William Burroughs by Jenny Long
Image source: theartark.com
Text Source: UbuWeb
At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. Andr Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this pointhad no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.
MP3 blogs are growing in popularity, attracting thousands of users daily. But while bloggers see their relationship with the industry as one of cooperation, it is a legally grey area. Chris Alden reports
The Guardian
“Find a feeling, pass it on.” So sang pop dreamers The Coral two summers ago: these days, it’s the mantra of a new breed of musical bloggers.
MP3 bloggers, as they are known, are people who hunt down and post musical gems — usually hard-to-find or niche MP3s — for others to discuss and, for a limited time, download.
Simon Pott from Bristol is one. As main contributor to Spoilt Victorian Child, a group blog named after a 1993 B-side by The Fall, he thinks of himself as a kind of DJ for the internet.
“I can’t help it,” he says. “If you pick a record up or are listening to something great, you can’t wait to play it out and share your excitement. When I’m at home listening through my records I get the same feeling.”
Performance is so many things: the synchronized sounds of a symphony; actions with words in a play; steps and turns in a dance; words from a pulpit. Performance art, too, is variable, perhaps too multifarious to define, even with semicolons. At traditional performances with traditional support materials, from symphonies with program notes to theatre productions with playbills, performance acts as replay, a repeat of an event, a memorization of a string of notes or a set of lines, a reformulation of a tested formula. Then there are those performances that vary, that respond to the moment, that unfold through the implementation of chance or improvisation or, more and more, digitization. With the insertion of new technologies into performance, the question arises – do actions result from numbers? What indeed is the connection between the physical and the digital? Does the digital component determine the performance, or do actions generate a numeric pattern, which then underlies the piece’s structure?
New media products and programming developed rapidly in the past year. Jeffrey Brown takes a look at the largest media stories of 2006, including the rise of YouTube and the ongoing struggles in the newspaper business.
JEFFREY BROWN: Yes, the big stars of what we can call old media were in the spotlight in 2006, notably when Charles Gibson and Katie Couric traded mornings for evenings.
But another old media mainstay, Time magazine, passed over the anchors and other newsmakers, and instead selected as its person of the year, “You.” That’s you, the viewer, reader, listener, and more and more creator of news content.
As Hollywood prepares to unveil its latest raft of big budget sequels, cinemagoers can expect to feel a sense of deja vu once again in 2007.
With more than half of 2006’s most profitable films being follow-ups to existing franchises, last year’s box office receipts have consistently disproved the adage that familiarity breeds contempt.
A short recap of Creative Commons-founder Lawrence Lessig‘s evangelization talk (or rather motivation session for the converted) at 23C3 in Berlin about the differences between culture and code.
The fundamental change is the fact that code had been used to create things like printer-drivers and such. But – since a few years, code, or rather the tools that had been coded have become a main element in the creation of culture as we use and witness it today. Especially the whole mashup-culture is heavily relying on the techniques and the mindset of digital creation and open access to other’s works for sampling from and building upon, etc. Popular examples are the anime music-clip subculture like the Muppet Hunter, the Jesus Christ the Musical-clip or lots of pieces that borrow from news networks’ footage to make their own suggestive edits.
Last May, i blogged about Plagiarismo, an exhibition that tried to demonstrate that the appropriation and re-formulation of other artists’ ideas is an essential component of culture.
Vuk Cosic – who’s having a solo exhibition at the Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana- wrote me then that he was putting together a show called CTRL-C on a similar subject. The show has just opened at the galerija Simulaker in Slovenia. Here’s the gist:
09/03/2006
To american dub producer and musician Slade “Burning Babylon” Anderson reggae in his begginings reggae was just a side thing. He started his musical career by playing guitar in punk/metal bands like The Straw Dogs and The Freeze, where he builds himself in solid guitar player. But when he, in mid 90’s, swiched the guitar with bass, and punk with reggae the remarkable part of his career begins. With his first album “Roots and Heavy” from 1999. Slade tried to imitate his idols, King Tubby and Mad Professor, in his own way, as well as his nationales Thievery Corporation, in which he succseeded. Next album, “Garden of Dub” from 2001. passed even better, as it comes with remarkable cover of Clash’s “Bankrobber” and few hits made on his own, “Into Twilight” and “Dub of Thieves”. Following year he started to work with excellent english dub/roots label & distribution Tanty for which he publishes a maxi single “Dub Shack”, as well as he contributes to their compilation “Roots of Dub Funk” vol.3 with song “Living Soul Dub”.
