The past few years

I was sad yesterday and I didn't think I was gonna be... But i started looking through sounds I recorded on my voice memos app over tha past few years and it made it a lot worse. I made a short peice out of these sounds .. I found the process very therapeutic but I feel a deep sadness when I listen to this piece. Much of that is due to my connection to the individual sounds. When I listen to it I feel I have died. I hope some of this feeling can be picked up on by the audience.

"The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature, in her manner of operation."  - John Cage

I cant think this way.. I feel so idle .. I love to do nothing and observe but it also makes me feel purposeless, useless... bad. Here in many of these recordings I am idle, observing.. and still compulsively recording. appropriating. *Insert Sontag quote here*

I like the sounds of me holding the phone while recording too. the clicks and scratches and static. It creates a strange feeling of point of view and a feeling that reminds me of listening to an old tape recorder. It's amature nature. It makes it feel more autobiographical. I thought it was an interesting interplay of forms where I record a tape recorder playing old tapes of my grandpa taking voice memos, on my digital voice memo app.

Rashaad Newsome: Rad Awesome!

Once again the guest speaker's talk made this passage come to mind immediately: "Primitive and pre-alphabet people integrate time and space as one and live in an acoustic, horizonless, boundless, olfactory space, rather than in visual space. Their graphic presentation is like an x-ray. They put in everything they know, rather than only what they see. ... the primitive artist twists and tilts the various possible visual aspects until they fully explain what he wishes to represent." McLuhan 56/7
He continues to talk about the how the new media artist now works in this way again. I saw this in the video and visual collages of Rashaad Newsome.
I found it very interesting when he said he wanted to represent the body through architecture although I'm not sure how he meant that or whether or not I thought he was completely successful.
I like what he said about everything being collage. Its funny he got knighted and I like that in the video he went back and got knighted by people he respected instead. After the third video of the trilogy I was kind of wondering why he was using himself in the videos. It seems so.... something lol.
As much as I liked the collages, I found the video art more affecting. "Icon" gave me chills. The interplay of sound and dance as well as digital collage was really effective.

Decay