Art review on Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948-1980

Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948-1980

 

 

 

 

Medium of work: Sound

Format/Genre of work: A 20th century electonic music composition
It is medium specific

Introduction of the work:

 

Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948-1980 is a collection of 43 electronic music compositions in 1937-1982 in 3CDs. While the collection is too large, I search the pieces one by one in youtube. The authors includes John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Milton Babbitt, Laurie Spiegel, Robert Ashley, LaMonte Young, Morton Subotnick,  Iannis Xenakis etc. As there is too much work in the collection, I choose the one that I was interested most in the collection to do the analysis of the work which is Otto Luening - "Low Speed" in 1952

 

Introduction of Otto Luening - "Low Speed"

 

Otto Luening - "Low Speed" was premiere in October, 1952 in New York. It was early tape compostion which from a major figure in electric music with using of flute. As Otto Luening is a flutist and also a tape musician, he combines the idea from both sides. As he wanted to explore the quality of the instrument, he slowed significantly to meet the goal. He also used the tape echo to create the pulses of the music. It begins with the echo from the tape, then it creates interference and texture with the flute and the echo. Finally it resolve with the slow of the tape echo and the flute to a single sound.

 

Personal Impression

 

The work in The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, 1948-1980 have a lots of electronic music that created in the early period in America. It contains a large range of electronic musics that I have never listen before. However, the electronic music actually limits the diversity of sound in some kind of nature. For example, the electronic music could only create a certain range of dynamics and effects which sounds like a little bit plain to me. Moreover, the emotion that we owns in the daily life seems being remove in electronic music which is te part I really hate.

Microwave 2012 workshops

Microwave 2012 workshops

 

Rather than only participate the exhibition of Microwave 2012, I actually chose 3 workshops to participate and met the artist of the exhibition directly.

 

 

The first workshop that I participate is the Invisible Disparities : A Workshop of the Poetics of Dust

by Ernesto Klar. Ernesto Klar was actually interested in the realtionship between dust and time. I was being confused that I could never imagaine how the relationship could be linked.  Ernesto Klar further explained that dust condense and stayed in place that passed through a long history. The dust of the place represent all of the history, culture and  political events theough time. He started a 3 year project which went to different places in the world and collected the dust in the place by a vaccum. This was the picture he stand in front of the UNESCO and vaccum the dust.

 

The exhibition lead him the first time to vist Hong Kong. While he also wants to vaccum the dust in Hong Kong and he have no idea how to start. We suggest a few places for him to start the project like the Kowloon park and the Wall Village. We also introduced him to go to the crazy market in Sam Shui Po where he could find everythig cheap there. We also exchange the email contact in the workshop. It was a excellent experience to listen to foreigns that how they see Hong Kong where everything compressed and share how I feel about Hong Kong. It also makes me to  rediscover Hong Kong as a place I lived.

 

The second workshop that I have participated was Data Happenings: A maker workshop exploring data driven text, code and sound from the network

By Helen Pritchard x Winnie Soon. The reason that there is no picture is the workshop need notebook, audicity and web to create a piece of art according to some rules. According to the instruction by Winnie Soon and Helen Pritchard, we used the search engine of twitter and search some keywords to find some sentence. After aply a rule to the sentence, we put the sentence in text2speech.com and change it into MP3. Then we linked all the sentence together. I did not choose the keywords from them. Instead I choose to search the keyword "I" and cut off a number of sentence. Then I apply to the rule that all of the sentence started in "I'. The outcome was a lot of fun. I found a sentence like " I want to panch you in the face". However, through the sound generated by the computer, the sentence remove all of the emotions in the sentence and speak in a very clam tone. One of the participant uses the keyword "finance" and replace the word as "all bankers are greedy". The outcome of the audio is full of "all bankers are greedy" which is very interesting.

 

 

The last workshop that I participated is Conditional Drawing

By Nicholas Hanna, UCLA Software Art Studio.

 

(Nicholas Hanna)

 

I was first interested by the workshop as a science student of how could use the concept of processing to create drawings. Nichlas hanna is the artist who hold this workshop but he is also the one who being as our group's groupmate. We draws a lots of pictures according to some rules.

For example: 1. draw dots until you feel it is enough

2. draw circles around the dots and it need to be overlap with other circle.

3. connect the dots together only when there is overlapign circle.

(Play with 2 people)

 

 

Although we follow the rules but we get numerous different kinds of picture affer the drawing.

 

We then continued to play other drawing games in the workshop.

 

Then we try to copy the signal from the right person.

 

 

At last we stand in a line and past the signal that generate by me. I thought we fail in this experiment as we got a totally different pictures in the end.

 

The workshop introduce  the concept of processing through a graphic way which contains a lots of fun. Most of the participate shares a great time in the workshop.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Microwave 2012

Microwave 2012 Exhibition

 

The Microwave 2012 Exhibition uses the concept of encode and decode as the theme of the exhibition this year in the City Hall. They invited artist from all over the world to show their art work and organise the workshop in Hong Kong. The following are the work shows on the exhibition.

 

 

This work use the image from google map to create a 3 dimensional abstract piece. It inspire us to think more about where we are living in the world.

 

 

This is my favorite work in the exhibition which show the art work through capture the movement of human being through the camera. However, it is just a little bit different to the other art work that use with the motion capture. The dots will only concentrate when the people is stable in a place. It just make me think about the meditation of asian culture that energy will get only when we are in peace.

And I was staill wondering whether the screen is borrow from SCM as I remember that there is one curve LCD in SCM lab.

 

 

 

 

 

This art work is a little bit special. The artist uses the google news to find the ratio of news in categaries and use red, blue and grey to represent different kind of news and print it on T shirt. Watching the colthing in the exhibition is just like reading the situation of the country in a short second. For instance, the clothes with the red bar(represent the military news in Turky), blue bar(represent the education news in Turky), and grey(represent the irrelavant news in Turky) shows the news in Turky mostly focus on the part of military. It seems like a easy read general news.

 

 

Korean artist exhibition

Korea Art Today: BEAM"

I went to the art exhibition which organised by Contemporary Art Exhibition in Harbor City on 11 November.

Choi So Young is the artist from the cais gallery creates her works through the using of the texture of  denim to present the world. Most of her works were using blue jeans. Moreover, some of her works are so big that did never come to Hong Kong this time. 

The work of art above was created by another artist who use different color to reflect the spirit of life and mood. 

The picture of horse called road without road  is created by Park Sung tae . This horse actually use a material like a metal net and re-transform it into a 3 dimensional movement of an energetic horse.  

Here comes my favorite artist in the exhibition, Kwon Hyun Jin who use paint and plastic to expense the colors. In the exhibition the picture was put in the most brightest place where the sun shines create a kind of peace in my point of view.

The following one is just like the movement of the sea which put just in front of the harbor create a certain of cohesive to the work. 

 Lee So yuen, the artist who created the following art create painting through using skills to imitate the computer image. It create the tension between the background. It also makes me confuse with the art as a computer work when I first saw it.

It was a wonderful trip of the exhibition in which I could know more about the artist in the world and how art could so close to our life. 

Art Review on Music for 18 Musicians

Art Review on Music for 18 Musicians from Steve Reich in 1978

Medium of work: Sound
Format/Genre of work: A 20th century music composition
It is medium specific

A little program note on Music for 18 Musician 

Music for 18 Musician is a 55 minutes long composition which composed by Steve Reich and premiere on April 24, 1976 at The Town Hall in New York City. As what he stated in the topic of the composition, it was a piece that composed for 18 musicians only which includes the follows:

1. violin
2. cello
3. female voice
4. female voice
5. female voice
6. piano
7. piano
8. piano and maracas
9. marimba and maracas
10. marimba and xylophone
11. marimba and xylophone
12. marimba and xylophone
13. metallophone and piano
14. piano and marimba
15. marimba, xylophone, and piano
16. clarinet and bass clarinet
17. clarinet and bass clarinet
18. female voice and piano

This piece of music is continued to stay in A Major and repeated to played all the seven chords. It basically separated into 2 parties. One of them sustain the "pulse" of the piece throughout the pieces while the another part played by the human breaths and the wind instrument measures the duration of the pulses and doing interference with the first part as they could do how long they could. There is also a issue about the melody fight with the harmony and how they developed in the piece. The piece begins and the develops in the whole piece. However, there is no resolve of the piece. 

Personal impression on the piece

The first time I heard this song is through the drawing lesson. While the tutor requested us to draw an abstract painting based on the music he gave, and  Music for 18 Musician is exactly what he played to us. The first thing I was noticed on the harmony of the piece. As it seems it never had a theme melody of the song, it made me felt like I was falling into abyss or surround by a lots of movement notes. I felt restless by listening to this piece. Moreover, after finishing the painting I felt totally exhausted as I had used out too much energy to complete the work. 

While doing this art review, I listen to the whole piece for an hour and get a different point of view. I felt peace after listen to the pulse of the song which is similar to I watch the waves forms and vanishes in the beach. 

New Vision Festival Phase 7

Student Workshop by phase7 performing. arts (Germany)

The New Vision Festival invites a lots of new artist in the world to perform their art in Hong Kong. The most attractive program of the Festival to me is the Phase 7 performing art created by Sven Sören Beyer (The art director of phase 7),  Frieder Weissm, other staffs and musicians. It is very expensive for me to watch the show, so I apply for the workshop.

In the workshop, Sven Sören Beyer and his team members shares their art work and projects that they have done individual and in team. They also further introduce the show and the equipment that they used in the show  It is a show using 64+4+4 speakers(60 in surroundings 4 in the top of the LCDs and 4 in the top up wall), lights effects with 4 huge LCD screen that surround into a square and put in the air. When they play some of their music to all of us, it surprises me that the speakers create a 3 dimensional space that we could actually recognize where is the sound coming from, what is the situation. Most of the sound comes from glasses, airplane and environment. While they played raining sound, I actually felt like I was being rained.
The sound engineer explain more that because of the budget and time they have they could only use the sound of instruments that sounds like real.

The video below is the show that they had done in Hong Kong before