Abstracts
Caleb Kelly - Cracked, Broken and New
From the mid 20th century into the 21st, artists and musicians manipulated, cracked and broke audio media technologies to produce novel, unique and indeterminate sounds and performances. Artists such as John Cage, Nam June Paik, Milian Knížák, Christian Marclay, Yasunao Tone, Oval and Otomo Yoshihide pulled apart the technologies of music playback, both the playback devices - phonographs and CD players - and the recorded media - vinyl records and Compact Discs.
The paper will discuss the old media practices of "cracked media" as a precursor to the now common place approaches to media production. These practitioners approached old media in a manner that mirrors the attributes of contemporary new media. Specifically the variability of data manipulation in relation to the deliberate crack and destruction of both the record and later the turntable itself. New media has at its core the ability to transform digital code into new objects which are not fixed and objects that can be developed and altered in an infinite number of ways. Old media, such as vinyl records, were created as final fixed products. Cracked media, then, takes these fixed objects and transforms then into new works. The paper will discuss the "Broken Music" of Milan Knížák examining how he took records and permanently edited them through his destructive techniques.
Robin Fox - Sound: Sight and Space - Recent Working Methodologies
Robin Fox will discuss the transition from working with audio and particularly lap-top based performance to working in the area of synaesthetic audio-visual correspondence. The discussion will raise issues about hardware mediated synaesthetic artworks and the technological hurdles faced in the realisation of this work. His current use of laser technologies as an extension of films made using the cathode ray oscilloscope has prompted a re-evaluation of his audio aesthetic moving away from live performance and toward immersive installation. As a pre-cursor to the Friday night performance he will also discuss his approach to sound diffusion alluding to the ways in which working with contingency and space can transform the composer's relationship to sonic materials and phenomena.
Yasunao Tone - Group Ongaku, Hi-Red Center and Team Random to Paramedia and Noise/Parasite
In the beginning I would like to talk about my formative years a little, that includes group activities of Group Ongaku, Hi-red center and Team Random. I retrospectively consider my work in this period had somehow singular and seminal elements of later work. I was also interested in theory as an art critic. Then I moved to the United States in 1972.
Emigration forces artists to reinvent him/herself and I am not the exception. Necessity of reinventing myself and reformulating my concepts on music made me finally resulted new piece and new concept, of which first I negotiating the Cagean idea of indeterminacy and new work, which started from Voice and Phenomena (1976) by chance, which brought about Critique of the metaphysic of the presence as well as critique of ethnocentrism through practicing the piece. Of course, I learned those ideas from Jacque Derrida, books like La Voix et le Phénomène in 1970 and De la Grammatologie.