J Milo Taylor is a London-based musician, artist, academic and writer whose interests include site-responsive installation, interactive robotics, sound art, multimedia environments, improvisation and performance. His work has been shown internationally and he maintains a commitment to interpersonal, intercultural and intermedial exchange as productive of original and context-specific creative outcomes.
His PhD project "ImMApp: An Immersive Database of Sound Art" involves a critical mapping of historical and contemporary sound art.
ImMApp: Ver 0.1: Web Interface from j milo taylor on Vimeo.
ImMApp: Ver 0.2: Installation Environment from j milo taylor on Vimeo.
Thursday, 23 April 2009
Sunday, 12 April 2009
Exterminator
Exterminator is an electronic sound object made by Nigel Ayers, it contains a three step sequencer which activates a sound chip found in a Dr Who Dalek Easter Egg.
The Daleks were created by writer Terry Nation and designed by BBC designer Raymond Cusick. They were introduced in December 1963 in the second Doctor Who serial.They became an immediate hit with viewers, featuring in many subsequent serials and two 1960s motion pictures. They have become synonymous with Doctor Who, and their behaviour and catchphrases are part of British popular culture. "Hiding behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear" has been cited as an essential element of British cultural identity, and in a 2008 survey, 9 out of 10 British children were able to identify a Dalek correctly.
The word "Dalek" has entered the Oxford English Dictionary and other major dictionaries; the Collins Dictionary defines it rather broadly as "any of a set of fictional robot-like creations that are aggressive, mobile, and produce rasping staccato speech". Terry Nation once said in an interview he got the idea for the name from the spine of an enyclopaedia, the volume covered DAL-LEK, although no such book has ever been found and Nation later admitted he had made this story up. It is also a trademark, having first been registered by the BBC in 1964 to protect its lucrative range of Dalek merchandise.
The term is sometimes used metaphorically to describe people, usually figures of authority, who act like robots unable to break from their programming. John Birt, the Director-General of the BBC from 1992 to 2000, was publicly called a "croak-voiced Dalek" by playwright Dennis Potter in the MacTaggart Lecture at the 1993 Edinburgh Television Festival.
The staccato delivery, harsh tone and rising inflection of the Dalek voice were initially developed by voice actors Peter Hawkins and David Graham, who would vary the pitch and speed of the lines according to the emotion needed. Their voices were further processed electronically by Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Although the exact sound-processing devices used have varied, the original 1963 effect used EQ to boost the mid-range of the actor's voice, then subjected it to ring modulation with a 30 Hz sine wave. The distinctive harsh grating vocal timbre this produced has remained the pattern for all Dalek voices since (with the exception of those in the 1985 serial Revelation of the Daleks, for which director Graeme Harper deliberately used less distortion).
Since 2005, the Dalek voice in the television series has been provided by Nicholas Briggs, speaking into a microphone connected to a voice modulator.In a 2006 BBC Radio interview, Briggs said that when the BBC asked him to do the voice for the new television series, they instructed him to bring his own analogue ring modulator that he had used in the audio plays. The BBC's sound department had changed to a digital platform and could not adequately create the distinctive Dalek sound with their modern equipment. Briggs went as far as to bring the voice modulator to the actor's readings of the scripts. He has used his modulator also for voicing the Cybermen in the 2006 series.
Easter eggs are specially decorated eggs given to celebrate the Easter holiday or springtime.
The egg was a symbol of the rebirth of the earth in Pagan celebrations of spring and was adopted by early Christians as a symbol of the rebirth.
The oldest tradition is to use dyed or painted chicken eggs, but a modern custom is to substitute chocolate eggs, or plastic eggs filled with confectionery such as jelly beans. These eggs are often hidden, allegedly by the Easter Bunny, for children to find on Easter morning. Otherwise, they are generally put in a basket filled with real or artificial straw to resemble a bird's nest.
The egg is widely used as a symbol of the start of new life, just as new life emerges from an egg when the chick hatches out.
The ancient Persians painted eggs for Nowrooz, their New Year celebration, which falls on the Spring equinox. The Nawrooz tradition has existed for at least 2,500 years. The decorated eggs are one of the core items to be placed on the Haft Seen, the Persian New Year display. The sculptures on the walls of Persepolis show people carrying eggs for Nowrooz to the king.
At the Jewish Passover Seder, a hard-boiled egg dipped in salt water symbolizes the festival sacrifice offered at the Temple in Jerusalem.
The pre-Christian Saxons had a spring goddess called Eostre, whose feast was held on the Vernal Equinox, around 21 March. Her animal was the spring hare. Some believe that Ēostre was associated with eggs and hares, and the rebirth of the land in spring was symbolised by the egg. Ēostre is known from the writings of Bede Venerabilis, a seventh-century Benedictine monk. Bede describes the pagan worship of Ēostre among the Anglo-Saxons as having died out before he wrote about it. Bede's De temporum ratione attributes her name to the festival, but does not mention eggs at all.
Other theories such as Jakob Grimm’s in the 18th Century believe in a pagan connection to Easter eggs via a putatively Germanic goddess called Ostara.
The English name for the festival of Easter derives from the Germanic word Eostre. It is only in Germanic languages that a derivation of Eostre marks the holiday. Most European languages use a term derived from the Hebrew pasch meaning Passover. In Spanish, for example, it is Pascua; in French, Pâques; in Dutch, Pasen; in Greek, Russian and the languages of most Eastern Orthodox countries: Pascha. In Middle English, the word was pasche, which is preserved in modern dialect words. Some languages use a term meaning Resurrection, such as Serbian Uskrs.
Pope Gregory the Great ordered his missionaries to use old religious sites and festivals, and absorb them into Christian rituals where possible. The Christian celebration of the Resurrection of Christ was ideally suited to be merged with the Pagan feast of Eostre, and many of the traditions were adopted into the Christian festivities.
A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in an object such as a movie, book, CD, DVD, computer program, web page or video game. The term draws a parallel with the custom of the Easter egg hunt observed in many Western nations, but actually is derived by the practice of the last Russian imperial family's tradition of giving elaborately jeweled egg-shaped creations by Fabergé which usually contained hidden gifts themselves.
This practice is similar in some respects to hidden signature motifs such as Diego Rivera including himself in his murals, Alfred Hitchcock's legendary cameo appearances, and various "Hidden Mickeys" that can be found throughout Disneyland. An early example of these kind of "Easter eggs" is Al Hirschfeld's "Nina".
Exterminator! is a short story collection written by William S. Burroughs and first published in 1973 (some editions such as the 1974 paperback illustrated at right label the book a novel)."The Exterminator is another collection of stories Burroughs published in 1960 in collaboration with Brion Gysin. The titles refer to a job as in insect exterminator that Burroughs himself once held. Certain aspects of this story were used in the film version of Naked Lunch, with the main character William Lee (a portrayal of Burroughs) holding the same job at the film's beginning.
In the summer 2009 Exterminator will be played live as part of BZZZOING! Future Sounds & Music By Mail by the BAU Artkestra in a public performance in Viareggio, Italy and documented in the magazine Arte Postale! 100. Vittore Baroni writes: "2009 marks 100 years from the first Manifesto of Futurism. In 2009 will be published the 100th issue of Arte Postale!, a mail art magazine that I started thirty years ago, in October 1979. What puts in relation the two events is sound: Futurist Luigi Russolo’s Manifesto The Art of Noise is a milestone in the history of the experimental and weird sounds that I have been promoting since the early Seventies in my journalistic work for a long string of publications (Rockerilla, Velvet, Vinile, Urlo, Sonora, Underground, Rumore, etc.). Music was also the theme of the first three issues of Arte Postale!, so I return to the subject in this open invite to the hundredth issue."
Nocturnal Emissions live show in Greece
Here's the poster for the Nocturnal Emissions live show coming up on 30th May.
NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS - live -UK
MAGNITOPHONO - live - GR
AGENT MO - djset - GR
Saturday, 30/05/2009, 21:00
House of Culture FEX, old town of Xanthi
After concert party at bar Kokori
Ticket: 5 euros
Organized by FEX & PAKETHRA
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Under My Breath a CD from PBK
I've just received this groovy CD from PBK which is playing on my sound system at this very moment.
The card cover has holes cut through to show the plain mirrored surface of the CD and inside the credits are written in mirror writing, which you can read on the CD surface.
This is what it looks like folded out:
It's a lovely bit of packaging. It took me two goes to get the CD the right way up in my machine, but when I did it was well worth it.
Here's what it says on PBK's web site:
"Very pleased to announce the long awaited release of "Under My Breath". "Under My Breath" is an abstract contemplation on post 9/11 paranoia in the U.S. Most of the album was created in 2004, during the height of the Bush administration's crackdown on human rights via the Patriot Act. The resulting album reveals a new vernacular for dark ambient isolationist music and is an important key to understanding PBK's ambitions in the world of sound. Seeking expression through the use of drones, natural or man-made acoustic sounds, digital glitching and turntable noise, the effect is one of surrealist juxtaposition, not jarring, but totally organic sounding, that can be listened to and savored in an intellectual way.
This CD has collaborations with legendary ambient/industrial artist, Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions); the great U.S. noise group, Wolf Eyes; Japanoise ninja master, Aube; HBO sound composer, John Wiggins; French electroacoustic composer, Christian Renou (Brume); avant garde composer, Slavek Kwi (Artificial Memory Trace); field recorder extraordinaire, Dale Lloyd; ambient composer, C. Reider; and sound collagist from the Canary Islands, Tore H. Boe. Waystyx Records have created a perfect packaging design to exemplify the concept of "Under My Breath". Last, but certainly not least, many thanks to the amazing poet, Ms. Anne Waldman, for her permission in granting the use of her poetry to develop the titles and text for this project."
http://pbksound.com/
(I love it when people call me legendary!)
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
The Animal Gaze
The Animal Gaze
Various venues, Plymouth and Exeter January to May 2009
The Animal Gaze is a London Metropolitan University event organised and curated by Rosemarie McGoldrick. It is an exhibition of work by over 40 international artists at several venues in Plymouth and in Devon between January and May 2009. The exhibition is part of celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species. This is of special relevance to Plymouth, as it was from Devonport, Plymouth where Darwin set sail on his voyage aboard the HMS Beagle on 27 December 1831.
Darwin's concept of the evolution of species through natural selection revolutionised our collective understanding of the world and our place within it. It offered a more convincing, and more verifiable, model of how our world works and our place within it than earlier-proposed creation myths, such as those involving intelligent design by gods and goddesses. In a catalogue essay Mary Loveday Edwards suggests that Darwin “removed the idea of an essential human identity. Humanity is a costructed position, an identity in process: we construct both human and animal by elevating one and demeaning the other”.
How art, as production and manipulation of symbols (meaningful within human perceptual systems), relates to the other species with which we share this planet, strikes me as a valuable and important theme for an exhibition. Especially in the light of the intellectual impact of Charles Darwin.
PLYMOUTH ARTS CENTRE
In the lower gallery, a taxidermically-preserved blackbird perched on a small antique table looks up at a DVD playing on a black framed flat monitor screen mounted on the wall. Standing on on small plinth under the monitor a DVD player is running. The DVD shows the lifeless body of a blackbird similar to the one perched on the table: it is laid on a white piece of textile fabric and is being handled by a pair of human hands. The hands probe the dead blackbirds, exposing pink skin beneath the black feathers. Then I am distracted by another video playing in the same room...
Second Nature by New Zealand artist Hayden Fowler, runs on a knee-level monitor. It's a way longer film than I've got time to watch, but the section I see is a slow-moving, sharply defined white 60s-futurist-type white walled set with a nude woman cradling a baby. Nothing much seems to be happening. It strikes me a bit like those glossy films that Sam Taylor-Wood and Matthew Barney make, minimalistic, carefully proportioned glamour, like the white walled antique bedroom sequence at the end of “2001 – A Space Odyssey” . Stanley Kubrick has a lot to answer for.
“In Blackbird Menagerie, 2007, an animatronic blackbird perches on a mahogany table, and comes to life when it witnesses a film of its own breast being cut open. Here Roe brings together the strange reality of the taxidermic process and its beautiful resolution in a wondrous creation: a live blackbird distressed by the evisceration of its own corpse.”
There is undoubtedly a high level of technical virtuosity in this piece. The tableaux has a lot to do with ideas of order, neatness, precision, virtuosity: qualities favoured by some art collectors. But a creature forced by an artist to witness its own evisceration is also a profoundly cruel concept.
As soon as I saw the bird, I could tell it was not a living one. To me, a live blackbird is a beautiful creature evoking wonder, and a dead blackbird evokes emotions of sadness. I would imagine that a live blackbird would move about, looking one way then another, to establish spatial relationships between itself and what it was watching. But this one stares rigidly at the screen. This blackbird moves to the recorded sound, but it doesn't “come to life”.
In this and the other lower gallery there are framed photographs and photomontages, including a large colour photograph of an owl, with circles snipped from the roundels of the eyes on the photograph. Suky Best's Wildlife Documentary 7, screened on a wall monitor is a DVD of a flipbook she's made of a seagull in flight.
In the darkened rear gallery, a video projection (Condition M by Clara Rueprich-right) fills the entire wall. A straight piece of documentary realism, shot from a fixed camera at dog's eye level, parallel to concrete kennels, a long line of meat is arranged parallel to the cameras' lens. A pack of hunting hounds is released from the kennels. The dogs weave about, awaiting orders from their human handlers. When the order is given they eagerly devour the meat. The flanks of the dogs are branded with an M.
Darwin emerged from a Victorian climate of scientific collection, specimen preservation, cataloguing and categorising information from the natural world. Matilda Downs' wall-mounted prints parody scientific research methodologies and classifications of knowledge, producing fascinatingly absurd diagrams, following their own logic that seem to make both sense and nonsense.
The Golden Ratio and the Animal Kingdom (below) is drawn as a grid made up of small square each containing a diagram of the proportions of an animal's head. Each head is divided by dotted lines and marked with letters: e: eye; n: nose/beak; j: jaw; in the manner of instructional manuals for artists. Alongside there are maps and atlases formed by interpretations of markings from herds of Friesian cows, scrambled pataphysical diagrams; clusters of of streets with animal names and the like.
Nearby a wall-mounted flat screen monitor is filled by the lifesize image of a fish tank in which a jellyfish swims around. Chroma-keyed onto the foreground is a small female actor who screams "will you miss me when I'm gone" . Her voice can only be heard over the headphones. The jellyfish is clearly disinterested, getting on with its jellyfish life. In the great scheme of things, human emotions don't exactly count for a great deal.
Ladybirds by Miranda Whall is a four minute loped animation, projected onto the wall at knee height, using the soft flickery technique that used to be a staple of hand drawn animation, watercolour-like images of women in stockings and suspenders consort with brightly coloured vibrators. Out of scale, but similarly stylised animated images of birds singing perch on top of the women. The images are so slow moving and tastefully done, so that any emotional shock at the exhibitionist content is erased. It's more an impression of “is that woman doing what I think she's doing?” The vibrator cavorting becomes a mode of territorial display, like the bird song.
I took the title Ladybirds to be a reference to the work of the artist Christine Newby (better known as Cosey Fanni Tutti). Explicit images of Cosey featured heavily in the first issue of Ladybirds, a magazine owned by porn publisher David Sullivan, in August 1976. Cosey was well known as a stripper and as a model who worked in the hard core porn industry as well as a performance artist in Coum Transmissions and later as a member of the music group, Throbbing Gristle. Cosey was active in mail art and often used images clipped from porn magazines in her collages. She has said that she initially ventured into the sex industry because "it seemed my collages would be more 'complete' and honest if the images included me in the real sex situation I was pillaging for my own art". It could be said that was little theory or strategy in Cosey's work beyond the desire to the blur the boundaries between art and life by experiencing new and different challenges. But also it could be said that she established some sort of synthesis between what she was doing as autonomous art-making, and the fairly well paid, but often dangerous, way she chose to make a living as a young woman. As an autonomous research project Cosey was testing her own ideas against the harsh commercial world of the sex industry and finding successful ways of asserting her own personal power within an often hostile environment.
She is taking a clearly defined and very humorous stance, which sets up a different set of ambiguities. Within a dispassionate, uninterested animal kingdom, emotional and sexual behaviour becomes removed from a feminist genre piece and recontextualised as signalling behaviour within one of many animal species, of which “art” is a part. The pictures don't operate in the same pattern of desire creation and commodification as in porn, or the knockabout humour of a Karen Finlay performance, say. The vibrator shots are crafted as animated watercolours, becoming instead an dispassionate, observed form of animal behaviour.
Bird song is also a form of sexual display most highly developed in 'perching birds' such as wrens, robins, blackbirds, and song thrushes. Study of bird song is a comparatively new science and the current understanding is that it is a very specialised form of bird call that serves one function only: to ensure the breeding success of the singer, indicating clearly that the singer is healthy and fit and ready to breed. This is largely a male thing, designed so that other females of the same species are attracted and males of the same species are repelled. So there are many levels of genre-bending going on here.
In the rear section of the Arts Centre, Aurelia Mihai's video surveys action in a small back yard, shot from the fifth floor of an apartment block in Bucharest. The film is only 14 minutes long, I'm not sure what is happening onscreen but I get the impression it involves something horrible happening to animals so I don't linger to watch it.
The exhibition includes a piece of sound art by Duncan Speakman, which is described as “an aural telescope... drawing on the listening practice of both animal predators and prey”. You are supposed to borrow MP3 players from the gallery to listen to while you wander between the exhibition venues. Unfortunately no-one here seems to know how to get the MP3 players to work. So I wander on to the other exhibition venues, grooving to the ambience of the Plymouth City Centre soundscape instead.
PLYMOUTH COLLEGE OF ART
The gallery beside the art college is busy with the to-ing and fro-ing of students and, compared to the Arts Centre, it has almost zero atmosphere for art appreciation.
More videos are running. There is a sign that warns that Cathryn Jiggens' DVD piece shows images of animal slaughter and meat preparation. I watch a section of a woman's hands and a dead goose, I read on the handout that the videos here "contain an unnerving eroticism" and document the artist's attempts to learn butchery and "it is Jiggen's stumbling struggle with the carcass as she pulls it apart that enables her work to take on a brutal sinister edge".
Hmm, somehow I don't think this is going to show me anything new, intelligent, or interesting about our coexistence with animals. Bestiality isn't really my bag and I've always found meat preparation brutal and sinister. Those are a couple of the reasons that my diet has been vegetarian for many years now.
The artist Martin White is also a dairy hygiene inspector by trade and his work poses some curious questions about our boundaries of acceptable behaviour. We are happy to consume the milk produced by other species, yet the thought of adults consuming human breast milk (a substance that has specifically evolved to be nourishing to the infants of our species) is strangely taboo.
So this exposes me to some personal self-questioning. Is it this kind of cheese taboo to me? Habitually, I am a vegetarian who eats dairy produce and I have been this way since adolescence. I don't like the idea of animals being exploited, killed, or mistreated and I am aware that an overproduction of meat products, and overfishing of the oceans has caused damage to the natural environment and is an inefficient use of food resources. But it is vaguely possible that my distaste for dead animal products in my food is more of an aesthetic reaction than an ethical one. My personal dietary choices are complex, whether they are primarily ethically or aesthetically decided. However, I do think of my dietary choice to be part of my democratic human rights and freedom of expression. So, assuming there are no health risks involved in eating human breast milk cheese, it does seem a bit weird but I wouldn't mind giving it a try.
PLYMOUTH MUSEUM
I pop up the road to the Plymouth Museum. There's a parallel exhibition to do with Darwin's voyage and the place is full of interesting taxidermical specimens, bird skeletons and collections of other curiosities quite apart from the gallery devoted to the Animal Gaze art.
As well as photos and sculptures, there's one or two art pieces that involve participation, on the level of answering questions on postcards, which blend right into the presentation of the museum as a whole.
I get drawn into a lovely flickery film While Darwin Sleeps by Paul Bush, with a shot of one individual insect per frame, it works nicely with the psychology of vision. The fast succession of images is difficult to process, the mind plays tricks in attempting to understand the visual information. The eye/brain is commonly tricked into believing there is motion in "motion pictures", but here the rapid succession of images is simply a rapid succession of images.
I love flickery structural films, they involve the viewer in something where the watcher's perceptual apparatus creates the art as much as anything else. And I think this tends to subvert the implied primacy and objectivity of the human visual apparatus in visual art. What is happening between the eye as an organ and the brain as it attempts to processes bits of information is thrown into doubt.
I initially assumed that the Animal Gaze exhibition was exploring the ways and animal might gaze, and see the world. But I checked the show's web site:
“The Animal Gaze showed stances outside anthropocentrism, deconstructions of species taxonomy, constructions of the idea of difference and documentation of the consequences of indifference. At the same time, these works about animals and humans perhaps confirmed a trend discernible in recent art - an ascendancy of meaning or ambiguity over ineffability and surface, a move away from the gigantic, as well as more evidence of the profile afforded now to artist collaboration and cross-disciplinary research.”
So it seems that the word "gaze" here is used in the sense of post-Lacanian feminist cultural theory rather than the sense of "an intent look" that a biologist like Darwin might understand it. In short, the exhibition is centred around academic, cultural theory rather than theories arising directly from natural science.
What we have here is a survey of how animals are currently being represented by a selected number contemporary artists, perhaps referring more to recent art history than it does to direct observation and interaction with the animals we share the planet with. If there is a weakness here, it is a basis in 20th century cultural theory that often seems unenlightened by more recent developments in eg cognitive research and natural science.
Be that as it may, the exhibition is challenging, thought-provoking and well worth a visit.
Animal Gaze is also on at Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, and Peninsular Arts Gallery, Plymouth
http://www.mirandawhall.com/video/ladybirds.swf
Nigel Ayers February 2009
review for http://www.artcornwall.org
Saturday, 7 February 2009
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Urbanomic party in Falmouth
Out to Falmouth last night for the EARTH MOVES launch party of Collapse V at the Urbanomic former Lemonade Factory. Collapse is journal of philosophy research and development and issue V has the theme of The Copernican Imperative.
Urbanomic is a lemony and effervescent gallery 'n' performance space. Brendan Byrne's video Another Day - shot on 16mm using a mechano-based camera rostrum - is running in portrait format on one wall.
The time-lapsed constellations form a suitable visual accompaniment to the space computersounds of Timothy Crowley (somebody tells me he is a grandnephew of Aleister) followed by looped live vocals through Kaoss pads and more laptops with chilly space beats from Oddstep Deployment Unit. All this followed by the Casio sound of Hedluv and Passman (straight outta druth):
I like this place, must come here again.
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