Category Archives: Lines of Sight for radio web macba

LINES OF SIGHT #7. Radio Incarné. Yasunao Tone and Tetsuo Kogawa

Tetsuo Kogawa ‘Dom im Berg’, Graz, Austria, October 7, 2007. Photo by Susanna Niedermayr

This is a collaboration for “Lines of Sight” by philosopher and pioneer of mini FM radio, Tetsuo Kogawa, and sound artist Yasunao Tone, based on an email exchange on radioart.

When we were asked to make a radio collaboration for Radio web MACBA, we decided to use an email exchange on radioart, vocalize the text, and then both of us play it live in performance.

Our collaboration started as argument on temporality, which was my fault because I started this difficult topic and it made our dialog into hastily scribbled heavy-handed letter exchanges rather than crisp emails. After we became aware of that, we began scribbling our thought by using the email format and keyboards. So, in accordance with Kogawa’s insistence on hands, we have literally thought on a column of email by hands. Regrettably, our native language is Japanese and we have been forced to speak a language we seldom use when we dream so we couldn’t play with words. However, I tried to add playfulness by vocalizing with a synthetic voice program from Mac’s “Simple Text” and burned it onto CDR. Then I prepared the CDR (so called scratching) and played it with my old CD player. Unfortunately we couldn’t practice our program as radioart because Radio web MACBA has no format for live broadcasting from Tokyo and New York. We present our collaboration in this recorded form.

Yasunao Tone

LINES OF SIGHT #6. Collaborating with Strangers. Brenda Hutchinson

“DB6-1AMNYSubway” Brenda Hutchinson, Daily Bell 2008 project

The life work of Brenda Hutchinson (literally “life work”, based on the cultivation and encouragement of openness in her own life and in those she works with) covers a range of action from abstract electronic music to year-long pieces such as her ongoing project, “dailybell2008”, a commitment to the simple action of ringing bells at sunrise and sunset every day for a year and sharing the awareness of that moment with others.

In public collaborations such as the “The West 4th Street Quintet”, Hutchinson records people that she encounters on the street, listening and witnessing; in more personal explorations and performances she works with family and loved ones working through grief and loss or fear. A recent turning point is “SoundTracks”, a score/invention and collaboration with her friend artist Ann Chamberlain, whose memory was seriously compromised due to end stage breast cancer. “SoundTracks” enabled Ann to draw by means of programmed sounds, intimate and personal elements of her daily life. Brenda Hutchinson has currently completed hospice and palliative care training to explore extending the potential benefits of the project to others. The “SoundTracks” drawings were shown as part of “Possibility of Action, the Life of the Score”, an exhibition exploring musical notation curated by Held-Subirà and produced by MACBA June-October 2008).

For “Lines of Sight #6”, Hutchinson converses with San Francisco composer/performer Jon Brumit, founder of Neighborhood Public Radio, about the thread of “collaborating with strangers” that runs through their work, and premieres a work in progress with The Cardew Choir directed by Tom Bickley.

Lines of Sight #5. An Orchid in the Land of Technology

Prototypes for the mobilization and broadcast of fugitive sound

The recording can be a reflection of the thoughts and emotions of a human being (Arthur Russell), memory (see Brandon LaBelle’s project, Phantom Music – Radio, Memory, and Narratives from Auditory Life), or museum (Edgard Varèse used recordings of the Holy Week procession of the Catalan village of Verges, presented every year since the middle ages, in his soundtrack for a film on Miró). A studio production records one perfect performance, its presence in time and space similar to that of a film. Destructive noise can be transposed into delicate vibrations of a transparent membrane (Juan Matos Capote).

Lines of Sight #4

Radio Action III. Photo by David La Spina

New program Lines of Sight at RWM, in collaboration with New York-based transmission art organization free103point9 and Galen Joseph-Hunter.

Radio Action III features five-minute sound works conceptually tied to the idea of “radio” as an instrument or theme, composed by free103point9 transmission artists working in collaborative teams. 31 Down & Matt Bua comment on the consumer market’s hunger for all that is wireless. Damian Catera explores FM spectrum broadcast content as a symbol of social decline. Alexis Bhagat & Sophea Lerner utilize the transmission spectrum as a networked space for communication. Melissa Dubbin and Aaron S. Davidson as well as neuroTransmitter stage reenactments and or use archival recordings in homage to historical radio experiments and actions. The Dust Dive & Latitude/Longitude infuse their musical practice with “celestial forces.” Joshua Fried & Todd Merrell, Tom Roe & Scanner, as well as LoVid & Michelle Rosenberg with Howard Huang employ the electromagnetic spectrum (signal and interference) as their sonic palette. Anna Friz & Tianna Kennedy consider conceptual and poetic radio space. Michelle Nagai with Kenta Nagai as well as radio_ruido & ben owen explore transmission and reception as a means to map an interior space.

Lines of Sight for radio web macba

LINES OF SIGHT, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirá, takes its name from the interconnected points of the global resonant space created by radio and other wireless technologies. From out of the extraordinary array of music that plays on this world-wide stage, we will follow threads as diverse as musical notation and non-linear composition, and introduce artists who explore the ideas around transmission as a medium for creative expression.
Transmission, translation, revelation>>>the performance score

LINES OF SIGHT #1 takes inspiration from recent projects concerning the musical score; musical, sociological, biological explorations of how our minds and intuition translate and transmit music.

The compositions on this program have been realized from scores as varied as an interactive computer software controlled by a live performer, verbal instructions that undermine a pre-recorded playerpiano recording, data from a gps navigational system that converts geographical position into mathematical sounds, a text by Jacques Derrida and three superimposed similarly evanescing matrices of differently white numbers.