Harding pours out a hard to find drone of the midshipman fish, courtesy of BBC, which finds its source in the animal kingdom. It is what Harding calls a ‘true drone from the animal kingdom’. It is a continuous sound that doesn’t change much, but Harding is ‘not content with that definition. A sound can change radically but still retain drone qualities. There are no temporal limits on a drone, how short can a drone be? A starting point for a drone could perhaps be, that it is longer than your natural breath.’But drones are not just that. The role of the drone can also be to ‘underpin, or underscore, a composition an an essential part of the orchestra’. A drone can also be a part of a musical instrument in itself, as is evident in Leif Elggren’s Royal Organ.

Von Hausswolff
Definitions of drone music are still fluid, a member of the audience for example pointed that throat singers can not be forgotten in the discourse. But what is drone music according to its musicians? Carl Michael von Hausswolff says: ‘It is silent and beautiful, it can make you stop skiing in the middle of a forest and in that moment you achieve a certain kind of rest. A state that you would like to be in for a long time. You lose a lot of the separation that can stand between yourself as human being and nature. There are no cars rushing by and its a personal dialogue. if you want to use it as a tool for practical living: It helps me understand the processes of life and being alive’.

Von Hausswollf also mentions a connection with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: ‘There is no start, no end. A kind of eternity. You become aware of a flood in your life. It is really stimulating and perhaps a positive way of trying to… well… live’. According to Von Hausswollf, this even applies to a live performance situation, where faders tend to remind you of time. Harding responds by asking if it is perhaps a kind of metastate. Von Hausswollf: ‘If you look at a concept such as transcendental meditation. Perhaps I could do it too, but I’m too western… And I’m too f*cked up to be able to list myself. I try to find other methods to achieve this kind of calm, or… whatever’.

Nordwall
Joachim Nordwall tends to touch upon the other side of the drone music spectrum. Nordwall: ‘How do you make drone? The drone is an illusion of safety for mankind, I like to recreate a certain feeling I had when growing up. The only fun thing of growing up for me was: cheap drugs and some place me and my friend could experiment with analogue synthesizers. There was this mix of drugs and analogue drones. In my work I have realized that I wanted to recreate that room where we grew up. Yesterday (during the Paradiso performance, ed.), I wanted to fill the room with the sound. A drone is convenient to fill up the room, and filling up the room creates a kind of safety. And moreover, that specific room where life was in front of me’.

During live shows, according to Nordwall, a ‘loud volume is important and the physical aspect of the drone is very interesting. To physically feel a change can be more interesting than the mental change. You get a feeling in the stomach. You can feel some parts of the body that sometimes do not exist’. Nordwall mentions Sunn as an example of a band that is enormously loud: ‘It has an effect that will get stuck in your bones for days after’.

In the discussion afterwards, volume levels at live performances sparked an interesting discussion. Is the artist responsible for exposing people to that kind of volume? Undoubtedly, there are physical consequences of sound. However, these consequences are largely unknown to the artist. The Pitch Police says: RESPECT THE HERTZ!

Links
Report by Twan Eikelenboom - newmw.wordpress.com
Photography by Roos Menkman - http://www.flickr.com/photos/r00s

To our audience, speakers, artists, board and funders,to all who contributed their time and energy;
to our partner organisations, bloggers, photographers, infodeskers, technicians and everyone else involved: thank you so much.

Annet Dekker
Alex Myers
Anthony van Zijl
Ayako Nishibori
Beer Damen
Benoit Espinola
Cigdem Turek
Daphne Holthuizen
Dave Emanuelson
Diane (Business Taxi Amsterdam)
Elvie Rienstra
Enoch Cheung
Eric Kluitenberg
Eric Lacroix
Esther Molenaar
Femke Herregraven
Floor Bijkersma
Floor Spapens
Hans Lenz
Ian van Riel
Jan Dietvorst
Jantien Ekkels
Jasper van Loenen
Jeanine Albronda
Jon Heemsbergen
Josephine Bosma
Klaas Melenhorst
Marieke Istha
Marius Hofstede
Marjolein Kassenaar
Mark den Hoed
Michael Huisman
Mirjam Dissel
Nicky Assmann
Noot van Sanden
Omar Munoz-Cremers
Pascal Petzinger
Paulien Dresscher
Peter van Vught
Petra Heck
Petra Valdimarsdottir
Ronald Linger
Roos Menkman
Sami Kallinen
Silvia Janoskova
Stoffel Debuysere
Taavet Jansen
Tiers Bakker
Tim Heijmans
Twan Eikelenboom

Thank you!

The Diorama was invented by Jacques Louis Mande Daguerre and Charles Marie Bouton and consisted of fast paintings, which were ’slightly larger than an iMac screen’. Moreover, paintings were made in such a way that parts were translucent. In the early days, these diorama’s had to be visited and therefore it became a new element of urban landscape. Huhtamo mentions the Paris Diorama in this regard.

But why would the diorama be interesting for us, now, Huhtamo asks himself. Bruce Sterling mentioned the concept of “dead media”, Huhtamo however does not believe media is capable of dying: ‘I believe that it is more a transformation and adaptation. My research deals with understanding the materiality, discursive manifestations and how these layers coexist in culture, as the culture changes and evolves’. One of Huhtamo’s big inspirations to venture into the realm of media archeology, is the fact that artists sometimes seem to be aware of the traditions, go back to these ideas and draw inspiration from them.

In its purely mechanical form, The Diorama is a large viewing machine, an actorless optical illusion theatre, comprised of two main features, being firstly giant translucent and transforming paintings and secondly a mechnically rotating auditorium. Culturally the Diorama provided the world with a new word, a neologism, that many of these new spectacles had. The Diorama is no different, combining “dio” (transparent/through) and “rama” (view). Because it is actorless, Huhtamo sees a valuable connection between the rise of CGI possibilities and the Diorama: ‘Actors are more in the scenery’.

“rama-mania”
Continuing on the linguistics of the Diorama, Huhtamo mentions Balzac, who picked up a linguistic pattern from the hair salons and the cafes of Paris. Balzac provided his own list of “ramas”, including health-o-rama, frozenrama, soupe-au-rama and the goriorama. Images shown by Huhtamo of various Diorama’s and Daguerre’s paintings are available at R. D. Wood’s MIDLEY essays on the History of early Photography. An interesting development is the portable diorama, like the “desktop” version of the computer, the ‘huge and gigantic’ is eventually brought to the desktop.

Now, Huhtamo continues, ‘we are in the beginning of this dioramic transformation I’m trying to sketch’. Most important for this transformation is that ‘reality is not conceived as given, but as a construct. Reality as a product of new spectacles such as the diorama, panorama, wax museums, paris morgue, etc. This is the culture from which the diorama appears. In turn, Diorama’s themselves start to appear in painting’.

New Spaces and Urban Mobility
The Diorama in an urban context is ‘not like a home, but also not like the city screen outside. It is a place for the flaneur and movement in new spectacles’. Huhtamo mentions various examples of these flaneur-like places, such as the cosmorama. All share that they are about a mobile mode of spectatorship. Huhtamo: ‘The only way of viewing the panorama is to keep on walking / moving. Being physically in motion was taken over by cinema, however, the motion becomes virtual.

The audience is virtually moving with the scenes seen in the cinema’. Huhtamo sees a return to physical movement in the advent of portable devices. Interesting in the mixture of Diorama and movement is also the the idea of the “trottoir roulant”, the moving walkway, which was presented as a novelty in that time at the Paris world fair.It turned Paris into panoramic scene, the platform is enough to define the surroundings and change the identity of the surroundings

The Diorama even shaped its own popstar. Albert Smith travelled around with the moving diorama. His “hit” was ‘The Ascent of Mont Blanc’ which was shown an astonishing 2000 times. Objects used to create a reality effect include dogs and a Swiss chalet. In later years, various people played with the idea of the diorama. Examples of these include the 1939 Futurama by General Motors, which exhibited GM’s utopian vision of the world with streamlined buildings and, of course, as Huhtamo mentions, GM cars. In the futurama, the audience is traveling through the show. It is not static, like the diorama by Daguerre. The Diorama has been revisited.

Links
Report by Twan Eikelenboom - newmw.wordpress.com
Photography by - flickr.com/photos/shutenochdown

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In the foyer of the Balie, Julien Maire performed his live piece “Digit”; the writer sits at his desk with a glass of wine and a pile of paper. There are no writing tools, no pen, no typewriter, no computer. The writer uses only his hands. While stroking his paper gently, words appear out of nowhere, leaving the spectator surprised, lost and somewhat disturbed.

The texts he composes make me think of a mix between Dada, Concrete Poetry and a new form of écriture automatique. As a spectator I don’t know if what Julien is writing has any meaning, but I can see him constructing cubes, drawing twirling sentences and destroying single words. It is a beautiful puzzling sight.

On his website, Julien Maire describes his relation with Burroughs’ cut up method and his concept of the soft machine. Julien refers to his own piece as soft cinema. I wonder if there is any connection to the concept of soft cinema Lev Manovich developed.

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by nicky  

Starting the day with following lectures by Ulf Langheinrich regarding his works opposed to a hard science input by Frank Kooi, it gave a nice opposition between the artistic approach of experimenting and trusting on your own senses and the hard science way of researching and depending on the outcome of numerous people senses.

After seeing Langheinrich’s ‘Drift’ during the performances in Paradiso later that evening I realized that this piece by Ulf was actually meeting the research done at TNO halfway. While Drift’s aim was to abstractive a realistic image into nothingness, one of the researches done at TNO was the opposite, namely to make interfaces that for instance allowed blind people to come out of a visual nothingness into a vaguely contoured more realistic image.

A nice conclusion of Frank Kooi after hearing Ulf’s approach: TNO should invest money in artists who make multi sensorial art, which resulted in a loud clapping by the audience

On to the next lecture by Timothy Druckrey; which immediately had the atmosphere of a warm and “gezellige” gathering of people. His story consisted of showing lots of interesting film clips that showed the history of computing. The clip of Heinz von Forester was most enjoyable and definitely recommendable.

Heinz von Forester

Then the self acclaimed renowned mumbler Joost Rekveld gave a lecture on ‘Mechanization of the Magical Sign’. Following an illuminating presentation which consisted of images of works by Rekveld’s heroes, we’ve got a clear idea of what it is that tickles Joost Rekveld. Images that struck me were the nave ceiling of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome made by Andrea Pozzo and the images from ‘Lapis’ by James Whitney, one of the great masters of visual music.’

ceiling of the Church of Sant’Ignazio in Rome by Andrea Pozzo

Joost Rekveld also tipped on the on the fact that Brakhage who saw his films as documentaries rather than abstract films because of his attempt of recreating the visuals like afterimage and phosphenes (the inner cinema that appears when rubbing your closed eyes). ‘Feld’ by Granular Synthesis, which was shown later that evening, came for me also very close to this phenomenon.

Showing us examples of beautiful swarms of birds and constellations of points from stills of the film ‘Lapis’ by James Whitney, this theme would later return in the film programme ‘Absolute Time’ as swarms of fishes were swimming through the reef in ‘Careless Reef’ by Gerard Holthuis, which created at a certain point the optical illusion in which my friend saw an Escher like drawing. But also in ‘Drift’, which at times seemed a glance through a microscope looking at millions of germs or tons of illuminating algae in the deep sea where no sunlight ever reaches.

still from Lapis by James Whitney

After lately having been surrounded by interactive artworks the film programme and the performances today were a warm return to the womb of the cinematic experience in which I was reduced to being a passive spectator again, trapped in the gaze of flickering images. I felt like a night creature that is frozen by the blinding headlights of a car, while dozing of into fractal like patterns.

I think it’s fair to say that after experiencing this day filled with films like ‘The Flicker’ by Tony Conrad and the performance PV868 by TeZ that I’m now officially declared flickerproof of epileptic seizures.

Hieronder stelt Alex over het werk van Ken Jacobs: “zulke intense gevoelens worden door zijn films opgeroepen.” En ik moet hem daar in gelijk geven al was het, voor iemand zoals ondergetekende die zijn films voor het eerst ziet, vaak een gevoel van verwondering. Deze ochtend was ontmoeting waarin Ken Jacobs een prettige mix vond tussen gesproken essay en film, relaxed en met passie. Er brandt in Jacobs nog een vuur over esthetisch en politiek onrecht dat in de jaren zestig is aangestoken. Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer kreeg ik bijna oogpijn van, al is het intrigerend om het een keer te ondergaan, het afsluitende Window Water Baby Moving van Stan Brakhage was dan een balsem voor de ogen. Zijn eigen films die vertoond werden hebben meestal een ontregelend effect, ze trekken als het ware “het blik” van de realiteit open en geven de kijker een kans om op zoek te gaan naar andere betekenissen. Wie zijn die personen langs de rails waarbij de film steeds vertraagt in Let There Be Whistle Blowers? Waarom eigenlijk die vertraging? Welke sinistere lagen van betekenis ontsluit het onweer boven New York aan een scene tussen Cary Grant en Irene Dunne? Vooral Window uit 1963, door Jacobs tussen neus en lippen door omschreven als een soort jazzimprovisatie, roept talloze vragen op die onmogelijk zijn te beantwoorden. De implosies, verschuivingen, scheuren, vouwen van realiteit die Windows presenteert maken het tot een unieke artefact ergens gelegen tussen schilderij en sciencefiction in. Jacobs liet ook zijn eerste film Orchard Street uit 1955 zien. Een geluidloze aaneenschakeling van een middag op een marktstraat in New York. Het is een inderdaad een voorbeeld van Jacobs stelling dat de camera niet het verleden maar het levende moment opneemt.Al vroeg ik me af of dat voor mij alleen in dit geval, een wereld waar ik nog niet in bestond…onbewust haast een artificiële wereld, geldt. Ik stel me voor dat een zelfde film gesitueerd in Amsterdam 1973 wel degelijk een explosie van nostalgie veroorzaakt, ook zonder geluid of muziek. Het bewustzijn dat het beeld induikt en aan de randen verlaat op zoek naar een jongere dubbelganger kan overmand worden door een vreemde nostalgie (met een potentieel van ontelbare vertakkingen). Het doet je afvragen welke filmer eigenlijk op het moment van filmen denkt voorbij het levende moment, denkt aan de blik uit de toekomst.

“In the cinema it is the type of image produced that determines the narrative, not the reverse. No one will miss the implication that the system of film production, invention and realization must be radically modified. It also means that a new kind of cinema and new poetics of cinema are still possible.”

This last part is certainly what we saw here. Jeffrey Shaw started with a few works he has been developing over the last years at the iCinema Research Centre in Sidney. Shaw is a creator of keyworks in the history of interactive art and has been working on the field of relations between development of techniques, representation technologies and visualization in order to find a new definition for the narrrative experience.

Shaw is building environments with interactive moving video as surrounding where the spectator is the center. One of the first things he shows us is the installation THE CAVE (1996). The Cave has contiguous projections on three walls and the floor. The user interface is a near life-size wooden puppet that is formed like the prosaic artists’ mannequin; by handling this figure the viewers cause real time transformations of the computer generated imagery and the acoustic rendering. By closing the puppets eyes, it gets dark, when opening again, the viewer enters a new space. The images are on the walls and the floor, but they do make these walls disappear at the same time: Infinity in all directions, cinematic space in all surroundings. It looked like a visual impressive installation but it made me giggle at the same time: Moving the arms and legs of the puppet, and therefore creating this serious immersive worlds seems like a funny contradiction. But, besides the overwhelming techniques, I could not help wondering what was the general message or feeling I should get while ‘playing’ this installation.

Another technique Shaw showed us was a remarkable recording machine consisting of multiple cameras. This camera can film in 360 degrees and consequently is projected on a cylinder screen of 12 meters wide and 4 meters high with 12 projectors. This modern re-invention of the -bullettime- Muybridge pictures, makes sure once you are inside this installation, you are no longer focusing on the screen but more like in infinity. Very much like the Cave installion indeed.
Remarkable enough, the camera’s and projection situations developed by Shaw are not just made for one piece, they can be see as some sort of a structure, appliable by other artists for other pieces as well. This gives an interesting insight on how different concepts are being developed within these same techniques.

An example of this is THERE IS STILL TIME . . BROTHER(2007) from the performance collective The Wooster Group developed for Shaw’s Interactive Panoramic Cinema.
While recording this project the camera is the center of the tale and the set is build around the camera. Different stories are evolving around this camera. They make use of the parallax of the camera: This overlapping disappears after 5 meters, but The Wooster Group films everything close to the camera so they use this parallax in their work. Shaw mentions how interesting it is to see how different people use the same techniques in different ways. The project is operated from a single place in the middle where just the part right in front of you is in focus. The viewer needs to discover a narrative path by zooming into the mindset of the characters.

Jeffrey Shaw’s work is hard to fully comprehend in this 2 dimensional documentation. This is partly caused by the fact his installations are merely based on a physical immersion: The individual is the center of the projection and the piece is best perceived from his point of view. From here we can fully experience the effects of the constructions. With all the things he showed us, I was awed by the technical efforts and possibilities, but unsure about the conceptual or narrative intentions and consequences.

This was different with the work of Marnix de Nijs. Though his field of work and research is also the overlap between the real and the virtual, his basic questions seem more philosophical than technical. Off course he uses technique as his tool (hardware, software) but while doing this he is adressing different non-technical issues. Every piece he showed had a quite clear conceptual foundation.

For example the piece RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN is a sort of speed up version of Shaw’s THE LEGIBLE CITY. In the Shaw piece you could ride calmly a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides of the streets. In RUN MOTHERFUCKER RUN you were not on a bike but on a treadmill and had the opportunity to feel an adrenaline rush while running through a sort of scary Rotterdam by night. While running on the belt, moving your body to the left or the right, you could navigate through the 8 x 4 meter screen in front of you. By quickening your pace, the speed of the belt as well as the speed of the image increases and depending on your running behavior and the directional choices you make, the progress of the film is determined. It is a film with an atmosphere somewhere between a thriller chase and urban horror. At the same time, you had to stay in the middle of the belt; If not, it would accelerate so much you would end up in the middle again. If you were getting at the back of the belt, it would get slower in order to get you back in place.

The other piece shown by de Nijs is the BEIJING ACCELERATOR (2006) with as basic principle that the participant sits down in a racing-chair on a motorized structure equipped with a joystick facing a 160×120 cm screen. The user controls the direction and the speed of the chair; rotating panoramic images are projected on the screen before them. The aim is to synchronize the moving image with the rotation of the chair. If you don’t do this quickly enough, you will get dizzy. Once this is achieved, the participant is able to view the images properly and the disorientation associated with the uncoordinated spinning is blocked. The Beijing Accelerator is in fact a remake of the Panoramic Accelerator and works with a 3D world based on pictures. Therefore the image-quality is quite high. The Beijing Accelerator is playing with the senses of the person; you have to fight the nauseated and need to get control over the machine in order to feel well.

The last piece de Nijs showed was EXERCIZE IN IMMERSION (2007). This piece is still in progress and is developed in cooperation with the V2 lab in Rotterdam. The subject here is the shift between the existing space and the 3D environment you see on your headset. The headset has a sensorsystem that connects the position of the player with previously modeled visuals. While wearing a crash-suit you could walk around in an empty warehouse. Objects in the virtual world correspond with objects in the existing world; on the display both are mixed visually. While wearing your headset, you loose your sense of your own physical presence. The game is modeled roughly around the Pacman system: you have to collect things. In this case, by walking around, you have to collect liquid balls who cling to your body once cathed. This way you slowly build up a new physical representation, meanwhile, the virtual world is gradually taking over the physical one (here you do need the crash-suit!). So level one sounds like: Collect a self-representation in this virtual space. A player who does not move, sees the physical reality that he confides in, but the more he moves the more that existing space is visually taken over by an unknown virtual world. Next year this project will be taken into phase two.

Core subject to both the work of Shaw and de Nijs is the way cinematic interactivity can enhance the immersive experience. Important seems to be the two sides of movement; On the one hand there is the movement and the perception of the viewer and on the other hand there is the movement of that what is happening on the screen. Within the work of de Nijs we try to synchronize those two by using our bodies, almost in a natural way. With Shaw, we can adjust by choosing perspective and therfore gain narrative influence. This feeling of being non-sync with the world is, strangely enough, not giving discomfort but people seem to find it pleasurable; It is not sickening but interesting.

The exhibition could be said to consist of two parts. Highly immersive spaces involving rather synesthetic experiences, in which one looses track of the sensual boundaries between sound and visual spaces almost completely, each individually fill the first four exhibition rooms. These are the works of Ulf Langheinrich, Boris Debackere and Kurt Hentschlaeger. The last room, situated at the end of a long corridor like in a strange dream, is inhabited by two works of one artist: the French ‘magician’ Julien Maire.

Granular Synthesis artist Ulf Langheinrich has two quite different works in this exhibition. The first, oddly called ‘Soil’, consists of four screens showing a composition in blue. The room feels like it is in a different universe. The screens are windows onto an unreal sky. Embraced by the sound the audience is compelled to sit down on the bench in the middle of the room and feel itself slip away into something like a meditation. This ‘altered state of mind’ experience is actually re-enforced all through the rest of the exhibition. Langheinrich’s second work ‘OSC’ is nothing less then spectacular. It uses the ‘flicker’ phenomenon to bombard the audience with sound waves and light pulses that evoke faux visions and involuntary physical responses. This is the type of work that could provoke a seizure. This does not mean the experience of ‘OSC’ is unpleasant, on the contrary. It reminded me very much of Carsten Holler’s work ‘Licht Ecke’, an also overpowering and spectacular work in which pulsating light in combination with (in that case) the heat it radiates makes the work impossible to escape.

The Belgian artist Boris Debackere’s work ‘probe’ unfortunately handicapped by its set up. The room has been darkened with black curtains that obviously have been used for a party one too many times. The stench in the room is so penetrating it makes it difficult to stay there long. It is possible to watch the work from the corridor, but of course it is not ideal. As far as I could tell Debackere’s work is a subtle, maybe rather decorative work. It shows an animation of a thin lined drawing that moves and changes in a way that reminds of the works of the Austrian Turux group (Dextro and Lia).

Langheinrich’s ‘other half’ in Granular Synthesis Kurt Hentschlaeger presents an intriguing work called ‘scape’. It is intriguing because it is quite simple. A practically black and white still image, an image moving barely, is accompanied by a soundscape creating a contemplative installation. The work is pleasant and beautiful. Before seeing this work I heard the interview with the artist, in which he explained this work was a result of re-exploring his old interest in photography. ‘Scape’ can be seen as a merging of photography and cinema, in which the cinematic experience is stretched in time, in extreme slow motion.

Last but not least we enter the wondrous world of Julien Maire. His works are not about engaging the body by drawing it in ‘from the outside’. His interaction with the audience is created through opening up the camera, the projector and the processes of their production. There is no distinction between the inner processes of the machine and the projection. Inner environment of the camera and projector have merged with the projection or installation space. This is the cinematic experience imploded.Even if the exhibition is a 15-minute walk away from the rest of the Sonic Acts venues it is definitely worth while to take the time to visit it.
  Josephine Bosma