British artist Vicki Bennett takes you on a roller coaster-ride with her art project People Like Us. In performances, videos, collages and music, her amazing editing techniques and sense of humor leave you flabbergasted and enthusiastic at the same time. People Like Us is like free-zone where appropriation meets alchemy, humor meets social critique and the boundless imagination meets reality (so called).
Moor Mother is a Philadelphia-based artist, musician and activist who utilizes her multi-genre practice to speak to consciousness, identity, blackness and the sociopolitical global landscape. She started to record and release music in 2012 as a solo project under the porous, playful rubric of self-defined sounds like “project-housing bop,” “slaveship punk” and “blk girl blues,” and her output is a patchwork quilt of spoken word, poetry and fractured lyricism alongside guttural electronics, dissonant textures and fragments of instrumentation. Her discography is vast and expanding, with albums like 2016’s Fetish Bones and 2017’s The Motionless Present critically acclaimed exercises in power electronics and intense vocalizations.
Moor Mother discussed her upbringing in Maryland, Black Quantum Futurism, being addicted to collaboration and the writing process in her lecture at RBMA Berlin 2018. #RBMA20 #afrofuturism #sampling
TOPICS:
6:15 – Growing up in Aberdeen, Maryland
14:46 – Stumbling into Afrofuturism
20:45 – Moving to Philadelphia and finding new scenes
33:26 – Writing and sampling approaches
39:55 – The Black Quantum Futurism collective and project
51:44 – The need for collaboration
Destino is an animated short film released in 2003 by Walt Disney Feature Animation1. Destino is unique in that its production originally began in 1945, 58 years before its eventual completion in 2003. The project was originally a collaboration between Walt Disney and Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, and features music written by Mexican songwriter Armando Domínguez and performed by Mexican singer Dora Luz. It was included in the Animation Show of Shows in 2003.
"Time" is a song by English progressive rock band Pink Floyd. It is included as the fourth track on The Dark Side of the Moon (1973) and was released as a single in the United States. Bassist Roger Waters wrote the lyrics and the music is credited to all four band members. Keyboardist Richard Wright shares lead vocals (his last until "Wearing the Inside Out" on The Division Bell) alongside guitarist David Gilmour.
"Eastman's experimentalism shared some tropes with Cage's, particularly the juxtaposition of disparate sonic materials, amplification, electronics, and tape music. 'Creation' (ca. 1973) is exemplary in this regard. Eastman composed it for the S.E.M. Ensemble, and it was played by Kotik, Eastman, and Williams on their European tour in the summer of 1973. The piece is, like 'Tripod' and 'Thruway', bifurcated into a prerecorded sound collage and a live acoustic component. Eastman's tape collage brings together wildly divergent sounds—vocal drones on an open fifth, sounds of screaming, laughing, crying, and electronic feedback. On the recording Eastman, Williams, and Kotik quote popular songs ('Danny Boy' and 'The Girl from Ipanema' stand out). Gay signifiers emerge periodically as well on the tape. Eastman and his fellow performers affect a lisping comic tone of voice while discussing subjects more expected in a John Waters film than in a classical music concert. This tape accompanies live sounds of percussion, flute, and piano that blend repetition, improvisation, and virtuosic displays from the performers. Eastman's inclusion of queerly surreal material is in line with a long tradition of avant-garde shock techniques in which abject subject matter is joined to an equally disruptive musical surface or formal conceit." - Ryan Dohoney, "John Cage, Julius Eastman, and the Homosexual Ego", in: Benjamin Piekut (ed.), "Tomorrow is the Question. New Directions in Experimental Music Studies", Ann Arbor MI 2014, pp. 39-62, here p. 43
"Creation" for flute, piano, percussion, and recorded sounds (1973)
played by Petr Kotík, Julius Eastman & Jan Williams (S.E.M. Ensemble)
photo (by R. Nemo Hill): Julius Eastman with a charming lady named Bill Paradise
Emergency Broadcast Network is the name of a multimedia performance group formed in 1991 that took its name from the Emergency Broadcast System. The founders were Rhode Island School of Design graduates Joshua Pearson, Gardner Post and Brian Kane (author of the Vujak VJ software). Kane left EBN in 1992. The EBN Live Team included DJ Ron O'Donnell, video artist/technologist Greg Deocampo (founder of Company of Science and Art (CoSA), and founding CTO of IFILM.com), artist/designer Tracy Brown and technologist Mark Marinello.
Josh Pearson, EBN's charismatic front man and principal performance artist, was also EBN's music composer and main video editor. The music and video editing techniques he personally developed and refined have been hugely influential on a generation of advertising and music video editors.
The first EBN video project was a musical remix of the Gulf War, created in 1991 as the war was still ongoing. The VHS tape of the remix project, which contained the George H.W. Bush "We Will Rock You" cover, became a viral underground hit, and was distributed widely by fans as bootleg copies. In the summer of 1991, EBN traveled with the first Lollapalooza tour, distributing tapes and showing their videos on a modified station wagon with TVs on the roof. The group also became well known for their media sculptures and stage props which were created by Gardner Post.
The EBN modus operandi was to take cable television broadcasts and remix them with a funky beat, often having the lyrics "sung" not by a singer but by half-second sound clips from TV, spliced together. For example, the lyric "electronic behavior control system" would be created with a clip of Ross Perot saying "electronic", followed by a clip of George H. W. Bush saying "behavior", then Ted Koppel saying "control", and finally a clip of Bill Clinton saying "system". This technique has been named video scratching.
Among their videos are "Get Down and Electronic Behavior Control System" from their 1995 album Telecommunication Breakdown, which mocks the way television controls our lives. Another was a cover of "We Will Rock You" by Queen, with a vocal track made up of remixed clips of George H. W. Bush making announcements about the Gulf War. Bono of U2 took notice of their work and hired them to provide visuals for their Zoo TV Tour. EBN's video work featured prominently into the show, and their "We Will Rock You" cover was played at the beginning of each show. EBN also produced visuals for The Edge's performance of "Numb" on the 1993 MTV Video Music Awards. In addition to the visuals, audio from those clips were featured in the live performance to create rhythmic effects.
Brian Kane has since worked a number of times with British AV artists Addictive TV on many of their projects, both live and recorded - including Mixmasters and at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Greg Deocampo continues his video remixes independently today, using footage from the 2003 invasion of Iraq (which he refers to as Gulf War II). In 2006, Deocampo started working with a trio of London video turntablists, Eclectic-method: Jonny Wilson, Ian Edgar, and Geoff Gamlen.
MARVOMOVIE (1967) taken from GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen (Out Feb 23)
An extract from an early Jeff Keen animation (1962) with a soundtrack recorded (by keen) in 2007 using an old Wasp synth and shortwave radio.
An extract from Jeff Keen's breakneck Artwar series last performed as a multi-projection event at Brighton's Phoenix gallery 2006.
'Jeff Keen has been collecting props from dumpsters and toy shops, spray painting them, setting fire to them and animating the results for forty years. His underground films pre-date Warhol, his fans include some of the most notorious and legendary figures in the world of cinema. Forget the so called greats of the silver screen, the true cinematic visionaries are elsewhere, hidden away, woefully neglected by the bulk of historians, working like alchemists with their old super 8 cameras, chocking refrigerators full of nearly out of date stock and bizarre props made from scrap or purchased in bulk from the pound shop. Jeff keen is one such figure, a true great of the avant-garde, experimental and underground film...' Jack Sargeant
Born in 1923 and having served as a soldier in World War Two, Jeff Keen began making films at the age of 37, prompted by a dearth of screenings at the local art-school film society. So began over 40 years of unique, imaginative, irrepressible film-making that has outlived the various scenes in which it thrived: the 60s counter-culture, punk and beyond. Featuring animated cut-outs and paintings, and populated by friends and family in a variety of guises, including The Cat Woman, Silverhead, Babyjelly and many more, these frenetic films reveal Keen's deep love of comics, B-movies and pulp novels while also making darker references to wartime experience.
Using various film stocks, though always preferring 8mm - as more oppositional, more disposable, less of a sell-out - this self-taught artist and pioneer of independent film impresses a very personal and highly individual stamp upon all his work. Often dubbed ‘pop art', these explosive films conjure all manner of associations: graffiti art, surrealism and home movies from the future...
Drawn from the various phases of his output - from his turn-of-the-60s beatnik movies through to the apocalyptic beauty of his multi-layered videos of the 90s - these four programmes offer a new and long overdue opportunity to explore the alternative cinematic world of Brighton's very own Dr Gaz.
"Whether by design or chance Jeff Keen's filmmaking activities have been dominated by random factors from the start. His initial involvement grew from an association with a Brighton art college film society, which acquired 8mm equipment: 'I was almost like a film factory...I was just turning out movies to justify the existence of the film society.' His earliest extant film, the second version of 'Wail' survives only in an out of focus 8mm dupe and an even more visually bizarre 16mm blow-up taken from it. By 1965 he had made a twin screen 8mm movie 'The Pink Auto' that by its very nature can never be shown identically twice. In 1967 overcoming a reluctance to unite one particular image track with one particular soundtrack in perpetuity, he added sound to his first 16mm film Marvo Movie..." Read Full Article (6 pages)
DJ Spooky (Paul Miller) talks about the history of media and thoughts about media in culture. He discusses and demonstrates the unexpected side effects of free speech, law, and copyright while showing the power of remixed art. The future and meaning of remix culture is discussed.
Scratch (92 mins) is a 2001 documentary film, directed by Doug Pray, that examines cultural and historical perspectives on the birth and evolution of hip-hop disc jockeys (DJs), scratching and turntablism and includes interviews with some of hip-hop's most famous and respected DJs.
Interviewees include: Grand Wizard Theodore (the inventor of the scratch), Grand Mixer Q-bert (Title given by Grand Mixer DXT to Q Bert in the movie), Grand Mixer DXT, Z-Trip, Mix Master Mike, Rob Swift, DJ Premier, Afrika Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay, Cut Chemist, NuMark, DJ Craze, DJ Shadow, DJ Babu and DJ Krush. Madlib and Peanut Butter Wolf also make uncredited appearances at a scrathching jam session.
Although this 10-minute work-in-progress draws from interviews used in the documentary Copyright Criminals: This is a Sampling Sport, it does not reflect the overall look, feel, and narrative of the full-length documentary.
Copyright Criminals will be completed in Spring 2007 and submitted to film festivals, to be followed by a DVD release. http://copyrightcriminals.com/
