Blogging - the new art...

TALKING:
Old one-way talking is being killed by clutter.
TV is down
Radio is down
Newspapers and magazines are down and almost out
Customers are ignoring you all the time.
BUT, it turns out that enabling your best customers to tell their friends is
up, way up. Making remarkable stuff that is worth talking about is up.
The most important talking is storytelling. Not top-down dictation, but
stories that resonate, stories that are authentic, stories that spread.
LISTENING:
Skewed focus groups are down.
Unfiltered, non-anonymous blog feedback is up.
Listening at your call center is up.
Rapid product cycles that involve users in product design are up.
So is open source, in which the users are the designers.
BLOGGING, then, is a platform that enables your organization to talk to people
who want to hear you. RSS makes the
publication of your ideas crisp and
focused.

Seth Godin

Heads

My current practice involves the candid / voyeur style of filming head and shoulders portraits in the street. The basis for this work is that a certain street in my home city always gave me the creeps when I was a kid then later in life I watched people seemingly follow each other in and out of shops in droves and called it 'sheep mentality'. Sure I like a bit of retail therapy but the people on 'my street' seemed weirdly down and extra, well, sheep-like. There are a higher proportion of cheap (and now empty) shops there so that accounts for some of the reason. Interestingly while taking part in a student group show last year, the 'curators' in our group wouldn't 'allow' me to use the footage for fear of violent reprisal at the opening of the exhibition (in an empty shop). So anyway, I still have the footage and moving the project on, quite excitedly really.
So I got to show my first edit in our critique group yesterday and got some great feedback. This, I am sure, will form an essential part of the body of work for my final show in June 2010.
The work / research is an interrogation, if you like, around various themes including communities, self-consciousness, emotions, identity politics and possibly even psycho-geography. It's a wonderful opportunity to step outside the frame and have a good look at the the people I share the city with. The 9 minute edit I did got some great reactions and a few people were really suprised at how quickly the time went. It's really hypnotic to watch these slowed down heads coming down the street. I can't post any here as, well the internet really does make things public doesn't it...?!
The work was likened by my tutor to the work of Philip Lorca diCorcia - a simple technique of capturing people, operating in the gap between postmodern fiction and documentary fact.

A

Trying to revive this blog now... just been using the Enable one while developing the writing and thinking, getting going with Bloc Education etc. So now my final dissertation has been handed in I can get on with the practical stuff... So, been doing some candid video portraits in town - watch out! Lurking in shop doorways and using enhanced 100x digital zoom on the Canon XM2. I'll talk about that in a minute when I at last get round to it.. Great fun, having free reign to do what I want while running up a huge student debt.. Well look, I took my 18yrs old daughter to a Transmission artist (David Bate) lecture yesterday and she was bored within minutes so we had a brief notepaper conversation about justifying the relevance of art in industry. I said 'Is intelligence just mental gymnastics?', she said 'making up reasons for the inexplicable experience that is LIFE : )'. I replied, 'exploding, interrogating, analysing...are we also celebrating?'. She replied 'I don't think this guy is celebrating'. This morning I decided to email her and just restore her faith, maybe just in me (!) by saying I think most of this commerce driven society and it's industries are 'making up reasons for the inexplicable experience of life' - art is the unavoidable and inevitable branch of industry that has to constantly question the creativity of it all..... hard fact!
The picture on the right is a painting I did in the Summer at Bloc. The TES feature on the left came out a few weeks later, look at the colours. Also the caption: 'Exceptional leaders are not always looking to move'. Quite weird as well, my main thinking about the education project has been leaning towards staying at Bloc for at least a while longer... Exceptional.. Hmm.
So.

More scribblings

Modern ways,
philosophy,
psychology,
mentality..
Limited.

All-encompassing
Spirit,
Rises Way, Way Above
This temporary world
And it's silly little tricks
And traps. And illusions

Nothing belongs to us.
Friends, family, wives, husbands,
We know nothing.
Be prepared for this.

If you're losing your faith
You never had it.

Oh Love! & Confusion!!
Save myself.

Don't force it.
Only fear can force it.
Happy. Safe. Good.

The Mental Limit

Isn't psychology fucking weird?
It's real but entrenched
in this illusory claptrap shit heap of a dead world.
So where to start from,
when, from a deeply personal, spiritual challenge, emerges the answer
and a consoling motive
for having to do something
for love and trust to develop?
Psychology and the mind cannot accept divine wisdom.
So you cannot understand that true inspiration in entirety.
Just go with it and be thankful
with your heart.
Not your mind. Not your mind.

Ya Zahir Ya Batin!

The Manifest. The Hidden.
Where's this plaque located..?

Socks with sandals are back!

30 Day Lunar Love Affair (in Oils)

One painting a day Aug-Sep 09

More about me then let's move on shall we.

That's the BLISTRAP World Tour over with. Starting at the Grapes pub and finishing 2 days later in London. It went so quick we didn't even notice all those gigs in 57 amazing countries! Stefano came over for the evening (from Italy!) and played like dynamite! Pity there were no bloody cymbals on the studio drum kit, but he made a excellent meal out of the bits he'd brought. Thanks also to Paul 'Time Attendant' Swindon for contributions to an excellent 2nd set. You can download the whole 90mins here - it's good! Thanks to Paul Shearsmith for putting us up; a lovely bloke and a great mini trumpet player as well as half of The Fujii
Meanwhile back in Sheffield, I'm getting on with a painting a day for this lunar month as a concept piece (10 days to go), starting working for Bloc on their new Education Project and trying to get on with my dissertation while reading lots of great books (check out 'Free Play - Improvisation in Life and Art' by Stephen Nachmanovitch) and looking forward to a couple of trips away including a weekend of qi gong with a Chinese master and 10 days with a Sufi master in Cyprus!

BLISTRAP

'How to properly destroy a guitar'. Tremendous fun! Finally got round to the slow destruction of a crappy old acoustic guitar that's been haunting me for ages - on stage though a PA with a contact mic! Yes I forgot to document it but hey, you shoulda been there. I got this pic which captures the final end after I threw it off stage. The decent sized audience enjoyed the set too. This was toward the end of a thorough 40 mins bash headlining at the Grapes with BLISTRAP, with Mick Beck and Charlie Collins guesting for the first time on drums. I slowly started with detuning it while playing then sawing and scratching until puncturing it with the screwdriver a few times before smashing it's poor body to bits. What a lovely sound! Funnily enough I broke two strings on the electric within ten minutes, almost a pre-cursor from the frightened guitar pixies. We're on Resonance FM on Saturday night - tune in on the web here or 104.4 FM in the London area. It's Jonny Mugwump's excellent show 'Exotic Pylon'. Stefano is coming over from Venice especially for just this show - so tune in! Oh yeah two new albums out - watch this space!!!!!!! etc..

New work...

Getting a pretty good flow of ideas this Summer but a lot of energy is going into planning for Enable (new blog here) and my dissertation as well as an application to the SSE for a year long course alongside the final year of my degree. On top of that I've also been given some work at Bloc organising their pilot educational project. So, art output currently includes a submission to Pan-demonium, quite a lot of fine line doodles and a 30cm sq painting a day for 29.53 days (the lunar month of Ramadan) (8 so far). I've also done a few sketches and got ideas for what I'm calling 'automatic mind maps', I'd like to do a large one as a performance piece somewhere. I'm also considering the impressions one gets from thousands of charaters in one space - the 'one in the many' effect, which I used to find overpowering especially on busy shopping streets. Recently I've found it incredibly intriguing and I wonder about interacting with this phenomenon in different ways as well as removing a number of people to an entirely different location to see what happened to their characters which seem to be enlarged when they are in the busy shoppatropolis. Sound wise a couple of gigs with BLISTRAP (inc. ResonanceFM live set on 5 Sep) coming up as well as organising for an electronics improv night on Sep 26 at Bloc, I think that's it.

A piece in a New York based exhibition

Pan-demonium resonates with the current global political, ecological and economic situation - one in which the hegemonic forces of order have been overwhelmed by a dynamic of chaos and disorder, turning the world 'upside-down'. Does it offer a metaphor for a critique of global capitalism and its 'devils' - its pan-demons - in all their guises (pan-demics included)? Or perhaps it conjures up collective creative forces for political challenge and the re-inscription of Pan in contemporary mythology?

bricolagekitchen invited visual, sonic and written responses to the idea of Pan-demonium and brought this together in an exhibition presented at AC Institute [Direct Chapel] New York 3 September 10 October 2009. The exhibition, documented and explored in this publication, assembled a cacophony of over fifty contemporary artistic responses and global voices gleaned via the web in a panorama of sound, text, visual and moving imagery, celebrating the affective power of disorder and noise. So, what does Pan-demonium mean to you?

AC Institute [Direct Chapel]
547 W 27th St 5th Floor New York NY 10001
www.artcurrents.org bricolagekitchen
aka Gillian Whiteley

Update

Just scraped through 2nd yr, pleased considering extremely tricky subject matter for essay ('Can Art Be Taught') as well as some strenuous circumstances. Out of the trees now though and getting down to some real creating and planning. Completed first workshop for kids at Bloc and started entering some exhibitions including Pan-demonium (NY) and Leeds Open as well as looking at ideas for a 2 week placement. The Montessori School are interested and have asked me to write further, (also see Pyrites for some really interesting alternative education philosophy) the Cyprus College of Art sounds like a nice one for a standard month's residency, seeing as I'm heading that way anyway soon. One other idea is spending time with a clinical psychologist researching synaesthesia which ties in nicely with Freenoise and so back to the live paintings on stage and waiting to hear from a couple of researchers.

The Sea In Legend & Tradition: Call for Papers

This two-day conference at the Time & Tide, the maritime museum at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, will be held on Saturday 5th and Sunday 6th September 2009 as the fourth Legendary Weekend of the Folklore Society.

We'd like to hear from anyone who can attend and present a paper - folklorists, performers, historians, singers and cultural or local historians. Come and celebrate mermaids, scrimshaw, ghost ships, shanties, shape-shifting seals, omens, lost lands and lucky beach-combings. Presentations, which should be 20 minutes long, can take the form of talks, performances, or DVD. There will be a limited number of opportunities for art installations. The main event will take place on Saturday with additional material and site visits on Sunday.

If you would like to attend or to present a paper or performance, please contact:

Jeremy Harte, Bourne Hall, Spring Street, Ewell, Surrey KT17 1UF
Tel. 44 (0) 208 394 1734 Email: JHarte@epsom-ewell.gov.uk

Tuning Forks - first workshop @ Bloc 28.6.09

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