(small) creative initiatives that challenge (big) traditional ideas
• ( egoistic ) • activistic • architectural • audible • cinematic • conceptual • graphic • strategic • surface • urban • wireless
A flashmob is planned on the last day of 2012 in Berlin in honor of the experimental composer John Cage.
The flashmob will stage John Cage's famous composition 4'33" - aka four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence.
The piece was composed in 1952 for any instrument and the score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece.
Everybody can participate in the collective performance of 4'33". Only requirements are to bring an instrument and NOT to play it during the performance.
Meeting point: Alexanderplatz, Berlin
Date and time: December 30th 2012 at 15:00 / 3pm
"Everything we do is music" - John Cage
• More info on Facebook and here
Back in May the National Gallery of Denmark invited seven progressive musicians to create a piece of music based on their interpretations of an art work in the museum's collection.
The musical interpretations have been released one at a time, and now they are all available as an app that allows users to listen to the music, either at the museum or at home while exploring high-res photos of the art that served as inspiration.
Museum goers without smarthphones can borrow a handheld device at the museum. The app is in Danish but given the limited amount of content it should be possible for anyone to navigate and enjoy.
Music Made by Art features:
Giana Factory (painting by Abildgaard)
Stoffer & Maskinen (painting by Ejnar Nielsen)
Kasper Bjørke (painting by Valdemar S. Møllers)
Darkness Falls (painting by Casper David Friedrich)
Turboweekend (sculpture by Niels Hansen Jacobsen)
Thulebasen (painting by Jørgen Valentin Sonne)
Trentemøller (painting by an unknown artist)
• More info at The National Gallery of Denmark + Get the app on iTunes
Sound Tossing is a project that combines shoe-tossing (the act of throwing a pair of shoes onto overhead wires) and DIY audio electronics.
Small sound generators hooked up to loudspeakers are thrown onto overhead electric wires, buildings and trees, from which they emit acoustic signals.
The project's prototype "urban cricket" is a solar powered audio device that releases cricket sounds. Other components that can be used to generate sounds are motion detectors, timers and light-sensetive switches.
Sound Tossing (aka "soundfiti") is created by Reinhard Gupfinger from Austria who ran DIY workshops at this year's Ars Electronica Festival. Instructions on how to build a unit is available online. The website does no provide much info on the environmental consequences, so we'll assume that you are supposed to clean up after yourself.
Related: Led Throwies by Graffiti Research Lab.
TORTURE CLASSICS is a collection of music that has been used as instruments of torture by US government interrogators.
It includes Top 40 hits, Metal, Hard Rock, Country and Western, TV theme-songs and commercial jingles, as well as original “mash-ups” created by CIA agents, prison administrators, guards and interrogators.
According to the publishers: "Torture Music is the kind of music that’s perfect for sitting in the Afghan or Iraqi Desert, sharing a prisoner for a night, or relaxing in a military barrack or a CIA black site in some godforsaken country on a lazy afternoon. It's music thats just makes you feel free and drives others crazy. '
TORTURE CLASSICS is seemingly released by Time Life, one the world's largest entertainment companies. However, if you take a closer look, you will find that it is a project by notorious e-activists/artists UBERMORGEN feat. James Powderly.
In 2008 the Danish Artnode foundation published the book 'Vi elsker din Computer' (We Love Your Computer), a 500 page anthology with no images on the phenomenon of net art.
Not exactly light material, but as if the format and perhaps subject itself wasn't already dry enough, the Artnode team subsequently transformed the publication into an audio book, which consists of a single audio track containing a 14 hour long, poorly recorded, reading.
When listening to the track you can't help feel sorry for the reader who on many occasions stumbles over some of the net.art references and URL's mentioned in the book - such as the numerous references to: http://0100101110101101.org.
The 200mb audio book is available for download at Artnode's website. Quite brilliant, but unfortunately only in Danish.
Copenhagen Podride is a series of podcasts created for passengers on the Copenhagen subway, the S-Trains.
The podcasts contain stories about the urban and sociological development along the S-train lines. Stories are divided into chapters that match the S-stations, thus making it possible for passengers to get a location-specific story as they ride by.
The podcasts are only available in Danish but hopefully they will be produced in English as well as the content seem well suited for tourists and other visitors interested in alternatives to the traditional city tours.
Copenhagen Podride is provided by DSB: S-Train and Copenhagen X. The service is free of charge and available for download on the web, or on your mobile phone via SMS.
The Danish music-poetry duo Bo hr Hansen & Nils Lassen has come up with a novel - and potentially very time consuming - way to promote their latest CD "Hvem er jeg?" (Who am I?).
Those buying the CD are offered a free private concert - via telephone.
In order to qualify for the concert, you need to send them an MMS (a photo via mobile phone) of yourself holding the CD, preferably with the receipt. Upon receiving the documentation, the duo will do their best to find a concert date and time that suits all of you.
Thanks Mogens for the link.
Related: Bubble Star At Home
• Private Telephone Concerts (Danish)
'Bubble Star at Home' is series of intimate punk-electronic mini-concerts that took place in private Parisian homes around 2002/03.
The concerts could be booked from a website and was performed by artist/singer Bubble Star (aka Isabelle le Doussal) who is perhaps best known as the lead singer of the French indie-rock band Prototypes that recently had a song featured in an iPod add.
Today, the home-service is inactive but there is still some evidence of its existence at the website of cultural production company DokiDoki. 'Bubble Star at Home' was performed, a few years before YouTube existed, which probably explains the mini-sized video documentation.
Related1: a few months ago, before giving a concert in Copenhagen, Marilyn Manson warmed up by playing a few songs in a small private apartment.
Related2: home-performances by SU-EN and Nuria Dina.
Last week, the brilliant Danish TV program den 11. time (11th hour) featured the bizarre story about a local DJ - Kid Kishore - who momentarily changed his artistic name.
It is quite normal that musicians copy each other's music but when Kid Kishore decided to copy the name of Trentemøller, a successful Danish electro-musician, things got interesting.
According to Kid Kishore, he merely took the artistic name because he liked it, not to hijack the identity of Trentemøller. However, that is exactly what happened. Soon after changing his MySpace profile to Trentemøller, Kid Kishore got an invitation to play at a club who assumed he was the original one.
Consequently, on the night Kid Kishore turned up to play he got rejected at the door. Although he never really claimed to be the real Trentemøller, but just a different Trentemøller, the police was called as the club apparently mistook him for a troublemaker. Fortunately the officers seemed to recognize the irony of the situation and nothing further happened.
To avoid confusion Kid Kishore is no longer using Trentemøller's name.
Related: Identity corrections carried out by the The Yes Men.
• Path to a video clip of the show In Danish
RFID is often associated with highly practical and somewhat ordinary functions such as tracking and identifying products (e.g. consumer goods) as well as people (e.g. ID cards).
However within the last few years media artists have begun playing around with RFID and introduced much more creative and sensorial ways of using the technology.
One of these artists is Mogens Jacobsen who was recently commissioned by The Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde, to come up with an new way of presenting the Museum's vast archive of sound-art.
From this brief, the artist created Audiobar (Hørbar), a physical bar-like social environment that enable visitors to interact with the sounds via RFID tagged bottles.
Each bottle in Audiobar is labeled with different keywords such as 'slow', narrative', 'noisy' etc. and by moving the bottles around, visitors can play sounds that match the keywords.
Audiobar is currently on exhibit at the Museum for Contemporary Art Roskilde Denmark.
Contact: Sebastian Campion