Monthly Archives: July 2008

Lines of Sight #4

Radio Action III. Photo by David La Spina

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.

Possibility of Action: the Life of the Score

Score by Alice Santoro

MACBA Documentation Centre
17 JUNE – 05 OCT. 2008

«I sometimes think of music as a succession of sounds which on reaching the listener’s ear turns back on itself and retraces its path, in orderly disorder, until re-entering the mind of the person who thought it up», wrote the Italian artist and composer Walter Marchetti.

Together with Robert Ashley, Eugènia Balcells, Joan Brossa, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Pauline Oliveros, Lee Ranaldo and Yasunao Tone, Marchetti was one of the authors whose work was included in the exhibition Possibility of Action. The Life of the Score, curated by Barbara Held and Pilar Subirà at the MACBA Study Center.

The exhibition explored the possibilities of musical notation, loosely understood as a means for musical and visual transmission, and brought together historical and contemporary scores as well as artistic creations not strictly from the field of music. Scores became a field of action, sound became artistic material, the boundaries between art, music and life blurred, and the powers of composers, performers and audiences merged.

The exhibition was presented in conjunction with the RWM program Lines of Sight, a new space for sound experimentation.

“One of the more recent contemporary art exhibitions to provide a historical survey of graphic and experimental scores as visual as well as notational objects was Possibility of Action: The Life of the Score at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona Study Center in 2008.” Cited by Hendrik Folkerts in his text for Documenta 14, Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness

http://www.documenta14.de/…/464_keeping_score_notation…

Clear Music, Eugenia Balcells

Download catalogue pdf
Review Art Daily