Like a Rolling Stone

Nigel Ayers came across this stone face on Rough Tor, Cornwall on 27 March, and thought it bore an uncanny resemblance to Rolling Stone Keith Richards.


Fortean Times 231, January 2008

Fortune

The Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame

Roche Rock

This is a great place to visit, not far from the Eden project. You can see for miles.

A curious relationship with physical objects.

Culturally, with the ubiquity of digital media, we are developing a curious relationship with physical objects.

I think it's a good idea to look at these developments historically. Definitions of art forms are always up for debate and negotiation. For example, the category now known as "sound art" didn't appear from nowhere, and it isn't purely a product of technology. For me, sound art means dealing with the poetic qualities of the physical apparatus used to create, distribute and reproduce the sonic work. It also means dealing with the complexities of historical conditions and social interactions that surround it .

In my own example, 30 years ago, I had spent three years of my time in the sculpture department of an art school. This was the best way I could find of exploring my practice of "multimedia" – meaning a convergence of categories between artforms and nothing whatsoever to do with computers. I explored photocopy, screenprint, film, sound, the postal systems, and what was then called "environments" (something like, but slightly different to what we now call installation art). I liked the Fluxus idea of the art multiple. Some people interpret Fluxus as part of the process of dematerialising the art object. To me the importance of Fluxus was in questioning art-as-commodity. In other words, dematerialising the artist-as-commodity - negating art as an alienated career path within modern capitalism.

In the late 70s and early 80s there emerged a context known as "cassette culture", wherein marginal musicians and performers could operate in opposition to the capitalistic aim of maximizing profit. I spent most of my time active in this DIY scene,. I produced sound pieces that were home-produced and distributed on hand-made cassettes through the Sterile Records label I ran with my partner. There was great diversity amongst such labels, some were entirely 'bedroom based', utilising new home tape copying technologies whilst others were more organised, functioning in a similar way to more established record labels. Some also did vinyl releases, or later developed into vinyl labels. Many compilation albums were released, presenting samples of work from various artists. It was not uncommon for artists who had a vinyl contract to release on cassette compilations, or to continue to do cassette-only album releases (of live recordings, work-in-progress material, etc.) after they had started releasing records.

A lot of the ethos of file-sharing networks, appropriation/remix/collage of elements of existing recordings, which is now associated with the internet emerged within that period.
But there was still a physicality. It was using things that could be put in the post. It overlapped with the concerns of mail art and many mail artists made sound art and vice versa. Digital audio can be "instant", "free" and "accessible to millions". But a physical object could also be used for other purposes than those it was intended for. It can be contemplated, touched. A physical object exists in time and space, it can wear out and assume new qualities in its degradation and scratches. It is never just pure code.

Composing/improvising/editing for cassette, vinyl, radio, or CD or download, or live performance, are all qualitively different processes. There are also different degrees of intimacy involved. Giving or receiving a compact disc has different ritual meaning to giving or receiving a download. The experience of "live" acoustic sound is qualitatively different to that of recorded sound.

It's important to think of these "object quality" elements - as well as social interaction - as formal poetic elements within arts that use digital platforms. They are the ecological elements that give them their meaning.


www.nigelayers.com

Download the Bodmin Moor Zodiac

Download the Bodmin Moor Zodiac map as high quality PDF:

Bodmin Moor Zodiac

Interview at artcornwall

There's a good new Nigel Ayers interview you can read at www.artcornwall.org

Transparency

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
That's what Pablo Picasso said.

Sea Creature

Painting

Here's one of me doing a painting. This was taken in Alma Road, Tideswell. Again it must be in the early '60s.

Phoneme Machine

Space Cornish is typified by inconsistencies in the vocal and gesture instruments used to speak it. Complexity is a key concern.
Space Cornish is concerned with developing word salads that have specific effects when eaten. These are the words that accelerate the Space Traveller, words that are unstable and incommensurable. These are words that affect the Space Traveller in beneficial ways. Words that are polyrhythmic, post-Euclidian and advanced.

Donkey riding

The past few years must be the most photographed years of all time, but most of the photographs taken on digital cameras, phones etc are never printed out. When the digital information photograph is lost, the image is lost forever. It's different with printed photos, you can still recover the image, even from a damaged photograph. On this photo you can see me riding on a donkey, sometime in the early 60s. I think it may be at Morecambe.

The Living Dead

"The scene as set shows a witch laying on the Altar of: "The Living Dead" prepared for the Act of Spiritual Conception. Namely the Act whereby a living person is able to step out of the material body and so to enter the Spirit World Beyond the Grave."

Another vintage card from the Museum of Witchcraft.

The Horned God

Here's a vintage card from the Museum of Witchcraft at Boscastle in Cornwall. I picked it up in the early 90s when the museum had a Hammer House of Horror type ambience.

"To give is to receive". A young witch offers the Horned God the foetus, proof of her conception with the Spirit Force from the World Beyond the Grave. In return the Horned God will assign to the witch a familiar Spirit or Guardian Angle to serve her and to be the catalyst of her magical power.

The Planetarium Must Be Built!

The Planetarium Must Be Built! is a low-fidelity simulation of one year of ritual walks on the Bodmin Moor Zodiac. The Zodiac is a mythical system which has been created by extensive fieldwork on Bodmin Moor using technology such as GPS satellite data to empirically verify visualised landscape symbols.

It is presented in the form of a geodesic dome, containing multiple CD players, each one playing a recording of a ritual walks. Each CD player is placed in a circle on an aerial photograph which maps both the place and time of the walk.

Visitors to the installation experience a unique time-based interaction with recorded material. Visual elements such as a DVD slideshow, a kinetic planetarium sculpture lit in ultraviolet light; and removable elements such as books and maps feature in the installation.