OPEN OFFICE

Saturation in music means a flattening of the dynamics and affect of a sound. The depth and perspective of the sound disappears, leaving a smooth one dimensionality. The use of drones in contemporary music is based on an essentialist reduction which traces the contours of what is immanent to music, duration being one of these borders.  In contrast, saturation works by operations of indiscriminate inclusion and intensification, revealing less about the essential qualities of music but more about it’s circumstances.

Saturation in vision is something close to extreme brightness and the saturation of any sense faculty can be described as the intensification of that faculty to the point of uselessness.  At the saturation point of sound we are no longer able to hear difference.  At the saturation point of vision we become blinded by brightness, unable to distinguish objects from one another. Staring at the sun has been known to induce such disability.

Saturation is the point at which everything is shown and everything is heard.  Everything is sensible, the faculties open to such a degree that difference vanishes and becomes a state of disorientation.  An individual or subject at a point of total saturation may experience the liquidation of the following:

faculties of judgement
intersubjective awareness
temporal awareness
memory
embodied sensibility
expressive capacities

If we can describe the experience of sensual saturation for each of the senses than what of the sense that endows us with synthestesia, the sense that bridges the differences between the others. The haptic sense, the sense of touch but also of touch touching itself. That sense which grants spatial awareness and internal awareness of the interelatability of all of the senses.  What is it to experience the saturation of this faculty?  What is saturated space?

I.

Psyte is a site-specific music project which uses a generative score to develop new logistical spaces. The score takes as its starting point a series of systems commonly used for identifying place: Longitude, latitude, dimensions of an architectural structure, time of sunrise and sunset, average temperature etc.  Though their goal is to specifically locate a place based on its particular qualities and attributes these systems also have the effect of departicularizing and rendering abstract the places that they identify.

These systems are inverted and combined with one another to generate a series of equations which determine the timing and character of the musical events which will occur when the piece is performed. Psyte #2 was written for an unused storefront in the Skenderija Center Mall in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  It was performed on February 10, 2010 using four ipods loaded with prearranged musical parts, each corresponding to a different surface of the space.

II.

On November 29 1969 the most expensive film in Yugoslav history premiered at the Skenderija Center in Sarajevo. The Battle of Neretva is about the Partisans, a communist militia who battled the axis powers in WWII under the leadership of a young Josip Broz Tito. The spectacular mobilization of resources throughout the course of filming - 10,000 actors from the Yugoslav People’s Army playing themselves, four whole towns built and destroyed, a railway bridge blown up, rebuilt, and then blown up again - is convincing evidence that director Veljko Bulajić, in a bizarre reading of the principles of method acting, believed that to make a good war movie, he needed to actually make war. A cast of international stars including Orsen Welles and Yul Bryner were lured to Yugoslavia by the film’s enormous budget.

Of course, a project of such proportions demanded an extravagant site for its premiere, and the recently completed, multi-use Skenderija complex was a fitting venue for the presentation of such a spectacle. The complex housed a theater, youth center, underground shopping mall and, after 1977, sports facilities for the 1984 Olympics. The architecture of Skenderija belongs to the typology of the multi-layered, fully enclosed shopping center. A privately controlled space functioning as an ersatz-commons. There is a long lineage of such types extending through historical modernity - Benjamin’s “world in miniature” of the Paris arcades – back to the classical world. Skenderija however is of a particular sub-type, mostly associated with the suburban temples of American consumerism, whose point of origin can in be traced back to Skenderija’s own neighborhood.

Victor Gruen, a Vienese architect who fled Austria to Los Angeles after the Anschluss, constructed the first of these types in Edina, Minnesota in 1956.  The Southdale Shopping Center boasted several pioneering features – stores oriented towards interior passageways, multi-floor plans, climate control technology - which would later be replicated in countless malls in the States.

Gruen was the first architect of commercial space to seriously consider how the built environment might function as a mechanism for encouraging public shopping habits. The architect of Skenderija may not have been consciously aware of the history of these features as he was drawing up plans for the center, but he surely had some sense of their effectiveness in creating spaces conducive to retail consumption.

The Battle of Neretva and the Skenderija Center appeal to two different modes of public temporality, two textures of communal relations.  Skenderija takes a futuro-speculative approach and is constructed as a space of future leisure time, a space which conceives of its users as a public based on a theory of shared consumer psychology. The Battle of Neretva constructs a public around the projection of a shared national history.  The coincidental premiere of both the building and the film on the same night in 1969 provokes a question whose relevance forty years later is evidence of it’s difficulty: How much are we citizens and how much are we shoppers?

Zwischen den Jahren 2010 opening performance. Photo: Sanela Jahic.

In the United States and Britain the challenge of punk was to execute a critique of the corporate system from it’s own position as a product of that system. Use of Marxist or fascist imagery was a key component of this critique, which sought to highlight the hypocrisy of the culture industry. In the German Democratic Republic, these messages were understood as dangerous bourgeois cultural forms that represented a threat to state security and forced collectivity. In the U.S. the visibility of punk music benefited both the artists, who sought to spread their subversive message, and the culture industry, which recouped these messages in order to neutralize them. In the GDR the more antagonistic relationship between punk groups and structures of official power precluded the possibility of fame and limited the visibility of this cultural sector. Messages were neutralized by brute force and censorship.

Zwischen den Jahren 2010 opening. Photo: Sanela Jahich

Punks in the U.S., Britain and the GDR performed in small makeshift clubs or squatted buildings. In the Wes,t sites of performance were based on punk’s resistance to integration into the dominant musical economy, including systems that dictated tour scheduling and bookings (the logistics and geography of musical performance). Eventually this subversive geography was adopted by the corporate system and mainstream society for use as a marketing tool. Repression of certain cultural activities during the GDR meant that a number of seemingly incompatible groups were forced into close quarters with one another and made to share a limited amount of subversive space.

Photo: David Knowles

Photo: David Knowles

This installation commemorates a microscopic slice of cultural life in the German Democratic Republic that has been scarcely noted in popular history. Punk music in the GDR was able to take root and grow in the gaps that emerged in state control in the time leading up to the Wende. The challenge for artists in developing their music was always one of space:  where to play? Where can we be public? Die Madmans, as on of the first punk bands in the GDR, was instrumental in establishing a new geography and a new terrain where this kind of cultural activity could take place. In Weimar this terrain overlapped significantly with the local religious community. Of all locations in Weimar the Jakobsaal, a small chapel in the house of a local pastor, was most important. In a place both sacred and public they found allies and audiences. This installation recognizes the lasting importance of specific places in the personal histories of individuals, while acknowledging that such histories are prone to retrospective revisions and interpretations. It also highlights the shifting functions of certain spaces over time and their evolution as places in a community.

Photo: David Knowles

Photo: David Knowles

The memorial consists of two record players positioned at either end of Jakobsaal.  Each of the record players plays, continuously, a piece of music that has been re-composed using samples from the songs of Madmans. These songs are pressed into soft plastic dub plates made of acetate. As the records play and replay the sound quality of the recording begins to decay until there is nothing left but a harsh static. Like individual and collective memories of a certain place, this memorial is prone to degradation and decay. Eventually all traces of what once happened in this place will disappear.

Photo: David Knowles

Photo: David Knowles

Although dub plates use the same technological platform as the vinyl record, a technological reproducible medium meant for large scale distribution, their message is not literary, like a newspaper or novel, but closer to the oral legend: prone to degradation and modification and susceptible to disappearance. Though all media undergo a slow decay, the decay of the dub plate is a function that is built into the medium itself. One plays a dub plate under the expectation that the message will only be heard by a select few…that it may in fact be dangerous. In spy movies the hero’s instructions are always followed by the fateful words “this message will self destruct in five seconds.” In order to protect the subversiveness of its message the medium must be destroyed. Punk in the GDR shares shared in this operational logic. Its messages were passed in secret. Only a few were privy to performances, records, activities. Punk in the DDR was not trying to make a reflexive critique from within it’s own system. Rather its survival depended on it remaining safely buried.

Zwischen den Jahren 2010: Original Audio

In general this project is about the failure of abstract, rationally conceived systems to generate expected results.  This score is an attempt on a musical level to ground these systems, making their objects and limits sensible to active users and participants.

The score takes as its starting point a series of systems commonly used for identifying place: Longitude, latitude, dimensions of an architectural structure, time of sunrise and sunset, average temperature etc.  Though their goal is to specifically locate a place based on its particular qualities and attributes these systems also have the effect of departicularizing and rendering abstract the places that they identify.

These systems are inverted and combined with one another to generate a series of equations which determine the timing and character of the musical events which will occur when the piece is performed.  Though the exact length of the piece is determined by the institution or space hosting the performance, it is intended to last anywhere from one week to several months.

The equations are completed and the score finished when the particular attributes of the performance space are inserted into the system and a new logistics of space is generated.  The implementation of these logistics refers to the type of the office or factory, where the presence and movement of workers and producers is carefully orchestrated.

Psyte #1 was written for a room in Haus 4 of the Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany and was performed on January 29, 2010.  The music was performed using four synchronized CD players.  Large format foldable version of the score available below.

Psyte #1 Score Large Format

Reconstituting the Studio

I have three new projects going on in the next two weeks.  The first is an installation and performance in a small church in Weimar, Germany called Zwischen den Jahren 2010:

Zwischen den Jahren 2010 is a tribute to the Weimar punk band Die Madmans in the form of a memorial, a remix, a sound installation, and a listening party.  The installation of the reworked songs of Madmans in the context of their former practice space in Jakobsaal makes audible the contrast between two logics: the history of space and the memory of events.  The continuous return and disintegration of sound demonstrates both the intensity and fragility of this confrontation.

The memorial consists of two record players positioned at either end of Jakobsaal.  Each of the record players plays, continuously, a piece of music that has been re-composed using samples from the songs of Madmans.  These songs are pressed into soft plastic dub plates made of acetate.  As the records play and replay the sound quality of the recording begins to decay until there is nothing left but a soft static.  Like individual and collective memories of a certain place, this memorial is prone to degradation and decay.  Eventually all traces of what once happened in this place will disappear.

The installation will be open on Wednesday, January 27 and Thursday, January 28 from 7pm to 10pm.  There will be an opening party on Thursday at 6pm.  The location of the installation is Jakobsaal im Pfarrerhaus am Jakobskirchof 9, Weimar, Germany.

The second project is the first installation of a project called Psyte that I have been working on for a while.  The score uses the architectural dimensions of the space of its performance to generate its musical content.  Though intended for a live band I have modified the score for four automated CD players.  The installation will happen in the soon to be demolished Haus 4 of the Bauhaus Universität in Weimar and will be open Friday, January 29 and Saturday, January 30.

On February 4 I will be traveling to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovinia to present the work done for Zwischen den Jahren 2010 and to complete a different installation of the Psyte project at the Sarajevo Winter Festival.

Photos forthcoming.