artists. Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. "Scanner"), Janek Schaefer and Joe Banks (a.k.a. "Disinformation") represent the more recent wave of British music and its obsession with the physicality of electronic media. Rimbaud's moniker derives from the public-service band scanner radio he used to eavesdrop on cellular telephone conversations in his early recordings and performances. Schaefer is an experimental DJ who has been pushing the limits of both the record-player mechanism and vinyl itself. Banks works with the sounds of non-broadcast electromagnetic signals, such as those produced by the aurora borealis, meteorites, the electrical power grid, navigation satellites and paranormal phenomena. We were very fortunate to persuade David Toop to curate the CD accompanying this issue. No single person was better placed to do so: musician, composer, writer, producer and fan, Toop has been a fixture of the British music scene since his teenage years. Through the strength of long-standing friendships and collaborations he has managed to assemble 27 extraordinary tracks, most of which are previously unreleased or long out of print. Together with Toop's own essay and the artists' notes, they provide tangible evidence of this heady time and its continuing repercussions. "English" Music? Obviously not just. Britain is much more than England---Wales and Scotland have strong cultures, musical and otherwise, and are loathe to rally under the flag of St. George. But the phrase "English Music" has a sonic resonance that the clinical precision of "British Music" lacks, and it carries specific and appropriate historical connotations. Since the Age of Dunstable (1400--1460) the term has been used to describe a peculiar "conservatism . . . strong enough to transform borrowed styles and genres until they became suitable for genuine native expression" and to "preserve old traditions even in periods of experimentation" [9]. Or, as Eddie Prévost puts it, "Amidst the general climate of fashionable change that is represented by 'the 1960s,' there came about a generous sense of convergence" [10]. Generosity is, by its nature, an untidy virtue. So, in the untidy spirit of generosity and convergence---"English Music." And Not Necessarily English Music. Nicolas Collins Editor-in-Chief References and Notes: 1. Joe Tilson, in conversation with Susan Tallman, February 1993, quoted in Susan Tallman, The Contemporary Print---From Pre-Pop to Postmodernism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996) p. 60. 2. "Merseybeat" refers to the phenomenon of the dozens of British Pop bands (including the Searchers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Hollies, Herman's Hermits and the Beatles) formed in Liverpool (and in other British ports) in the early 1960s. The Merseybeat scene was independent of London and heavily influenced by imported 1950s American rock 'n' roll and rhythm 'n' blues. 3. New York's Brill Building was the home of pop songwriting during the late 1950s/early 1960s. Songwriters Barry Mann, Carole King and Gerry Goffin started their careers in the building, as did producer Phil Spector. In 1962 there were 165 music businesses in the building, ranging from songwriters, music publishers, arrangers, demo studios, record companies, managers, singers, radio promoters. 4. David Toop, Introduction to the CD Companion Section, in this issue. 5. Michael Nyman, Experimental Music---Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974) (2nd Ed., Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999). 6. Merchant Ivory is a film production company specializing in movies portraying the British white flannel crowd during the inter-war period. 7. Toop [4]. 8. Leonardo Music Journal 8 (1998), entitled "Ghosts and Monsters," took Cardew's essay "John Cage---Ghost or Monster?" as a point of departure, and the volume's accompanying CD includes Cardew's composition "There Is Only One Lie, Only One Truth." LMJ8 is available from the MIT Press journals-orders@mit.edu or from CDeMUSIC http:// www.cdemusic.org. 9. Willi Apel, Harvard Dictionary of Music, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969) p. 288. 10. Eddie Prévost, "The Arrival of a New Musical Aesthetic: Extracts from a Half-Buried Diary," in this issue of Leonardo Music Journal. _________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | FEATURE | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________________ < Special Section: Selected items from Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 12 > - TABLE OF CONTENTS AND ABSTRACTS - INTRODUCTION - Thoughtful Pleasures, by Nicolas Collins - CD COMPANION INTRODUCTION - Pleasure From Gdansk till Dawn, by Christian Scheib This month, LEA features selections from the new issue of Leonardo Music Journal (LMJ), dedicated to the subject of pleasure in "serious" music - an oxymoron? Read on. Following are the table of contents and selected abstracts of articles, Nicolas Collins' introduction, which muses on whether or not it is possible to like music that is often intellectually exhausting, and the introduction to the CD Companion, "Pleasure from Gdansk till Dawn," which focuses on new music in Eastern Europe. Enjoy... The LMJ series is devoted to the aesthetic and technical issues in contemporary music and sonic arts. Currently under the editorship of Nicolas Collins, each thematic issue features artists/writers from around the world, representing a wide range of stylistic viewpoints, and includes an audio CD or CD-ROM. LMJ is available by subscription from the MIT Press. .................................................................. LEONARDO MUSIC JOURNAL, VOLUME 12 - PLEASURE Table of Contents Introduction - Thoughtful Pleasures by Nicolas Collins .................................................................. Articles Pleasure Beats: Rhythm and the Aesthetics of Current Electronic Music by Ben Neill ABSTRACT: The division between high-art electronic music and pop electronic music is best defined in terms of rhythmic content. Pop electronic music uses repetitive beats, primarily in 4/4 time, but a new generation of composers is working within that structure to create what is essentially the new art music. This phenomenon is an outgrowth of such historical currents as minimalism and postmodernism, along with the continuing development of a global technoculture; it is part of a larger cultural shift in which art is becoming more connected with society rather than being created by and for specialists. This positive development is being accelerated by the rapid evolution of new technologies for producing and reproducing music today, as well as by new possibilities for distribution and dissemination of music electronically. Machines of Joy: I Have Seen the Future and It Is Squiggly by David Byrne ABSTRACT: The author discusses the relationship of human and machine in Northern European "Blip Hop." The embrace of electronic and computer technology by the region's inhabitants finds its musical expression in peculiar stylistic attributes. The author identifies a preference for obviously non-natural sounds, an avoidance of rhythms easily danced to and a disposition toward effects only achievable through computers (as well as the sounds of the malfunctions and failures of such technologies) as indicative of Northern European acceptance of this modern symbiosis. Human Bodies, Computer Music by Bob Ostertag ABSTRACT: The author considers the absence of the artist's body in electronic music, a missing element that he finds crucial to the success of any work of art. In reviewing the historical development of electronic music from musique concr*te to analog and then digital synthesizers, the author finds that the attainment of increased control and flexibility has coincided with the reduction of identifiable bodily involvement by the performer. He contrasts this trend with the highly physical intervention and manipulation, first practiced with atypical electronic instruments such as the theremin, subsequently introduced to the electric guitar by Jimi Hendrix and his followers, and then to vinyl by turntable artists. He concludes that the tension between body and machine in music, as in modern life itself, can only exist as an experience to examine and criticize and not as a problem to resolve. Electric Body Manipulation as Performance Art: A Historical Perspective by Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha ABSTRACT: The authors trace the history of electric performance art. They begin with the roots of this art form in eighteenth-century experiments with "animal electricity" and "artificial electricity," which were often performed as public demonstrations in royal courts and anatomical theaters. Next, the authors sketch the development of increasingly powerful techniques for the generation of electric current and their applications in destructive body manipulation, culminating in the electric chair. Finally, they discuss the development of electric muscle-control technology, from its eighteenth-century beginnings through Duchenne de Boulogne's photo sessions to the current work of Stelarc and Elsenaar. Some Sadomasochistic Aspects of Musical Pleasure by Reinhold Friedl ABSTRACT: The author posits that a dynamic of sadomasochistic pleasure is at work in contemporary music. The rise both of compositions that equal a set of technical instructions and of perhaps impossible requirements upon performers can be seen to make the act of taking pleasure in their execution a form of masochism. The audiences of increasingly intellectualized musical styles could be said to enjoy a similar relationship to their performance. And in the more physical "noise music," the intended effect is often not auditory pleasure but suffering. The author recounts a number of sources in his discussion, from Freud to Nietzsche, Adorno, Schumann and Stockhausen. I Know It's Only Noise but I Like It: Scattered Notes on the Pleasures of Experimental Improvised Music by Ricardo Arias ABSTRACT: The author, a Colombian improvisational musician residing in New York, muses about the pleasures associated with experimental improvised music. He draws from his own experience and from ideas borrowed from the viewpoints of others to present a deliberately disjointed picture of the subject. A Graph Topological Representation of Melody Scores by Leonardo Peusner ABSTRACT: This article is an informal presentation of a rather trivial observation: if a melody score is translated into a graph, the resultant drawing has aesthetic qualities that parallel in the visual domain the pleasure of experiencing the music in the auditory realm. Moreover, this beauty has several interesting elements of precision that the author explores using the simple though rigorous tools of graph theory. That's Comish Music! Mutant Sounds by Frieder Butzmann ABSTRACT: The author reflects on the uneasy relations among pleasure, humor and music by way of a German word meaning both "strange" and "funny." Such music arises out of mutation from the sounds that their creators attempt to get "right." Playpens, Fireflies and Squeezables: New Musical Instruments for Bridging the Thoughtful and the Joyful by Gil Weinberg ABSTRACT: The author discusses research in music cognition and education indicating that novices and untrained students perceive and learn music in a fundamentally different manner than do expert musicians. Based on these studies, he suggests implementing high-level musical percepts and constructionist learning schemes in new expressive musical instruments that would provide thoughtful and joyful musical activities for novices and experts alike. The author describes several instruments---the Musical Playpen, Fireflies and Squeezables---that he has developed in an effort to provide novices with access to rich and meaningful musical experiences and recounts observations and interviews of subjects playing these instruments. Eine Kleine Naughtmusik: How Nefarious Nonartists Cleverly Imitate Music by Dave Soldier ABSTRACT: The author poses the question whether or not those who are not bona fide artists generate "genuine music." He discusses his research on children, animals and resultant networks that cunningly assemble collections of sounds designed to fool listeners into believing them to be genuine music created by true composers. .................................................................. Artists' Statements The Sheer Frost Orchestra: A Nail Polish Bottle, A Guitar String and the Birth of an Orchestra by Marina Rosenfeld Techno, Trance and the Modern Chamber Choir: Intellectual Game or Music to Groove To? by Robert Wilsmore Sounding the Ritual of Sensual Rebellion: Pacific-European Resonances by Bruce Crossman The Red Bus Stops Here by Amnon Wolman .................................................................. Notebooks A Nonmusician's Life in Music by Yale Evelev ABSTRACT: The author reflects on his experience as a devoted music fan who has made music and its dissemination of it the center of his work and life. He documents his progress from early fascination with American musics to a growing engagement with myriad African and Asian styles, and from amateur collecting to increasing professional involvement. As a result he is currently president of an international music label, but remains committed to sharing his particular enthusiasm for his favorite independent artists and musical forms. The Psychoacoustics of Mono by Robert Poss ABSTRACT: This discussion of the dynamics of sound memory finds the author's nostalgia for music essentially monophonic in nature and considers some possible explanations for this phenomenon. .................................................................. Final Note Pleasure Has an Opposite, or Somewhere over Whose Rainbow? by David Rosenboom .................................................................. LMJ12 CD COMPANION >From Gdansk till Dawn: Contemporary Experimental Music from Eastern Europe Curated by Christian Scheib and Susanna Niedermayr Introduction: Pleasure from Gdansk till Dawn by Christian Scheib .................................................................. CD Contributors' Notes Tigrics: Everbeener (Hungary) Olga+Jozef: 7B2 (Slovakia) Wolfram: Sentinel (Poland) nicron: highpass.2 (Hungary) EA: s. pool (Poland) Daniel Matej: SATIollagE (Slovakia) Borut Savski: Birdy Activity (Slovenia) Molr Drammaz: niezano(zano) (Poland) The Abstract Monarchy Trio: Schrattenberg (Hungary) Arszyn: Oho!---rzekla Zydówka, ukazujac drugie, duze, czarne oko. (czesc druga) (Poland) Vladimir Djambazov: The Secret Life of a Can (Bulgaria) Jeanne Fremaux: Fret Accord (Croatia) Arkona: Komputerliebe (Poland) Vapori del Cuore: Great Dance (Czech Republic) Martin Burlas: monika vypoveda (Slovakia) .................................................................. Commentaries Ana María Romano: Comment on "The Development of Electroacoustic Music in Colombia, 1965--1999: An Introduction" Lucio Edilberto Cuellar Camargo: Response Editors' Notes: Texts by Paul Burwell on the Web, Identification of Mystery Composers .................................................................. 2002 Leonardo and Leonardo Music Journal Author Index .................................................................. < Thoughtful Pleasures - Introduction to Leonardo Music Journal, Vol. 12 > By Nicolas Collins LMJ Editor in Chief Many years ago, a former student of mine, well versed in both Cageian koans and ProgRock, emerged from a concert looking even more bemused than usual. "It was difficult," he lamented, "I didn't know if I was supposed to understand the music or enjoy it." It was a casual comment, thrown out between the takedown of gear and the retreat to the bar, but, for me, it encapsulated a major quandary of Postmodern music. Were comprehension and enjoyment condemned to live at different addresses? From its naughty lyric content to the pounding physicality of its sound to the hyperbolic hedonism of its performers, Pop music has always been unabashedly driven by the pleasure principle. This pleasure can take many forms: the fluffy crushes on wholesome boy bands and girl groups, the ambiguous sexuality of Glam rock, the S&M undercurrents of Punk and Grunge and Hardcore, the no-nonsense rutting rhythm of Techno and Funk. With the antilogic of star-crossed love, justifying one's Pop tastes inevitably comes down to the argument, "but I like it" (as the Rolling Stones once said). "Serious" music, however, is perceived as more refined, genteel, or to put it another way, repressed. Although music of the Renaissance and Baroque was largely dance music (Antonio Vivaldi may well have been the Giorgio Moroder of his day), Classical and Romantic composers edged away from the dance floor, and Modernists removed themselves to the cramped cafe around the corner, where bodies sat still while ideas flowed. Since its inception in the nineteenth century, the avant-garde has stood in opposition to thoughtless pleasure, and as a consequence has found itself in the peculiar position of accompanying bohemian, hedonistic lifestyles with defiantly itchy and uncomfortable music. But are pleasure and thoughtful invention necessarily at odds, or is this apparent opposition merely a convention of recent European art music? Ordinary people may not have danced to "serious" music since the gavotte was hot, but surely, Berlin's Love Parade [1] notwithstanding, there's more to life than dancing. Is there no fun to be had above the waist? Can there be no thoughtful pleasure? Certainly much post-Cageian, post-summer-of-love music broke with Modernism's aloofness. Consider the gratifying, sternum-thudding din of Rhys Chatham's guitar pieces; the heaving, well-oiled muscularity of Gordon Monahan's speaker swingers; the blissed-out Maryanne Amacher fan, raptly wrapped around her subwoofer for 2 hours. The acoustic experimentation and formal methodology owe as much to Alvin Lucier as they do to CBGBs. Here are clear examples of a thoughtful core enveloped in a seductive coat of physicality. The sheer joy of playing is not limited to guitar pyrotechnics: pianist Matthias Osterwold once told me, "I love Bach, but I love playing Chopin, the way it feels under my fingers." And there's meditative pleasure as well: the trancelike states induced by the perfect perfect fifth of the Indian tambura, the rise and fall of Gregorian chant, or the hallucinogenic acoustics of La Monte Young's well-tuned piano. For nigh on a half century, journalists have tried to raise pop out of the cultural gutter and convince us of its intellectual merit, but there has been scant critical attention paid to the feel-good factor of "serious" music, except to condemn (Ned Rorem) or extol (Milton Babbitt) its paucity. We felt that the time had come to talk of libido and Ligeti, Tenney and transcendence, in the same breath. For this volume of *Leonardo Music Journal* we sought out articles and personal reflections on the role of pleasure and sensation in music. The response was eclectic. Pleasure in music, even in "new" music, has many parts: the thrill of creating, the pleasure of playing, the bliss of listening, the smug satisfaction of owning. Certain topics recur: rhythm, toe-tapping and otherwise; the rumpy-bumpy of machines and bodies; the pseudoscience of musical appeal; overt and covert sexuality; the exhilaration of playing in public. Rhythm plays a pivotal, if controversial, role in this issue. Ben Neill asserts that the future of the avant-garde lies in computer-driven "beat science," as evidenced by the sonic (if not formal) experimentation of recent dance music. David Byrne and Bob Ostertag, on the other hand, expound on the beauty and the shortcomings, respectively, of machine-derived rhythms and their cultural and physiological ramifications. Ricardo Arias takes the contrarian position as he extols the joy of the unexpected and uncontrollable in decidedly undanceable improvised music. Robert Wilsmore recounts the difficulties of adapting high-speed, high-volume dance music to a choral setting. Arthur Elsenaar and Remko Scha invert the human-machine interface in their history of electrical stimulation of the body. The authors draw on a variety of techniques to explain, and even quantize, pleasure in music. Reinhold Friedl sees sadomasochism underlying both the ubiquitous oscillation between expectation and resolution in the psychoacoustics of melody and harmony, and the social conventions of music. Leonardo Peusner uses graph theory to map "pleasing" melodies to similarly satisfying visual patterns. Through his use of the idiolectic term "comish music," Frieder Butzmann evokes a linkage between the mechanisms of "success" and "failure" in both music and humor. Several composers discuss giving "non-musicians" access to the joy of composing and performing. By incorporating the results of research in music cognition, Gil Weinberg designs instrument/software hybrids that allow the general public (including infants) to produce "rich and meaningful music," guaranteed to please. With her Sheer Frost Orchestra, Marina Rosenfeld gives ordinary people "a way to do this mystical and enthralling activity: play electric-guitar music live." David Soldier applies a tongue-in-cheek Turing Test to compositional collaborations with children, elephants and statistical data to determine whether it is possible to distinguish between "real music" (made by "real" composers) and "naughtmusik" (made by nonmusicians.) Bruce Crossman and Amnon Wolman focus on the adaptation of sensual or overtly erotic text material - Crossman looks for "resonances" between Filipino poems and traditional instruments, while Wolman creates an electronic accompaniment and tableau-vivant staging for monologues of gay sexual conquests. Yale Evelev contributes an autobiographical account of his life as a professional "musical hanger-on," from childhood through his days at the legendary Soho Music Gallery to running Luaka Bop Records. Robert Poss posits that our brains preserve the most splendid of musical memories in "glorious low-definition mono." Finally, David Rosenboom returns to the central question: the "antiquated and artificial debate about mind versus body." Rosenboom urges listeners to perceive rather than evaluate music, to tear down the "iron curtain around the joy of sound now." Although individual essays herein might espouse a specific path to pleasure, taken together they demonstrate the perversity of what Rosenboom calls "the pleasure filter," the sneaky little machine of intellectual conceit that keeps us pure and passion-free. The CD accompanying this issue grew out of a chance conversation with Christian Scheib in which he described a project he has been working on with Susanna Niedermayr for ORF Radio in Vienna, collecting new music from emergent scenes in Eastern Europe. "High" and "low," "pop" and "avant-garde" stand promiscuously cheek-by-jowl, as if, indeed, the distinction were moot. Welcome then, to the world of bump and mind. Reference 1. For information on the Love Parade, see http://www.loveparade.de/. .................................................................. < LMJ12 CD COMPANION INTRODUCTION > Pleasure from Gdansk till Dawn By Christian Scheib, co-curator Eastern Europe does not exist. In its place we find - from the outside as well as from the inside - a strangely multilayered bundle of experiences, opinions and prejudices dating from various historic periods, and still forming moving constellations of self-understandings and identities. Hungary and Croatia were not part of the Ottoman Empire to the same extent as were Bulgaria or Serbia, for example. Slovakia and Poland were part of the Eastern Bloc, but not Slovenia and Croatia, who were formerly part of "bloc-free" Yugoslavia. The Czech Republic and Slovenia will probably be part of the European Union soon, which one could not say with the same confidence of some of the others mentioned here. And actually prior to all of this was what some Slovakian musicians very intently and proudly call the "genius loci," the ingenuity of the vernacular, the driving force of each region's own tradition. The one former frontier appearing most obvious to us, the Iron Curtain, once arbitrarily defining what the West thought to be East in Europe, slowly has begun to dissolve, and in the loosening of this rigidity a number of the other stories (re)appear, historically remote ones as well as those written by today's markets. Participants in Slovenia's techno scene see themselves on the same lines that run from Rome to Berlin, from Istanbul to London. Experimental free-improvisers from Hungary play with an Austrian musician. A Slovakian electroacoustic composer remixes Western European iconoclasts and a Hungarian independent pop group refers ironically to Western cliches about melancholy. Current purveyors of Polish electronic music gain confidence for international appearances by drawing on Polish experimental tradition, which was actually kept strong by the Cold War and martial law. It might seem more appropriate, in accord with today's ideology of political correctness, to ask a team from these countries to choose music for a compilation like this. But instead of presenting that kind of a self-portrait or self-portrayal, this compilation evolved according to the principles of a classical portrait: the portraitists, coming from outside, devote some time to the object of their desire and finally draw up a highly personal picture of the experience. However, at least some of the principles applied can or should be explained. Of course, there are well-defined and well-functioning genres, such as contemporary classical music (as in Poland and Hungary, with role models like Lutoslawski [1], Ligeti [2] and Kurtag [3]), jazz (represented in Croatia or Poland by seminal musicians such as Tomasz Stanko [4] and Ursula Dudziak [5]), or techno (represented in Slovakia and Slovenia, for example, by Umek [6]) and hip-hop (as in Bulgaria and Poland, represented, for example, by DJ 600 Volt [7]). But these well-defined areas were not our main concern; we were looking for "independent" music and musicians, and right there one might discern a subtle and manipulative strategy of ours, since a very "Western" category hides within this concept. For decades Social Realism - even though it has varied from country to country - has made more or less everything non-official and non-academic pretty "independent" anyway, to say the least. On the other hand, music fitting into a Western category of "independent music" cannot evolve in just a little more than 10 years of capitalistic structures of producing and presenting music. Independence - and some other related conceptual features - seem to constantly move in a floating field opened between old social realism and new capitalistic reality. More and more, from country to country during our travels, we have found that reflecting upon the use of such categories, concepts and expectations has turned out to be a basic means of investigation. This development increased our awareness of the social implications of musical explorations. Our task of exploring new music, experimental sounds and/or independent pop evolved into an exploration of and discussion about social, economic and political changes. Most of all, it clarified the active as well as the reactive role of these musics and musicians within social processes. Of course, it would be marvelous if some of these aspects would be perceptible, even in a 60-minute compilation taken from hundreds of hours of discovered music. The area of Europe formerly known as the East is changing. Eastern Europe as we were used to it has ceased to exist, or it will soon. Various musics have played and will play an interesting part in this process. This compilation is a snapshot of these developments. Postscript Traveling from Vienna to explore the various countries of Eastern Europe makes one feel - not the least for historical reasons - both very close and extremely far away at the same time. To increase our knowledge about our neighbors and to transform our relationship with them, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation's culturally oriented radio station Oesterreich 1 has presented a program of weeklong specials under the title Nebenan (Next door) at regular intervals since 2001, concentrating on recent cultural and political developments. Oesterreich 1 broadcasts a daily one-hour music series called Zeit-Ton (Tone of the Time), presenting new, experimental and contemporary music. During each of the one-week Nebenan specials we have presented a condensed survey of current musical developments in our neighboring countries: Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Poland, Bulgaria and Croatia have been featured so far and are represented on the LMJ12 "From Gdansk till Dawn" compilation [8]; surveys of music from countries such as Romania, Lithuania and the Czech Republic will follow. References and Notes 1. Witold Lutos_awski. (1913--1994). His biography and a list of works are available at http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/lutoslawski.html. 2. Information about Gyorgy Ligeti (born 1923) is available at http://w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/ligeti.html. 3. Gyorgy Kurtag was born in Lugos (Lugoj, Romania) in 1926, and was educated at the Academy of Budapest, Hungary. Information is available at http://www.karadar.com/Dictionary/kurtag.html and at http://www.bmc.hu/kurtag/index2_en.htm. 4. Information about Polish jazz musician Tomasz Stanko is available at http://www.stanko.polishjazz.com/. 5. Information about fusion vocalist Ursula Dudziak, originally from Poland, is available at http://www.gallery41.com/JazzArtists/UrszulaDudziak.htm. 6. Information about Slovenian techno DJ Uros Umek is available at http://www.godskitchen.com/global/atomicjamdjs/umek.htm. 7. Information about Polish hip-hop artist DJ 600 Volt is available at http://www.hiphopoo.civ.pl/voltszejsetkilo.html. He is included on the compilation album V/A: Verdachtsmomente, Subetage Records 08 (2001) http://www.sra.at/records/209/8913.htm. 8. All the pieces on the CD were originally collected for the Oesterreich 1 radio program Zeit-Ton, except those produced and provided by EA and Abstract Monarchy Trio especially for this compilation. Christian Scheib is a musicologist, music journalist and music producer. He has founded and established several institutions and initiatives, among them the Music Information Center Austria (MICA) and the nationwide pedagogical experiment Klang-Netze. As a curator for the Austrian state department of the arts, he has developed several new music workshop series and festivals as well as supported the ensemble Klangforum Wien. He writes scripts for music documentaries for European TV-stations. He has edited a number of books, such as Das Rauschen ("Static Music," 1995) and Form-Luxus, Kalkül und Abstinenz ("Form," 2000) and Bilder-Verbot und Verlangen in Kunst und Musik ("[No] Graven Image in Music and the Arts," 2001). Transfer/ence - Übertragung ("Music and the Arts in Multiple Realities") is scheduled for release in 2003. He has been a lecturer at the California Institute of the Arts (1998) and is currently lecturing on aesthetics at the University of Music Vienna. Scheib is editor of the new-music programs of the Austrian cultural radio station Oesterreich 1 and the program director of the new music festival musikprotokoll im steirischen herbst http://kultur.orf.at/musikprotokoll. Christian Scheib was born in 1961 and currently lives in Vienna. Susanna Niedermayr was born in Vienna in 1972. She studied fine art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. From 1995 to 2000 she was a member of WochenKlausur, http://wochenklausur.t0.or.at, an international group of artists based in Vienna that has made social and political interventions on behalf of art and culture institutions since 1993. Since 1996 she has worked as a freelance radio journalist and web designer for the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation. Among other projects, she worked for three years as an editor and moderator with ORF Kunstradio http://www.kunstradio.at. Since 2000, Niedermayr has worked mainly for O1 Zeit-Ton, a radio program that promotes new and unconventional approaches towards music. She studies political science at the University of Vienna. In 2002, Niedermayr initiated an association called line_in:line_out, for the realization of intercultural projects. At the moment its main focus is to promote music from countries usually classified as Eastern European. _________________________________________________________________________ _________________________________ | | | | | LEONARDO DIGITAL REVIEWS | | 2003.01 | |_________________________________| _________________________________________________________________________ Leonard Digital Reviews January 2003 In Leonardo Digital Reviews this month, two of our newer panel members - Chris Cobb from San Francisco and Luisa Paraguai Donati from Sao Paulo - file reviews, respectively, of *Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century,* edited by Hans Joachim Braun, and the website *Holes-Lining-Threads* by artist Alicia Felberbaum. Along with Claire Barliant's response to *One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,* by Miwon Kwon, Roy R. Behrens' coverage of the photography of Lewis Carroll and George Gessert's reflection on *Cooper, Dave. Crumple, the Status of Knuckle,* they constitute five short, sharp and incisive reviews that provide quick access to material. Amy Ione's two contributions this month, reviews of *Exploring Consciousness,* by Rita Carter, and *Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps,* by Edward S. Casey, are lengthier discussions of both the books and the implications of the author's contributions. In a similar vein, Robert Pepperell provides us with an extended account of the *Mirror of Consciousness: Art, Creativity and Veda,* by Anna Bonshek, and a rather critical reaction to David W. Galenson's *Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art.* Simone Osthoff give us one of two reports on the Eleventh International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), held in Nagoya, Japan, last month, both of which raise similar questions about the value and future of such an event. There are no doubts in Yvonne Spielmann's mind, however, about the merit of *Theater Goes Reality TV,* which, it seems, is a must-see event in Berlin at the moment. With equal enthusiasm, Stefaan Van Ryssen reviews *YPGPN,* an audio CD by Phill Niblock, and revives our interest in Vilem Flusser - not a moment too soon, given the current debates in the field of photography. Finally, we are grateful to Ellen K. Levy for allowing us to publish her review of the "Society for Literature and Science Conference" (SLS) - clearly a valuable conference for us at LDR to attend. This month's postings can be viewed in full at: http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/Leonardo/ldr.html Michael Punt Editor in Chief Leonardo Digital Reviews ........................................................... New reviews posted for December: Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century, ed. Hans Joachim Braun Reviewed by Chris Cobb Lewis Carroll, Photographer, by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens Exploring Consciousness, by Rita Carter Reviewed by Amy Ione Representing Place; Landscape Painting and Maps, by Edward S. Casey Reviewed by Amy Ione Crumple the Status of Knuckle, by Dave Cooper Reviewed by George Gessert Writings by Vilem Flusser Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen Painting Outside the Lines: Patterns of Creativity in Modern Art, by David W. Galenson Reviewed by Robert Pepperell Mirror of Consciousness: Art, Creativity and Veda, by Anna Bonshek Reviewed by Robert Pepperell Theater goes Reality TV: *Master and Margarita* at the Volksbuehne in Berlin, Germany, directed by Frank Castorf Reviewed by Yvonne Spielmann Society for Literature and Science (SLS) Conference Reviewed by Ellen K. Levy YPGPN, by Phill Niblock (audio CD) Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity, by Miwon Kwon Reviewed by Claire Barliant Eleventh International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Nagoya, Japan [Orai] Reviewed by Michael Punt ISEA 2002: Connecting Art and Technology with Transportation, Transit, Tourism and Theory Reviewed by Simone Osthoff Holes-Lining-Threads (Website), by Alicia Felberbaum Reviewed by Luisa Paraguai Donati ........................................................... < Holes-Lining-Threads > Website by Alicia Felberbaum, http://www.felber.dircon.co.uk/holesliningsthreads/ Reviewed by Luisa Paraguai Donati, luisa@iar.unicamp.br. The concept of this website is based on Sadie Plant's essay, "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics." According to Plant, women have historically had a fundamental role in the invention, development, manufacture and use of technology. She begins her argument by pointing to the historical role of women in technology, drawing attention to looms and their connection to computers through the development of Babbage's analytical engine. Using the metaphor of weaving, she describes the development of computer software and tries to visualize the basic non-linearity characteristic of the World Wide Web: as a "web of complexity, weaving itself" (Plant, 1995). In an extension of this argument, Alicia Felberbaum, the creator of the *Holes-Lining-Threads* website, uses women's history in the textile industry, in Batley, West Yorkshire, U.K., to create the context of Sadie Plant's essay in a construct of visual and auditory references. The website does not have a common informational architecture with explicit menus, such as those that usually guide users with regard to the informational space to be explored and accessed. The users are instead invited by initial words (cards and holes, software linings, threads) to get "interlaced" in the concept of the website and start their navigation. An image of tapestry emerges as the Web matrix, which is gradually constructed by the proposed connections made by the user. These links are constantly actualized by each user's reading, intervention and action. The images used bring together the concept and physical aspects of looms and weaving, showing diagrams and components as switches and sets of gears. These images also refer to the functional process, the logic that is present in computer technology in which the user/weaver needs to have her/his commands understood by the machines. Following the context of computer systems and Web technology, there are several levels of language that translate the machine language, based on binary numbers, to different users, from computing programmers to common Web users. Turning on and turning off becomes "yes" and "no," zero and one, and this can become a language to be converted into physical movements performed by any machine during its different and specific tasks. There are other important considerations about the use of images on this site; namely the movement created by the animated gifs, which use a specific property from HTML tags to construct backgrounds in which a small image is horizontally and vertically repeated until the screen is totally filled. The purpose appears to be to recreate and reinforce the idea of looping in the constant repetitions that determine both the physical movements of looms and define the internal procedures of computing. This mirrors the necessity of every computing language to have routines and sub-routines as basic elements to describe recurrent functions and implement events. The use of these animated gifs as background in many pages here results in an interesting visual effect, but it is also pure meta-language used to talk about the logic of computing that the author uses. The texts on this website are comprised of interviews with women weavers and quotations from Plant's book and essay, highlighting the connection between looms and computer technology. The use of juxtaposed and superimposed texts in layers emphasizes the idea of non-linearity and the possibility of a potential state for interference. The users can modify the graphic composition of texts, changing their size, font, color and position, and are invited to leave a message, which will later be integrated into the website. Sounds are only used in some pages to make reference to these interviews accompanied by text that emphasizes the women's accents; some words are completely changed. In her writing, Sadie Plant has created a cohesive metaphor of the Web and an alliance between women, machinery and the new technology. Alicia Felberbaum refers to Plant's work and accurately uses resources from programming language to create a poetic space. The website demands an unusual attitude from users to handle the interface and to weave their own way, based on their choices. The exercise thus suggests changes in the users' contemplative and interpretative behavior for action and intervention. The informational layers are in a constant potential state, until the user's reading and interaction determine which one will be actual. The web space can be "occupied" by users via the creation of personal networks, in the same way that women's work has woven their histories into the textile industry. References: D. Jones, *The Technologies of the Self: "Sex" in cyberspace,* in Impact Seminar Series (1997). . Sadie Plant, "The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics," In Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows, eds., *Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment,* London: Sage (1995). ........................................................... < Writings by Vilem Flusser > Edited and with an introduction by Andreas Strohl, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis/London, 2002. 256 pp., illus. Trade, $29.95. ISBN: 0-8166-3564-1. Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen, stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be. The thought of Prague-born philosopher Vilem Flusser (1921-1991) is becoming increasingly influential in Europe and Latin America. Unfortunately, most of his writings are scattered throughout journals and hard to find books, and remain untranslated from the original German or Portuguese. This book, the first English-language anthology of his work, displays the wide range and originality of his ideas. Andreas Strohl, director of the Goethe film institute in Munich, has written an insightful and very readable introduction into the origins and evolution of Flusser's thought, selecting 25 essays that cover practically all facets of his oeuvre. Flusser escaped from death in the German concentration camps when he fled to Brazil with his wife in 1939. His parents and sister stayed behind and were all killed. In Sao Paulo, he found a job in a motor factory and resumed his philosophy studies in the evenings and the weekends. Though he quickly became an enthusiastic believer in a great future for Brazil - an ideal that was cruelly shattered by the military coup in 1964 - the fact remained that he was an exile with hardly any ties binding him to his home country. Deeply influenced by Husserl's phenomenological method in philosophy and by Buber's ethics, he developed a keen sense of forlornness, which he called "bottomlesness". This absolute lack of sense in life and the total and uncompromising solitude of a person before death, however, did not lead him to a negative or cynical view of life; rather, they became the foundations of a philosophy of freedom and choice, of communication as a means to escape solitude and of history as a product of writing. When Flusser became an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Sao Paulo, he started his work on communication. His international breakthrough came with the publication of "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" (Fuer eine Philosofie der Fotographie). In this long essay, published in German in 1983, he analyzes photography (and other communicative "surfaces") in an entirely different way from Sontag, Benjamin or Barthes. "The task of a philosophy of photography," he writes, "is to analyze the possibility of freedom in a world dominated by apparatus; to think about how it is possible to give meaning to human life in the face of the accidental necessity of death." Instead of concentrating on the relationship between the image and reality, Flusser sees photography as a revolutionary step away from the domination of linear thinking that was established through the development of writing and that reached its full height in the Enlightenment and the Renaissance. If history is a function of writing, photography - and with it the other "surface" media such as television, film, posters and advertising in magazines - is the real "end of history." It is "post-historical." Long before Fukuyama identified the end of history as the end of the Grand Stories, the end of ideologies and the end of the Cold War, which are basically historical events in their own right, Flusser foretold the end of the "age of linear reasoning," which he equated with history. History, in this view, is not a series of events, but the written image of relationships of facts. Photography freezes events into scenes, successfully reintegrating the image into a linear unfolding of events and narrative of history. In his essays, Flusser draws heavily on science as well as on the aforementioned philosophers. He frequently refers to entropy and negentropy, the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics and the uncertainty principle of Heisenberg, cybernetics and Einstein. He freely mixes insights from those sciences on the border of philosophy with purely logical reasoning, in the style of the early Wittgenstein. This makes for a very refreshing cocktail, especially if you compare it to the overwhelming long drinks that are served by so-called postmodern media theorists, who have had more of Baudrillard and Deleuze than a healthy stomach can take. Flusser is good reading - profound and playful at the same time, wide-ranging in his subjects and sometimes surprisingly naive in his stance, but always to the point, clear, final and inescapable. Very few of Vilem Flusser's writings have been translated into English, and he did not write comprehensive theories or closed systematic and exhaustive treatments of problems in philosophy. Rather, he chose the essay as his form and he really excelled at it. This collection is a must-read introduction for all, professional media theorists and workers, philosophers and artists, into the connected and networked world of one of the most original and prophetic thinkers of the last century. Flusser died in a car crash in Chechnya in 1991. ........................................................... < One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity > by Miwon Kwon, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002. 218 pp., illus. ISBN: 0-262-11265-5. Reviewed by Claire Barliant, cbarliant@yahoo.com. What do most people think of when they hear the term "site-specific art?" Richard Serra's *Tilted Arc,* perhaps, or Claes Oldenberg's baseball bat in Chicago - both examples of what is now pejoratively referred to as "plunk" art. Or else one might think of temporary installations, such as the twin towers of light dedicated to the collapse of the World Trade Center. Whatever images come to mind, chances are they are out of date; the definition of what is site-specific is constantly changing. In her groundbreaking book, *One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity,* Miwon Kwon charts the development of site-specific art from the mid-1960s to the present. It is not an easy history to document. Beginning in the mid-1960s with well-meaning bureaucrats who wanted to bring "art to the people," these intentions were complicated in the 1970s as artists began to question the cultural confinement and physical boundaries of the museum. Today, artists have moved beyond the critique of the institutional framing of art, largely because art-world concerns are usually deemed too exclusive, unrelated to a broader social context. Kwon argues that as artists seek out methods of art-making that do not focus on the object, but rather on the process, many artists who work on site-specific projects are engaging with social and political issues rather than with a physical place. Obviously, the idea of artist as itinerant freelancer poses several problems, and Kwon tackles these problems with convincing examples and clear, accessible prose. Today, artists are not hired to produce an object (read: commodity) for a site, but to provide an aesthetic service. The artist becomes a sort of manager, or bureaucrat, while the community gets to, as Kwon provocatively puts it, "enact unalienated collective labor." In other words, the artist provides a surrogate for a labor system in which the worker's voice is often suppressed. As Kwon moves into a discussion of the problems surrounding site-specific art that involves the community (this has been termed "new genre public art" by critic Suzanne Lacy), she uses the event, *Culture in Action: New Public Art in Chicago,* as her target. This massive 1993 event was a crucial moment in the trajectory of public and site-specific art. Conceived by Mary Jane Jacob, *Culture in Action* commissioned artists to work directly with specific communities within Chicago. It was a break from public art that had seemed to ignore community concerns - Serra's *Tilted Arc* being the most extreme and tricky example, which Kwon also revisits in this book. However much I enjoy Kwon's challenging ideas, I have some trouble with her attack on *Culture in Action.* There were eight projects in total for Jacob's event, and it seems obvious that such a huge effort would have some degree of failure. But failure is a relative term, and here, for Kwon, it seems to relate to the amount of actual collaboration between the artist and the community, as well as the amount of meddling on the part of the curator and institution. Kwon cites examples in which it appears that the curator prohibited actual discourse between the artist and the community. I find it hard to imagine public art happening without some institutional support, and Kwon does not give any examples of recent developments in public art that have successfully involved community, so one has the sense that we are not getting the complete picture. But her goal is not to solve problems, just to identify them. Her hands-off approach is clear from the title of her last chapter: "By Way of a Conclusion: One Place After Another." As the title warns, she does not provide any solutions or conclusive arguments that site-specific art is doomed. Instead, the chapter is a lyrical meditation on the increasing displacement not only of the artist, but of the academic as well. "As many cultural critics and urban theorists have warned," Kwon writes, "the intensifying conditions of such spatial undifferentiation and departicularization - fuelled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications to accommodate an ever-expanding capitalist order - exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life." Once Kwon brings herself into the book, she drops the clinical tone and becomes more sympathetic. Longing, or nostalgia, for a (generally fictitious) stable location, is perhaps a means of survival, Kwon muses, in a world that is (thanks to a global market economy) rapidly changing. This is not to say that globalization is entirely bad for us, but that does not mean we are not adjusting to the difference. Kwon uses an unusually literary example - *Valparaiso,* a play by Don DeLillo - to show that sometimes being constantly on the move can reveal our true character in a way that stasis cannot. Perhaps the next phase of site-specific art will address the nature of this mobility and fragmentation - "relational specificity," Kwon calls it. While recent site-specific art is certainly a long way from early "plunk" art, as Kwon and many others have observed, it still has a long way to go. ............................................................................ < Music and Technology in the Twentieth Century > Edited by Hans Joachim Braun, The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 2002. 256 pp., illus. Trade, $32.95. ISBN: 0-8018-6885-8. Reviewed by Chris Cobb, ccobbsf@yahoo.com. This much-needed collection of critical essays addresses sound art from many new and interesting perspectives. From reading the book, one gets the impression that sound art is rediscovered periodically but never really seems to find its place. This is apparently due to the fact that it gets diluted either by the pure abstraction of art or the concrete nature of written music. In between, there are numerous sub-genres, each with its passionate adherents. >From the earliest days of the Theremin to contemporary DJ mix-and-scratch compilations, there are plenty of examples of music that is not quite music. In the same vein, there are many artists who do sound art as a side practice, or are influenced by non-musical elements. Hans Joachim Braun's essay, "Movin' On: Trains and Planes as a Theme in Music," explores the connection between the industrial age and the art produced during that time. Many composers, Braun asserts, were affected by the intensity of these big, loud machines that roared through towns. He draws a connection between the birth of swing and jazz and the love of rhythm and wild time signatures with these developments, singling out Duke Ellington's "Daybreak Express" as "perhaps the greatest piece of train-inspired music." My favorite essay in this collection is Andre Milliard's "Tape Recording and Music Making." Here, Milliard surprises us with accounts of how Chuck Berry was quick to purchase a tape recorder, apparently upgrading from his clunky old wire recorder, and how Buddy Holly's voice was subtly enhanced by his usage of tape effects in the recording studio - in particular on Holly's "Words of Love," from 1957, which "gives the impression of several voices in harmony." What stands out about this collection is that there is even room enough for over-the-top academia, such as Rebecca McSwain's aptly titled "The Social Reconstruction of a Reverse Salient in Electric Guitar Technology: Noise, the Solid Body, and Jimi Hendrix." This essay, divided into four sections, seeks to pick apart the history of the guitar in the context of its existence as a tool for social expression. While I am glad that McSwain addresses such an important social issue, her essay shows just how hard it can be to approach music (or film for that matter) as a critic or historian. After all, music, especially that made with guitar, is inherently one thing: entertainment. The essay thus often comes off as if this were her first encounter with the guitar as an object. Interestingly, the essay is both painfully academic and breathlessly devotional - an interesting marriage of sentiments. Overall, Braun does a nice job of bringing together these 17 very strong and personal voices, which in the end make for good, thought-provoking reading. _________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | LEONARDO JOURNAL | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________________ This month , we include the table of contents and selected abstracts from the forthcoming issue of LEONARDO, Vol. 36, No. 1. < LEONARDO 36:1 (2003) - TABLE OF CONTENTS AND SELECTED ABSTRACTS > OPEN CALL TO THE LEONARDO COMMUNITY ROGER F. MALINA et al.: Rethinking Leonardo ............................................................................ EDITORIAL OTTO PIENE: In Memoriam: Gyorgy Kepes, 1906-2002 ............................................................................ SPECIAL SECTION - GLOBAL CROSSINGS: THE CULTURAL ROOTS OF GLOBALIZATION HISHAM M. BIZRI: *City of Brass:* The Art of Masking Reality in Digital Film ABSTRACT: The author's interest in film lies in its ability to expand consciousness and perception in ways unique to the medium. His films challenge the language of filmmaking, be it montage, color, sound, lighting, mise-en-scene or acting. The author employs a wide palette of film vocabulary to mask reality and filter it through a personal vision. With the introduction of computers, new ways of seeing the world through film, and thus of acting in the world, may be accomplished. CHRISTOPHER HIGHT: Stereo Types: The Operation of Sound in the Production of Racial Identity ABSTRACT: Discussions of race and identity have often privileged the visual field and its representations as a site of cultural identity. In contrast, this paper examines how sound and its organization have been implicated in the constructions of "whiteness" as a normative category during the colonial epoch. Using a set of case studies, it examines the network formed between sound and vision through what the author calls a harmonic system of representation. After mapping this dominant system, the paper describes tactics that have been used to disrupt it. The possibility of heterogeneous subjectivity, often called the cyborg, is explored as an alternative, in relation to different organizations of sound. ............................................................................ ARTIST'S ARTICLE STEVE MANN: Existential Technology: Wearable Computing Is Not the Real Issue! ABSTRACT: The author presents "Existential Technology" as a new category of in(ter)ventions and as a new theoretical framework for understanding privacy and identity. His thesis is twofold: (1) The unprotected individual has lost ground to invasive surveillance technologies and complex global organizations that undermine the humanistic property of the individual; (2) A way for the individual to be free and collegially assertive in such a world is to be "bound to freedom" by an articulably external force. To that end, the author explores empowerment via self-demotion. He has founded a federally incorporated company and appointed himself to a low enough position to be bound to freedom within that company. His performances and in(ter)ventions over the last 30 years have led him to an understanding of such concepts as individual self-corporatization and submissivity reciprocity for the creation of a balance of bureaucracy. ............................................................................ ARTIST'S NOTE MARTA DE MENEZES: The Artificial Natural: Manipulating Butterfly Wing Patterns for Artistic Purposes ABSTRACT: Recent advances in biology allow interference with normal animal development, making possible the creation of novel live organisms. The author's project explores this potential through her work in a laboratory creating live adult butterflies with wing patterns modified for artistic purposes. Although these patterns are determined by direct human intervention, they are made exclusively of normal live cells. As genes from the germ line are left untouched, the new patterns are not transmitted to the offspring. Therefore, this form of art literally lives and dies. It is simultaneously art and life. ............................................................................ ARTISTS' STATEMENTS MARIE SESTER: *L'Architecture du Paradis* TRAN T. KIM-TRANG AND KARL MIHAIL: *Gene Genies Worldwide* ............................................................................ INVITED REVIEW DAVID CARRIER: The Aesthete in Pittsburgh: Public Sculpture in an Ordinary American City ABSTRACT: There is a great deal of public art in Pittsburgh. Surveying some examples of this public sculpture suggests some general lessons about the role of such art. Art in public spaces needs to be accessible to the public. One way to make it so is to present local history, commemorating local sports heroes, politicians or artists. Public art also needs to be placed in a way that is sensitive to local history. Most public art in Pittsburgh is not successful because it does not deal with the interesting history of that city. Much sculpture that is successful in a museum is not good public art, and some successful public art in Pittsburgh does not belong in a museum. ............................................................................ SPECIAL SECTION - GENETIC ALGORITHMS IN VISUAL ART AND MUSIC JOHN A. BILES: GenJam in Perspective: A Tentative Taxonomy for GA Music and Art Systems ABSTRACT: GenJam is an interactive genetic algorithm (GA) that models a human jazz improviser and performs regularly as the author's sideman on jazz gigs. GenJam learns to improvise full-chorus solos under the guidance of a human mentor and "trades fours" in real time with a human performer in "chase" choruses. In this article, the author first briefly describes GenJam's architecture, representations, genetic operators and performance characteristics. He then places GenJam in the context of a proposed taxonomy for GA-based music and art systems. FRANCINE FEDERMAN: The NEXTPITCH Learning Classifier System: Representation, Information Theory and Performance ABSTRACT: NEXTPITCH, a learning classifier system (LCS) using genetic algorithms, inductively learns to predict the next note in a musical melody. NEXTPITCH models human music learning by developing the rules that represent actual pitch transitions in the melody. In this article, the author addresses the issues of (1) the impact of the representation of a domain (the encoding of the characteristics of the field of study) on the performance of an LCS and (2) the classification of the input (the melodies to be learned) to an LCS in order to determine the highest percentage of correct next-note predictions. COLIN G. JOHNSON: Exploring Sound-Space with Interactive Genetic Algorithms ABSTRACT: This paper describes a system that uses evolutionary computation to provide an interface to a complex sound-synthesis algorithm. The paper then considers a number of general issues to be considered when evolutionary computation is applied in artistic domains and the differences between interactive and non-interactive genetic algorithms. EDUARDO RECK MIRANDA: On the Music of Emergent Behavior: What Can Evolutionary Computation Bring to the Musician? ABSTRACT: In this article, the author focuses on issues concerning musical composition practices in which emergent behavior is used to generate musical material, musical form or both. The author gives special attention to the potential of cellular automata and adaptive imitation games for music-making. The article begins by presenting two case-study systems, followed by an assessment of their role in the composition of a number of pieces. It then continues with a discussion in which the author suggests that adaptive imitation games may hold the key to fostering more effective links between evolutionary computation paradigms and creative musical processes. ALEJANDRO PAZOS, ANTONINO SANTOS, BERNARDINO ARCAY, JULIAN DORADO, JUAN ROMERO and JOSE RODRIGUEZ: An Application Framework for Building Evolutionary Computer Systems in Music ABSTRACT: The authors present a musical composition model that creates rhythmic patterns through a system based on genetic algorithms, involving the interaction of several artificial musicians. In this environment, various composer systems and human musicians may interact within a system based on artificial life. ............................................................................ HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE ARTS, SCIENCES AND TECHNOLOGY STEPHEN ESKILSON: Thomas Wilfred and Intermedia: Seeking a Framework for Lumia ABSTRACT: The most successful early-twentieth-century artist of colored light in the United States was undoubtedly Thomas Wilfred (1889--1968). In the 1920s, his "Lumia" compositions were praised by art critics and performed throughout the U.S. After initially embracing a musical analogy to explain Lumia, in the early 1930s he shifted to an analogy based on painting. In pursuit of this new context, Wilfred sought to legitimize Lumia through a relationship with the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career is emblematic of the difficulties inherent in the creation of art using technology early in the twentieth century, years before the postmodern embrace of pluralism. ............................................................................ EXTENDED ABSTRACT ATTILIO COLAGROSSI, FILIPPO SCIARRONE and CLAUDIO SECCARONI: A Methodology for Automating the Classification of Works of Art Using Neural Networks ............................................................................ NEW MEDIA DICTIONARY LOUISE POISSANT - Part VII: Multimedia Part 1 ............................................................................ LEONARDO REVIEWS LEONARDO NETWORK NEWS _________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | OBITUARY | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________________ < In Memory: Rich Gold, 1950-2003 > Rich Gold (Richard Goldstein) of Menlo Park died in his sleep on January 9, 2003. Born on June 24, 1950, he received a B.A. from SUNY-Albany, and an M.F.A. from Mills College. Rich Gold was a digital artist, inventor, cartoonist, composer, lecturer and inter-disciplinary researcher who in the 1970s co-founded the League of Automatic Music Composers, the first network computer band. As an internationally known artist he invented the field of Algorithmic Symbolism, an example of which, The Party Planner, was featured in *Scientific American.* In 1979, he married his soul mate, Marina LaPalma. In the 1980s, he was director of the sound and music department of Sega USA's Coin-op Video game division and the inventor of the award winning Little Computer People (Activision), the first fully autonomous, computerized AI person (which turned out to be an inspiration for the development of The Sims). From 1985 to 1990 he headed an electronic and computer toy research group at Mattel Toys and was the manager of the development of several interactive toys, including the Mattel PowerGlove. He also worked on the first interactive broadcast TV show of Captain Power, an early CD based video system and an artificially intelligent talking robots. In 1991, Rich and Marina's personal lives were transformed when the light of their life, their son, Henry Chase, was born on May 30th. After working as a consultant in VirtualReality, he joined Xerox PARC in 1991, where he was a scientific researcher in Ubiquitous Computing, the study of invisible, embedded and tacit computation. He was a co-designer of the PARC Tab (the precursor of the PalmPilot), helped launch the successful LiveBoard and was the co-inventor on eleven patents as well as directing the ubi-comp patenting effort. In 1993, he founded the influential PARC Artist-In-Residence program (PAIR),in which fine artists and scientists collaborated using shared technologies. Later that year, he created the multi-disciplinary Laboratory RED (Research in Experimental Documents), which studied the creation of new document genres by merging art, design, science and engineering and then creating exemplars of those genres. One of RED's most successful projects, called Experiments in the Future of Reading (XFR), included the design and development of several new interactive reading devices. XFR was installed at the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation in 2000, where it was visited by over a half million people; XFR is currently touring the United States after winning the Gold and Silver awards for interactive design from I.D. Magazine and being featured on ABC Nightly News. The XFR reading experiments were based on the concepts of "Total Writing," an anti-convergent theory where the media itself becomes authorable and has meaning. Rich Gold was a provocative speaker who lectured throughout the world on the future of the book, the nature of engineering, creativity, innovation and Evocative Knowledge Objects (EKOs). After leaving Xerox PARC in 2001, he became a principal at the product design company Polaris Road. During 2002, he finished a book called The Plenitude (The Present Press). See www.richgold.org for a list of his writings and talks. He is survived by his wife, Marina LaPalma; his son, Henry Chase Goldstein; his parents, Herbert and Phyllis Goldstein of Buffalo, NY; his sisters - Patti of Oakland, CA, Judy of Buffalo, NY, Anne (Peter) Goergen of Allegany, NY - and his brother Andrew (Patty) of Buffalo, NY, and four nieces and nephews. A memorial service was held at 1:00 pm on Monday, January 13, 2003 at the Insight Meditation Center of the Mid-Peninsula. For more information see: www.RichGoldMemorial.onomy.com. The family prefers that donations be made to the Henry Chase Goldstein Educational Fund, 526 Hopkins St., Menlo Park, CA, 94025. For donation information see: www.RichGoldMemorial.onomy.com/HenryFund.html. _________________________________________________________________________ ______________________________ | | | LEA NEWS | |______________________________| _________________________________________________________________________ < LEA Special Issue: Art, Science and the Contemplative Study of Consciousness - February 2003 > In next month's LEA, guest-edited by Patrick Lambelet, we will explore the convergence between art, science and the study of consciousness from a contemplative perspective. The issue will feature discussions of consciousness from the point of view of Buddhism and Hinduism, explorations of common points between spiritual contemplation and artistic expression, and investigation of how science and contemplative traditions intersect in their attempts to explore the possibilities of the mind. _________________________________________________________________________ ___________________ | | | | | CREDITS | | | |___________________| Nisar Keshvani: LEA Editor-in-Chief Michael Punt: LDR Editor-in-Chief Patrick Lambelet: LEA Managing Editor Beth Rainbow: Assistant Editor Andre Ho: Web Concept and Design Consultant Roger Malina: Leonardo Executive Editor Stephen Wilson: Chair, Leonardo/ISAST Web Committee Editorial Advisory Board: Roy Ascott, Michael Naimark, Craig Harris, Paul Brown, Julianne Pierce, Seah Hock Soon fAf-LEA corresponding editors: Ricardo Dal Farra, Young Hae-Chang, Fatima Lasay, Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Marcus Neusetter, Fion Ng and Marc Voge _________________________________________________________________________ ___________________ | | | LEA | | WORLD WIDE WEB | | ACCESS | |___________________| The LEA World Wide Web site contains the LEA archives, including all back issues, the LEA Gallery, the Profiles, Feature Articles, Publications, Opportunities and Announcements. It is accessible using the following URL: _________________________________________________________________________ _________________ | LEA | | PUBLISHING | | INFORMATION | |_________________| Editorial Address: Leonardo Electronic Almanac P O Box 850 Robinson Road Singapore 901650 E-mail: _________________________________________________________________________ Copyright (2003), Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology All Rights Reserved. Leonardo Electronic Almanac is published by: The MIT Press Journals, Five Cambridge Center, Cambridge, MA 02142 U.S.A. Re-posting of the content of this journal is prohibited without permission of Leonardo/ISAST, except for the posting of news and events listings which have been independently received. Leonardo/ISAST and the MIT Press give institutions permission to offer access to LEA within the organization through such resources as restricted local gopher and mosaic services. 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