Kleptographia – or all photography is theft.

There is an old term from the days of sprocket holes and projectors called found footage; meaning either appropriated footage or literally bits of film discarded on the cutting room floor and then scavenged from the bins outside editing rooms. In the 70s you would have been able to find anything from snippets of earnest documentaries to porn if you knew outside which doors to look in Soho.

Of course you would be hard pushed to find anything so physical nowadays. The web however is just bursting with (mostly low res) digital clips and stills waiting to be found and recontextualised. Keen viewers of this blog will notice that that is pretty much what I have been doing these last few years. Starting firstly not so much with footage per se but with single photos, an accordion for A Rocco Din, a Harley Davidson engine for Engine Trouble, a pin-up poster of Marilyn for Kisser and so on. More recently I have been using short sections of classic films for the Chronocuts series and this has made this appropriation far more explicit indeed, even foregrounded.

In the Chronocuts series the viewer’s likely familiarity with the original footage is an important part of the process but more generally I am always happier working with someone else’s footage or stills. Or to put it another way there is always an unease about taking or originating either photographs or video. There is a sense in which all filming or taking of images involves a certain theft; a removal of something, which doesn’t belong to you.

I shall call this process Kleptographia. There is here something of a parallel with the idea held in aboriginal cultures of photography stealing the soul of those photographed but concept of Kleptographia goes much further to say that all photographic processes involve an illegitimate transference whether they contain people or not. What problematises that transference over say a process like drawing or painting is that nearly all commercially available camera equipment produce uncanny likenesses. Truer, sharper, blacker, brighter, richer colors and detail; the terminology of photography strives endlessly for perfect reproduction to act as some kind of seamless mirror reflecting a reality back to us. Or some illusion that passes for reality. The constant need to resist the illusion of reproduction becomes a time consuming process and can make it all but impossible to originate such material. Where does one look, brazenly through the lens as one swipes the scene? Easier to break a window and make off with a fur than stand on a street corner taking photographs.

So if unhappy to be a part of the Kleptographic process and steal the images in the first place why then happy to be a “fence”: a handler of stolen shots? With found footage and stills the anxiety of the original theft is lifted. The crime being subsumed by the supposed ownership of the image taker. The image or images do not of course belong to the original taker, the thief, they belong to the scene form when they were stolen. The thief’s claim on the images enshrined as it is in copyright law means the fence in this context is by handling the goods serving to release them from the thief’s grasp. Short of destruction and the death of all who have seen the pictures the theft can never be legitimized but in re-appropriating them there is a sense in which one can partially liberate them from the notion of ownership.

Woolworths Closed – UK to follow.

Many branches of Woolworths closed their doors for the last time on Saturday. Since the company went into administration in December it has offered a curious spectacle; its increasingly empty aisles filled with a mixture of bargain hunters and those who just came in to stare. Many seemed to be wandering aimlessly round the store gawping with a curious mix of fascination and nostalgia at the slow motion death throes of a retailer which has been on every UK town high street for 99 years. “Woolies” at it was affectionately known will be genuinely missed by many not least those without the transport to get to the out of town ASDA or Tesco.

In the high street the demise of Woolworths comes on top of a spate of recent shop closures leaving parts of many town centre bleakly empty. The closure of most of these shops was not however bemoaned, as was the passing of Woolworths. There was something symbolic in the closure of Woolies as one person was overheard to say “ its the end of the era”. Hardly the most original of phrases but somehow spot on. For the passing of Woolworths brought on as it was not so much by poor trading but a lack of credit to service the company’s overdraft marks some final chapter in England’s Dreaming. A Thatcherite dream that has held sway for almost thirty years who’s central fantasy was that the UK could shut down all of its manufacturing and rely on some shiny suited city types to make the money.

We would leave the nasty business of making things to low paid foreigners overseas somewhere. They could break their backs and inhale the toxic fumes manufacturing stuff and we would take the profit by pushing paper around. Indeed we even encouraged people to come to the UK to do the jobs we were not that keen on doing here ourselves. We as the first post-industrial country were beyond all that dirty work now. All those who used to make things here in the UK were either pushed into the service sector or onto incapacity benefit.

That we got away with for so long is remarkable. That the rest of the world effectively subsidised our relatively high standard of living for doing pretty much bugger all for thirty years is a trick that Malcolm McLaren would be proud of. Sooner or late though we would get rumbled and the man from the Pru really is sans culottes on this occasion.

When Thatcher was busy closing pits in the early 1980s whole colliery towns were left without a purpose; their populations stranded in the middle of nowhere without any jobs or any really reason d’etre. Much of the UK is now in that position.

Death & The Mirror

Upon reflection.

Expanded Browser Cinema

Here is a cut-up waterwork. Entitled Diced & Sliced. It is an expanded browser version of Row Row. Just how the piece looks and sounds depends on your browser, the speed of your broadband connection, amount of RAM and the general state of your computer. Its different on every set up and slightly different every time you load it.

If you are on a Mac use Safari, Firefox loads movie files in a different odd way that privileges one file over the others and here the browser is showing 16 movies at the same time. Also tested on a PC with IE where it seems to work fine.

If you feel so inclined you can stop and start any slice by clicking and double clicking. Reloading the page will also shake things up. Now and then your browser may crash. Diced & Sliced

About Turn – Tate Modern

When Tate Modern opened it decided to eschew the accepted narrative of chronological isms pioneered by Alfred Barr at MOMA in favour of thematic hanging designed to create interesting and new juxtapositions between artists who would normally inhabit different parts of the museum.

Arguably such a strategy has been a success with many major galleries worldwide adopting a similar approach and of course the ever-increasing visitor numbers would suggest that the public if not applauding the hanging policy are not staying away.

This morning on a visit to the Tate, I was struck by what random attractions the thematic Tate now offers. Re-hung many time since it opened I found myself on level 5 in States of Flux. A space “devoted to the early twentieth-century movements Cubism, Futurism and Vorticism”.

Ok so far so good but what do we get at the entrance to Sates of Flux but a Lichtenstein namely Whaam!. Hang on we must have taken a wrong turn and be in Pop Art? Ah but read on “Cubist innovations such as collage were central to the emergence of Pop Art which combined high and low culture, art and commerce into forceful, celebratory and sometimes critical visions of the post-war consumer era“. Well yes in a way, but this a possibly tentative connection and one, which is not really so robust on close scrutiny.

Elsewhere in States of Flux we find a room with a projection by Jonas Mekas, some Fluxus works (In a Sate of Flux(us) get it?), an After Impressionism room, a Pop Art room and so on. In other words it is a little all other place. Perhaps consequently so is the audience. The more informed can perhaps try to put the pieces of this tentative jigsaw together but most seemed happy to walk very quickly from room to room looking for the next attraction. Few if any were stopping to ponder or contemplate instead they wandered in and out of the rooms at speed looking pleasantly bewildered.

Part of me feels that this re-hang approach should be applauded; that to break away from the conveyor belt of art history is in many ways a positive thing. Certainly its nice to see something like a Mekas given the same weight and space as a Picasso. Too often though the thematic Tate Modern does not suggest a major reappraisal of art history or a studied re-valuation of works by lesser known artists it is all a little too tentative in its connections a little too pix and mix for that.  

Voice Box

Tune in this coming Friday the first of August at 5.30 to Resonance FM and the Sound Projector radio show for 1 hour 30 minutes of Voice Box; a montage of spoken word ill matched and yet perfectly set to music and/or vice versa. All selections by Ed Pinsent and Philip Sanderson.

Update on August 6th: a full track listing is now up on the sound Projector site.

Oramics Live

Last night went to hear (and see) The Life and works of Daphne Oram at the Purcell Rooms. Oram is a little like Delia Derbyshire’s maiden aunt; older, rather primmer in appearance and voice.

Things kicked off with Snow the Geoff Jones film for which Daphne did the soundtrack. Snow deserves the term “classic” a masterpiece of cross cutting and on the beat edits of locomotives pitted against the winter elements all set to Daphne’s slowed down and treated version of a Sandy Nelson number. The lights were then dimmed for the playback of a number of Daphne’s works. This was altogether quite odd; after the screening of Snow this was very much music with the picture turned down as we were now as an audience in a cinematic mode of reception. Surprisingly it was actually highly effective. There was no sense of feeling cheated that we were just listening to a playback with no one on stage even pretending to tweak the EQ or stare at a MacBook. It created a perfect space for concentration and the space for visualisation was left purposefully empty.

The music itself was quite a revelation. The Oramics CD released last year suggested Daphne’s music to be more of historical interest than delivering actual musical pleasure but hearing Four Aspects, Episode Metallic and Pulse Persephone (which are included on the CD) in this context made one aware of just how subtle the works are. The CD mixed such pieces in with some of Daphne’s more commercial work; electronic jingles for power tools and so on and left one with a feeling of quirkiness without substance. This notion was quite dispelled by this playback.

Perhaps less mesmerising was From One to Another  for viola and tape. This reminded me of those rather worthy pieces one used to sit through at St John Smith Sqaure which combined tapes with a classically trained musician’s bowing. Things were to go further downhill though for there followed a 30-minute live remix in which a selection of tired beats and buzzes were overlaid with samples of Daphne's music, which seemed to bare little resemblance to anything Daphne originally recorded. Accompanying this was some basic video manipulation that did little to enhance the music. Many of the audience left for the refuge of the bar.

The evening rounded off with another Geoff Jones film Trinidad and Tobago; a documentary funded by BP that avoided using an overbearing commentary but just combines beautiful footage with an Oram soundtrack. The film helped to restore the mood somewhat and sent us off into the night.

Tagging

There was a time in the great hegemony of mainstream musicalsim when only one or two tags were needed to categorise music "file under progressive or popular" was all that most record shops needed with a smattering of spoken word, country, jazz and misc. Tags as a way to define or carve out a musical territory are now so prolific as to be all but absurd. Here for example is just one group's tags from Last FM: alternative rock ambient electronica contemporary electronica dark electro dark pop depeche mode downbeat downtempo dreams and fantasies electro electro psychedelic electro-acoustic electro-psychedelic electro-rock electronic electronica electropop elektro elektro-indie full-on indie electronica instrumental intrancewetrust progressive trance psy-trance psychedelic psychedelic trance psytrance retro electro...

Tags though date faster than Nike trainers and all of the above already seem a little past it. "Anyone for trance, one lump or two" they murmur in the retirement home disco. So we need a new supply of tags to keep us box fresh. Being prompted yesterday to tag some of my own tracks I responded with nu-bleep, downdrone, avantient, sickstep, homesung, duityorself, fadfleet, voodle, etc, etc.

Heading towards another Boat

Video here

Traffic Calming Measures

Further adventures in pursuit of the roundabout; this time down in Wainscott in Kent. To see the suitably spun movie click here

Hair of the Dog

If by some chance you find yourself in Santa Fe today then why not visit the exhibition Hair of the Dog where you will find work by yours truely in a gallery show that: "investigates the vocabulary, limitations, and mythology of the medium of painting through modern art history and into the 21st century." Rest assured "no artists in the exhibition will apply pigment to canvas in the traditional manner; some will not use paint at all. Portraiture, landscape, and narrative are some of the structures within the language of painting to be engaged." Having been screening for the last 5 years it will be nice to be exhibiting again.

Instant Kitten (The Application)

Today a piece of software no less! This is the Instant Kitten Application I built in Max/Msp/jitter a couple of years ago and which is the brains behind Fleshtones and SkyPoint.

Basically the app provides an instant audio accompaniment to any movie. So how do you use it? OK firstly download the zipped file here.. Unzip it and then double click on the Instant Kitten application inside the folder. It takes a moment or two to warm up. Once going switch it on using the big blue button. Click on the "read" button to open a movie file. Ideally the film should have no soundtrack. It doesn't matter if it does just the existing soundtrack and the new one might get in each others way. OK so the movie is playing. Next click the midi button and change it to QuickTime (unless you have some fancy midi app you want to drive instead). The sound defaults to piano but you can change the instrument in the "change instrument" box to xylophone, flute etc. The duration of the note is set to standard decay but if you want long sustaining notes in the "dur" box enter say 1,000 or even 2,000. You can slow the movie down using the speed box. 0.5 is half speed etc.

Sensitivity sort of controls the response; experiment. To get full screen mode hit the escape button, hit escape to get out of full screen mode as well.

OK it only works on Macs. I've tried it on both PPC and Intel and it seems to function fine though no doubt your computer will immediately break down and crash when you try it.

Bathing Beauty

The third and final of the Standard 8 films shot in 1990-1991 finds us in Cornwall with a little Bathing Beauty.

Old Poster

In the late summer of 1981 to coincide with the release of Snatch 3 an A2 poster was screenprinted. My design was heavily influenced by Theo van Doesburg's cover for the Dadaist magazine Méecano. It was around this time that I started recording with Michael Denton and much of the the execution of the poster (done at the Albany screenprinting workshop) and especially the colour selection was down to him. The pink and turquoise inks were subsequently used for the labels for Snatch 3. Here is the last known remaining example.

Fishing line

For a short while in the late 1990's and early naughties I sent out an occasional fax sheet called Fishing Line. The subject of this one sheet newspaper tended to be fine art topics of the day combined with scratchy drawings. The faxes were sent unsolicited to various art mags and galleries. All looking rather quaint now here is an example or two.

Quadrangle (unedit)

Slightly to my surprise I am still getting requests for the Quadrangle video. Paradoxically the piece was not originally conceived as a stand-alone piece of fixed duration but as an installation. The synchronised music and image movements are produced by a quasi-random algorithm (quasi random in that its output is more akin to an improvisation based on certain parameters). Once running the piece will produce variations indefinitely with no obvious beginning, middle or end. Some intervention on the part of the artist was required to change the visual parameters on the fly, though with some max/msp jiggery pokery these too could be randomised.

I had the work running in such an ongoing fashion when visited one day by Prof Cheese who being in the throes of programming for the Island festival asked for a small slice. I duly obliged recording a section, taking some choice cuts and very quickly assembling a short self-contained piece. Here today though is the whole cut. This is in itself really an extract from the infinite unseen but gives a feeling for what an installation version might be like.