Re: grabbing people by the balls (dumbtype et al)

[Christopher Sorg <csorg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Karkowski/Sensorband managed to ruin a set of 23Five's speakers at their
> recent SFMOMA performance as well (despite extensive sound-checking, they
> vastly exceeded the agreed-upon limits).
>
> Those excesses are disrespectful to both the audience and the venue, in my
> opinion.
>
> Philip

Well, this is really what I was curious about, but who do the venues think
they are booking?  I could tell _exactly_ what Karkowski's show was going to
be like, before he came to Chicago, just by some of his writing online.  I'm
surprised that people like this are invited to shows knowing full well what
they are interesting in doing with sound, and that the audience is just
paying blindly to go to shows.  I don't blame the artists at all for this;
their intentions are pretty clear.

I personally thought that the constant noise level from Atari Teenage Riot
was more troublesome to my ear than the dumbtype performance, but there
again, I knew what to expect from both shows.  I just don't get what these
audiences are reading or expecting, or if they're going into shows
completely oblivious.  What exactly to patrons of the MCA expect anyhow?
Jesus, most of those shows are not particularly gentle at *all*.  You have
to be pretty open-minded to go to shows like Cremaster 2 or even Christian
Marclay (who was just FANTASTIC).  For crap's sake, it's a *CONTEMPORARY*
art museum.  For at least the last fourty years that has meant that almost
anything goes.  People were shooting themselves in the 60s and 70s and that
was considered art.  What department of slappy a silly smile on your face do
they think they are donating to, anyhow.

But I digress.  I was really trying to find out more from the list about the
politics of music.  You've quite obviously got some "noise" politics
(embattled with enviromental noise, fight din with din, so to speak) and
more subtle uses of noise (like Ryoji Ikeda using it poetically), then
others who use sampling to disrupt ownership of sound (such as
Plunderphonics' Beck work, for example).  I'm just curious what else is
going on.  I'm very interested in the idea that others are using sound not
as some ethereal, b-line to the emotional centers of the brain, but as
concrete "statements" or manipulations of other ideas and how they can
connect to sound.  For instance, take some "big brain" concepts like
post-structuralism, Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, etc.  Are
people producing work, composing and trying to apply these concepts to
sound?  There has been some talk about minimalism and it's relationship to
current audio explorations, and also of Deleuze, so I'm curious what else is
out there.

Blah, blah, blah...;0

__________________________________________
Christopher Sorg
Multimedia Artist
Instructor
The School of the Art Institute of Chicago
http://csorg.cjb.net
csorg@xxxxxxxxx
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