Hi

How nice of you to come back. Not "nice' er... Hi!

Later I thought that what I sent was not one of my finer writings.
Cerainly, I didn't want to put down the masses of fine work that are done.

I see myself as part of new media writing.

"New" as denotation is fine; but I wonder where it starts.

A. N. Anthropologist has remarked that technology we do not understand is
functioning as magic. It applied with analog kit, which is where I
started, and people did say wow! A tape recorder could make them say wow.
Henri Chopin fellating his microphone made them say wow.

When I first heard quadraphonic sound (Lars Gunnar Bodin et al), I said
wow. I got used to that, made my own, and then said wow again when I heard
hong kong trams moving through Camden Peoples Theatre in 8 channel sound
courtesy of John Levack Drever

I have also heard 16 channel sound in the last few years the content of
which might be heard in a lift but with delicate and empty-headed
spatalisation

Eno's work with audio loops of different lengths engaged me for a while.
But he's right. It sounds more complex than it is. I got the idea and then
began to fall asleep. (Fortunately he is various and often worth listening
to)

In a way the category new media is flawed because it is the newness which
defines it rather than the appropriateness of the medium to the work.It's
a stance for our time -- solution without problem, solution looking for a
problem, a complete solution unquote

Because it is very easy to be impressive, it's easy to do smoke and
mirrors if you have the I.T. skills

I admire the way that live coding people show what they are doing. When I
make sound art, however we categorise it, I aim to use my score as my
visual material so that it can be read.

The Fahlstrom quote -- I don't know what the original was, I have only
seen a translation -- might be misleading. When Bob Cobbing picked it
up,there was readymade humour there because he was working on mucky ink
duplicators as visual writing tools and repro machines.

On one occasion, he eschewed a studio and worked with a complexly-echoing
staircase to treat his voice.

On many occasions, though, in his late 1960s multi-channelwork, it was
engineered by Sveriges Radio engineers. I wasn't there but he published
some of his whississippi studio score - drawings made quickly for the
engineer. "Quick and dirty" as in QDOS from which, I believe, early MSDOS
was produced. That quick, that dirty, prototype stuff

Watching him work was interesting. There was a practical
matter-of-factness about it, drawing not to be looked at itself but to be
worked from (as in studio notes) or with a knowledge of how the
photocopier would transform it

His father had been a sign writer and much had been "inherited". But in
terms of "dirty" I offer the story of a sign-writer my father managed on
behalf of his firm. This guy could paint an advertisement across the side
of a large truck, a field of cereal with a woman smiling as she holds the
resultant mass-produced loaf, from a print the size of a standard writing
pad. He could do it free hand, scaling it up in his head as he balanced on
a ladder.

BUT

he could only do it when, with the connivance of his wife, my father had
dragged and or bullied him out of bed, shaking from delirium tremens and
been taken to the pub where he was allowed two pints of beer. His hands
stopped shaking. His eyes focussed. And he performed his virtuosic act of
graphic reproduction. The side of a lorry later, he was beginning to
shake, took the cash and went to the pub. Once the money went to his wife;
but he beat her up till she gave it to him.

Then there is lo-tech. I rather like lo-tech. Children's toys etc Don't
start me on that

What Fahlstrom may have meant by dirty may be seen in his gallery images.
The compositional methods. The multi voice poems, in bis 1966 book it's
all very precise

That may be, as I recall, partly to do with letterpress setting -- an
analogue of the way a computer screen can make whatever is displayed upon
it look impressive! Though the Fahlstrom poems *are impressive

And the sound work, Birds in Sweden, for instance, which is on ubu, is
beautifully made, flawless, yet all put together with a razor blade and
splicing tape - I dont know how else it could have been done 50 years ago

Dirty, in these senses then may be more  to do with what one might call
the romantic versus the classical -- horrible horrible terms... er
expressionistic vs ... whatever

Cobbing making his typestracts vs the spareness of a Hamilton Finlay

Maybe

I *do sense a problem with live presence. Plenty of willingness to offer
showpersonship. I don't mean that really. I mean risk-taking and
vulnerability. In many ways, that's where it is at for me.

& a danger in performance or coding or graphical terms is in the work that
is superbly executed but empty

enough already

L

n Wed, February 24, 2010 15:47, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> I guess you mean the term, Lawrence. And are questioning the 'new' as
> maybe too much?
>
> But, wow, if these new practitioners are  ' worried by live presence
> in performance' that's sad. I would agree that that 'space' is still a most
> exciting one.
>
> So thanks for your thoughts. I suspect I'm a bit 'cleaner' than you,
> but I agree that the active play is still something exciting.
>
> I do admit that a few years ago when I was examining a thesis on the
> 'new' online poetry scene, I was amazed by some of the programming
> while bored stiff by the actual words playing across my computer screen.
>
> So there's still work to be done....
>
>
> Doug
> On 24-Feb-10, at 2:53 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> There is a general imprecision to it. Presumably that will even out.
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
>
> Why can’t words mean what they say?
>
>
> Robert Kroetsch
>
>


-- 
"The desire to testify": interview with Chris Goode
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/2010/02/desire-to-testify.html

‘a song and a film’ by Lawrence Upton -- Veer Publications / Writers Forum
ISBN: 978-1-907088-05-6 A5 84 pages. 2009. £6.00

"water lines and other poems" by Lawrence Upton  - Pdf_16x16 111 pages
free download http://chalkeditions.co.cc

‘snap shots and video’ by Lawrence Upton -- Writers Forum
ISBN: 978-1-84254-113-5 A5 52 pages. £6.00

Lawrence Upton
AHRC Creative Research Fellow
Dept of Music
Goldsmiths, University of London