LINER NOTES 2011!

Twenty eleven. I really liked the part where so many people, in so many places, in so many beautiful, creative ways, for so many reasons, in so much solidarity, with so much determination, looked the Establishment in its ugly face & said fuck off already.

An apt theme for the past year, as I experienced & observed it, would be community. It describes the successes of the socio-economic awakenings, the challenges to political establishments, the encampments, the risk-taking of activists for social justice & self-determination, the widening scope of movements against war & to protect water, soil, air, forests, rivers, cultures.

In a year largely defined by people taking to the streets, my year was spent, for better & for worse, less in the street than on the road. I travelled more heavily this year, to perform, than in any other year of my life. It has been utterly fulfilling & I look forward with enthusiasm to more. Everywhere I went I met people eager to create & strengthen the community of experimental & independent music & art. A polemic: real music & art cannot be expressed in market terms, & is a crucial component of societies actively challenging the political, economic, & cultural hegemony of the Establishment.

The following lists are an attempt (probably incomplete) to articulate & thank, in one place, all the wonderful people, venues, & organizations who are nurturing meaningful community in the places I performed & exhibited my work in 2011. What an honor! What a privilege!

THANKS FOR SETTING UP SHOWS! THANKS FOR HOSTING!
Tad Michalak (Burn Down the Capital), Dan Smalls Presents, Tom Orange (Cleveland), Kevin O'Brien Cain (Buffalo), Squeaky Wheel, Brandon Hawk (Dayton), Joel Peterson (Bohemian in Exile series, Detroit), Gabriel Beam (Robinwood Concerthouse), Bubba Crumrine (Ithaca Underground), Martin Blazicek (Bludny Kamen, CZ), DC Sonic Circuits, Vicky Chow (Contagious Sounds, NYC), Santo Pulella (Head West), Mike Kramer ((h)ear Festival), Adam Schatz (Search & Restore), Paul Baldwin (Black Sparrow), Pete Lebel, Stephen Pellegrino, Anne Wellmer, Dewi de Vree, KG Price, Kaleid Series (Chicago), Quiet Cue (Berlin), U-Ex(perimental) (Utrecht), Peter Bradley (Schoolhouse, Guelph), Harold Arts, Jacob Kart (Chicago), Marie Guillerey, Gregory Clow, Joseph Hess, Aaron Hefel (Counter Productions), Thom Elliot (Pleasuredome), Jessica Puglisi, Sam Sowyrda, Rozz Tox (Rock Island IL), Good Style Shop (Madison WI), Nowy Wspanialy Swiat (Warszawa), Bomba (Kraków), Kevin Ernste (Cornell University), Brad Thorla (Anabell's, Akron), Stephen Crowley (Iowa City), Culture Shock & The Westy (Ithaca).

THANKS FOR COLLABORATING WITH ME!
Rafal Mazur, Ensemble Klang, dj sniff, Reuben Radding, Andrew Drury, Red Trio, Joe Sorbara, Paul Dutton, Chad Taylor, Jonathan Goldberger, Alyssa Duerksen, Lindsay Gilmour, Chris Seeds, Michael Stark, Zaun Marshburn, Ryan Zawel, Hank Roberts, Walt Lorenzut, Ross Haarstad (Theatre Incognita), KBD, Dan Friedman, Heather Seggar, Alter Koker, Mark Alban Lotz, Dick Toering, Johanna Varner, Antibody Xtett (Manuel Miethe, Anna Kaluza, Max Andrzejewski, Stephan Bleier, Nico Meinhold, Wolfgang Georgsdorf), Johnny Dowd, Krzysztof Wolek, John Ritz, Margaret Lancaster, Nils Hoover

THANKS FOR SHARING BILLS WITH ME!
Deerhoof, powerdove, Matt Bauder, Hyrrokkin, Nick Millevoi, Fred Thomas, Alter Koker, Seth Graham, Andrew Weathers, Tristan Trump, Forget the Times, Rowan (Shelley Burgon), Rambutan (Eric Hardiman), Holland Hopson, Matta Gawa, Mouth to Mouth to Mouth, Sid Redlin, Arrington de Dionyso, Steve Baczkowski, Sinjo Thraw Mash, Loop Goat, Chris Seeds, Frass Accolades, Wind Farm, Stephen Pellegrino, Joel Peterson, Joe Panzer, Raphael Brim, Mall Mutants, Michael Attias.

THANKS FOR PUTTING OUT AWESOME RECORDS THIS YEAR!
Matt Bauder, dj sniff, Tomek Choloniewski, Matt Wright & Evan Parker, Jason Ajemian & the HighLife, Hyrrokkin, Red Trio, Jennie Stearns, Matta Gawa, Go-Go Beuys Band, Big Mean Sound Machine, Travis Laplante, Colin Stetson

THANKS FOR RECORDING (WITH) ME!
Dana Billings, Michael Perkins, Jason Ajemian, Edward Ricart, Brett Nagafuchi, Danny van Duerm

THANKS FOR HAVING ME TALK TO YOUR STUDENTS!
Krzysztof Wolek (University of Louisville), Marek Choloniewski (Studio of Electroacoustic Music, Academy of Music in Krakow), Michael Hersch & Oscar Bettison (Peabody Conservatory), Joe Sorbara (University of Guelph)

THANKS FOR PLAYING ME ON YOUR RADIO SHOW & WRITING ABOUT ME!
Greg Baise (WCBN 88.3FM Ann Arbor), Needles Numark (Upstate Soundscape, Buffalo), Tom Orange (Brewing Luminous, Cleveland), Taran Singh (Taran's Free Jazz Hour), Ken Waxman (Jazzword), Bartosz Adamczak (Free Jazz Alchemist), Guy Sitruk (Jazz à Paris), Mechanical Forest Sound

THANKS TO THE PEOPLE WHO TURNED ME ON TO THESE NICE OLD RECORDS I NEVER HEARD BEFORE!
This Heat, Deceit; Talk Talk, Spirit of Eden; Cabaret Voltaire, Micro-Phonies; Einsturzende Neubaten, Kollaps; Pere Ubu, Dub Housing; The Stooges, Fun House; Nas, Illmatic; Wire, Chairs Missing and Pink Flag; Death, ...For the World to See; Television, Marquee Moon; Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Blank Generation.

THANKS THANKS THANKS!

If the music isn't activism, it's the wrong music

Excellent, brief essay by composer John Luther Adams: Global Warming and Art. From the essay:

Three decades ago I came to Alaska to "get away" from the world. But the world has followed me here in an inescapable way. I came here also to help save the wilderness. For years I worked as an environmental activist. When I left that work I did so feeling that someone else could carry it on, but that no one else could make my music. Implicit in this choice was my belief that, in a different way, music could matter as much as activism.

Of Exasperation and Democracy

I sometimes send an email update to a few hundred people to inform them of my creative activities. To my latest update I added a paragraph detailing some of my main reasons for not voting in the U.S. (Not much changes, here’s a link to what I had to say about voting two years ago.) This paragraph was not only pertinent to the time I sent out the mailing (a week before the 2008 presidential elections) but also to an audiovisual installation of mine Registering Our Exasperation currently on exhibition at the Melkweg in Amsterdam.

I will not be voting in the upcoming U.S. elections, though I am eligible to do so. I see the electoral situation as not so different from that of Belarus, wherein the democratic process is so obviously flawed that participation only seems to indicate legitimization. I wouldn't bet on a horse that I knew in advance would not make it to the race. Only the extraordinarily well-funded are given access to the public through mainstream media. And they--the well-funded (and forked-tongued)--maintain attitudes that are so obviously divergent from the majority of the people that even with their obscene funding they will not allow other ideas to compete for public attention and support. I am not suggesting that there is no difference between the two main actors this particular year, but that the difference does not speak to the breakdown of democracy. Given the various extinction-level crises that an American president sits at the helm of, I am not willing to be pragmatic in the question of government, at least not with regard to the illusion of choice. As I have written many times before, this is not only an American issue. However one chooses to participate in democracies flawed or perfect, I advocate a particpation in community that obviates mega-powerful, centralized governments. To be clear, I am refering to the kind of participation that Henry David Thoreau had in mind when he wrote "Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence." Because without a community actively defined by those who live within it, any government is irrelevant and any election is ridiculous. If it is change that one wants, it is change that one must do (and not change that one must vote for).

Anyway, I received a number of thought-provoking responses, some from people who share my attitude. The majority of the substantive responses, however, were from people who thought my decision poor, although all agreed with the notion that American democracy is in a very sorry state. But the suggestion seemed to be vote for the candidate who is black, because he is black, and that is historic, and he talks about change, and change would be good, and the other candidate is really much much worse. Which all may be true, but how that would address the democracy issue I do not know. As it happens, I found this to be exasperating, again appropriate to the work I am presenting at the Melkweg. So I wrote the following to be made available at my exhibition. It has some cursing in it.

How do I register my exasperation? How do I indicate the frustrating understanding I have come to that mega-nations & governments run by madmen are causing all of the problems—problems that, year in & year out, someone, somewhere, is telling me I should solve by voting for different madmen? Could everyone please stop telling me to vote?

Go ahead & vote, vote, get your candidate or political party of choice to win some sham election, vote. Pat yourself on the back for participating in democracy & then go back to sleep for the next few years, while politicians & the corporations that own them ride roughshod over the earth, killing people & rivers, enslaving children & the integrity of genes, slaughtering languages & rainforests, mocking democracy.

Or do they? Do they mock democracy? Hitler, Mugabe, Lukashenko, Hussein all won elections. Even that shit-brained son-of-a-bitch Bush nearly did, twice. What is democracy anyway in our age of perverted information, when all information is commercialized, when shit floats, when access to your intellect is sold to the highest bidder, when soundbites will have to suffice because neither you nor your candidate have time to read the policies drawn up in backrooms by people whose names no one even knows?

How do I register my exasperation? Stop telling me to vote. Stop telling me to participate in a counterfeit electoral process, in a democracy in which political parties can be divided over whether human industry is cooking the planet or not, over whether the violence should be conducted by insufferable idiot jerk-offs or charming intellectuals, over whether this or that group has the right to self-determination, over whether torturing someone constitutes ‘torture’, over whether the integrity of borders is more precious than the integrity of the lives of those who wish to cross them, over the extent to which women’s reproductive rights & the civil rights of homosexuals threaten the nation.

I am not part of a community that stretches across multiple mountain ranges, over rivers, beyond the corpses of once-proud & impenetrable forests, that has asserted its right to pave the planet & pour chemicals into the eyes of bunnies to create new cosmetics or find cures to cancers the culture causes in the first place.

No. How do I register my exasperation? What place does democracy have in the mass extinctions we are witnessing, mass extinctions of a magnitude only seen when a comet smashes into the planet or an ice age covers it for centuries? Vote. Vote for liars who pay lip service to the builders of bombs, to the financiers of fire & brimstone, to the high priests of pedophilia and misogyny, to the conquerors of carbon, the gangsters of genetics, the vanquishers of forests. Vote for them & encourage everyone around you to do the same, get the vote out, they say, get it out. Rock it. Get it out & then go back to sleep, & in a few years’ time another cast of back-alley elite, socialite sociopaths will dance on camera for you in expensive suits, with flecks of corporate shit in their teeth & the fresh blood of a million children on their breath.

You raise your voice & say no, no, these are not my nations & this is not my way, these democracies are killing my planet, my first & last & only beloved planet, & listen to the response you get, they say, with less subtlety than Chavez or bin Laden: but do you want a dictatorship? And that’s when you realize just how shallow all this fuckin’ democracy is, you knew it stank, you knew it was false, a fraud, a fake, but it wasn’t until democracy loving people—& it’s true you are surrounded by intelligent and creative people, & they love democracy, just love it, every time an election comes around they get hard with hatred for the greater of two evils—but when such creative, intelligent, imaginative & democracy loving people as those around you fail to imagine anything but this violent shithouse, this fiction, this sham, this obscenity parading as righteousness, this vile method to slowly annihilate the whole goddamn toy, well that’s when you ask, how do I register my exasperation? How do I register my exasperation? How, midst all this skullduggery, all this shallow & pernicious blather, do I register my exasperation?

For a while, I listened to the radio program Democracy Now! I listened & I listened & all the guests were getting tortured or incarcerated or had brothers & sons about to be executed for the color of their skin or the sexual orientation of their partners, or were lawyers fighting against the latest surveillance laws & bipartisan gladhanding to fund more war & on & on & on. So I took away the words & left the aspiration, meaning both what these beleaguered activists & dissidents wanted and literally the sound of their breathing & pausing while they spoke. And it sounded like exasperation. They were all exasperated, like me, perhaps like you.

This was in 2006 & everything they were saying was something no one wanted to hear, people just wanted the economy to go up, up, up & for news of the wars to go away. Well the wars are still here & at the moment the economy stinks the way it has always stank to me, like shit, but back to the artwork in question all that audio of exasperation was of things no one wanted to hear, so I put it together with the text from my video Things You Cannot See, which I had just made & the two seemed to go together very nicely, things you cannot hear & things you cannot see, I put them together & gave the work the title Registering Our Exasperation, & so to answer the question How do I register my exasperation? I think a pretty decent start is to make some art, something that relates & transports at the same time, in which the content goes together very nicely, as artwork should, form is important after all, yes, to make some art & to talk to people, to vote with my whole influence & to turn my back on the madmen.

Disputing Augmented Unreality

from TAGMAG 06, a publication of <>TAG in The Hague

I never feel better than when I'm walking in mountains far from urban civilization. I carry a heavy pack filled with my sleeping bag, a small tent, some food, some cooking utensils and other gear, and some spare warm clothing. I keep a map of the area and a liter of water. And some chocolate. My best walks have been in the south of Poland, where I can wake up and spend eight hours following good trails through the most sparsely populated terrain—just a tiny village here and there in the valleys far below—before arriving at a clearing to set up the tent or stay in a rustic hostel or farmer’s place. I fall asleep tired and sore shortly after sundown and awake at dawn energized and ready to cover more ground.

It really is an ideal way to use my energy and spend my time, especially in the company of good friends. Enjoying my time out here is something that I had to learn to do, and I am certainly no expert at it (and I go all too infrequently). I can only identify a very few types of flora and fauna. I have not learned to successfully navigate with the sun or the stars. The only foods along the trail I recognize as safe to eat are blackberries and raspberries. (On some walks it is possible to literally fill buckets with them without pausing, so plentiful are the bushes by the path in late summer.) When I have the opportunity to drink water straight from streams—it is always excellent, utterly refreshing—I have no way of knowing for certain that it is safe. I can recgonize when distant clouds are bringing with them rain, but not so far in advance as to change my course.

I am not a mountain climber; most of the walking I do is not particularly risky, but I have made some foolish decisions. I once wandered off an isolated alpine trail and crossed a very recent avalanche in the Dolomites, in Italy, and as I slowly zig-zagged my way I watched as stones loosened beneath my boots and tumbled hundreds of meters down sheer cliffs. On another walk I climbed across a fresh mudslide in the Beskid Zywiecki region in Poland, balancing precariously on upturned tree roots and mud-encrusted boulders that defied gravity as they jutted out of the mountainside. But perhaps the most foolish thing I have ever done in my life was set out alone on a day-long walk around Hogsback, in South Africa, without a map or water or any local knowledge. I lost the path and spent hours exposed to bright sun, winding my way through dense prickly brush, navigating around unexpected cliffs dropping off to nowhere, and endeavoring not to lose my footing in the many holes dug by unseen animals in the ground. I returned to my hostel hours later than planned and completely dehydrated.

I have never gone walking with a mobile phone.

***

Imagine: I am on a walk somewhere, lost and thirsty and hours away from any shelter. The sun is setting and menacing clouds are rolling in and, not knowing what to do, I begin to panic. But I have a small Augmented Reality (AR) unit with me, connected to a sensor that monitors my heart rate and a lightweight pair of sunglasses with embedded translucent video screens. The unit takes barometric readings, it cross-references GPS data with the latest Internet-based ordinance survey information, and plots a route to safety that takes into account weather conditions, the terrain, access to water, and my own physical condition. As I look through the sunglasses, a map customized to my needs appears superimposed over the wilderness, displaying place names, likely places of shelter, and calculating distances and walking times. Data about local flora and fauna I should avoid is provided in image, text, and sound. All of this reassures me. I calm down and set out confidently and safely for civilization.

Yes, but I would rather leave such a device at home.

***

Augmented Reality refers to the layering of virtual (computerized) data upon one or more of an individual’s senses for practical, entertainment, medical, military, or artistic purposes. It is also a syntactical misnomer. Reality is not—cannot be—augmentable. Unlike breasts and penises, we cannot modify reality on a whim. Reality is not a show. In order for us to have a discussion that doesn’t resemble an LSD trip or a stay in an asylum for the insane (or a televised American political debate) we cannot qualify or quantify ‘reality’. To do so would be to dispute it. And there are only two possible consequences of disputing reality: insanity or art.

I am not a philosopher, I cannot address here the philisophical history of our culture’s conception of reality. I am also not a religious person, I do not believe that reality is ordained by the supernatural. I am often flabbergasted in philisophical conversations by questions such as ‘How do you know everything did not begin five minutes ago?’ or ‘How do you know we are not all just brains in a jar?’ It is difficult to properly articulate my certainty that I was in fact here more than five minutes ago and that my brain is not in a jar. My reality exists between the soil and the sky. And that’s that.

So how is it that I can communicate with others with different understandings about the nature of what is real? Like you, I am a human animal and, like you, I have the capacity to empathize. I was discussing this with my friend, the composer and computer musician Tom Tlalim, who observed that AR, like the Internet (and I would add like mobile phones, like anything that can be abstracted from specific perceptions of time, space, and connectivity), threatened the notion of the local. And I think he is correct. ‘The soil and the sky’ poetically defines the largest entity that I can grasp as local: my planet. And not only my planet, but tangible, physical aspects of it that others experience and are subject to. When I watch you drink water, I cannot taste it but my mind may trigger a memory of the taste of ‘water’. That, I think, is empathy. An AR device might allow me to actually taste water. And that is insane. There is no water!

***

My notions of empathy and ‘the local’ are closely intertwined. Since we are living in a global village, a small world, a litterbox playground for capitalist ideologists, it seems we are unable to value and respect the local. In multiple ways we are torn away from the local, torn away from the positive and negative realities before us. We live in the same local global village as billions suffering from starvation, or preventable disease, or political disenfranchisement, or state terror, or environmental degredation, and we fail to empathize. We relate, rather (or many of us do, anyway), to layer upon layer of digital unreality: gadget fetishism, video games, rampant militarism, the false corporate prophecies of a green future fueled by capitalists, the celebration of shit-brained celebrities.

There is a word for all of this, and the word is insane.

***

Why is it that some sort of AR unit have been helpful to me in Hogsback? Because I was a damn fool for doing what I did. Technological progress should not be used to medicate stupidity. I for one will not submit my animal body and my animal mind to Twenty-First century cyborgification. I never cease to be disturbed by the fact that people willingly wear those idiot bluetooth devices in their ears. I certainly never will. And no one cares if I do or not. But AR is advancing along with another phenomenon, called ‘ubiquitous computing’. Ubiquitous computing, the idea that everything we create can be networked, constantly processing and syncing a variety of data, seems to be widely accepted. In a world of ubiquitous computing there will be no ‘opt out’ possibility. Individuals may well become simple conductors of machines that talk to each other. Go ahead and try to opt out, now, of all the things that have become ubiquitous, the air and water and noise and light pollution, the transmission waves that flow through your body whether you want them to or not, whether you know it or not, the carcinogens and chemicals.

We march fullspeed ahead towards openly disputing reality at every turn. This is what the ubiquitous disputation of reality is called: mass insanity.

***

There’s a tangential comment I need to make on the subject of ‘ubicomp’ (does it get more 1984 than some of the words and phrases we use for technology these days?). I wrote above that within ubiquitous computing, data from the things we make can be networked. It may seem touchy-feely to some reading this, but I’m pretty sure trees and birds and bees and earthworms and people who are awake to their unaugmented senses are networking and syncing too. I know this to be true; the longer I spend away from devices doing the networking for me, the more I feel alive to the world around me. I need no products to facilitate the connectivity between my perceptions or amongst them and my surroundings. It is all wireless when you spend days walking in the mountains.

***

Insofar as we can influence and instigate aspects of our evolution, I propose in the strongest possible terms that we do not evolve away from our empathetic, animal, and locally-conscious selves. What advocates and developers of AR might see as augmenting not only our experiences but also our capabilities, I see as forfeiture of our experiences and capabilities, and this should be considered very carefully. I can and should learn about the flora and fauna in the mountains where I walk (to make an example of my own stupidity), but this ought to happen at the speed of experience, not the speed of a wireless or GPS network. I neither need nor want to submit my autonomous humanity to military and corporate augmentation. We can all make our own choices about how many gadgets we own and how many starving people we refuse to see. But when the augmentation, when the insanity is not only expected but ubiquitous, it is reasonable, it is utterly sane to say no. And to do more: to act on that refusal.

***

There is a layer of experience and perception and action that is maleable, that is augmentable. I first saw the formulation ‘art disputes reality’ in the work of Albert Camus, whose own grasp on the realities of the Twentieth century were manifested clearly in his writing and activities. ‘Art disputes reality,’ he wrote, ‘but it does not hide from it.’ I believe art can dispute reality when artists address it forthrightly and bring creativity to bear on the enigma of being, on the problems and beauty embedded in our perceptions. And by sharing in reality, consciously, conscientiously, and with clarity. Which is to say: sanely.

Decay, Destruction and Waste

Note: written for the program book of the fourth edition of new music festival Dag in de Branding. Also appears at the <>TAG website.

Decay, destruction, and waste. I could be writing a history of the decline and fall of an ancient empire. Or a modern empire. Or the much more devastating and long-lived empire of Civilization. But I’m not: I’m describing the twelve hours of new music that make up the fourth edition of the Dag in de Branding Festival.

If you’re inclined to see this red thread of explicit decadence as just so much doom and gloom, I invite you to look more carefully. Albert Camus, a hero of mine who worked in times not unlike our own---times that were and are unfortunately “interesting”---wrote that the greatest art speaks to the time in which it is created. That is exactly what the events in this program do.

This is not doom and gloom. It is an absolutely essential state of the Arts at this interesting moment. Indeed at any moment. I have written elsewhere that artists are the sensory organs of the culture. We are its eyes, its ears, its mouths and its hands. If our works of art fail to recognize the decay, destruction, and waste, then our eyes, ears, and mouths are shut, and our hands are bound. How encouraging then, in these seemingly senseless times, that (some) artists haven’t lost their senses. To rephrase yet another observation of Monsieur Camus, art may dispute reality, but it does not hide from it.

How so? At the start of the program we are brought face to face with the reality of decay in the abstract in Bill Morrison’s film to Michael Gordon’s extraordinary symphony Decasia wherein ancient filmstock is seen suffering the ravages of time. But the work masterfully disputes this reality by preserving the decay itself, turning the visible death of a beloved artifact of industrial civilization into a thing of aesthetic beauty. An underlying question of this work, at least for me, is whether to mourn or celebrate the decay of a culture that has paid for its wonderful creativity with unspeakable environmental devastation.

Or this: the destruction referenced in Bob Ostertag’s music to the Living Cinema project Special Forces is the real destruction that the world silently (and to its great shame) witnessed in Lebanon last summer. Ostertag is never one to hide from the reality of destruction, having earlier brought his Yugoslavia Suite to the Balkans, post-Nato, and Special Forces to Beirut. Yet, I think, he disputes this reality, constantly, by using these works as opportunities for beginning dialogues on the themes he treats. Ostertag disputes the reality of the destruction his work reflects with uncompromising dedication to social justice through and beyond his music.

Or this: Egon Kracht and the Troupe bring us the Faust story as a rock opera (with a nod to Frank Zappa) in The Seduction of Harry Faust. In this updated version, guess how God, Mephisto, and Faust are portrayed? As a media tycoon, his marketing expert son, and a loser they destroy by bringing him into their world, of course. This is right on target for our uber-consumerist, narcissistic, and celebrity-infatuated culture (though I must say, sadly, that satire and reality are more often than not one and the same thing these days).

Or this: Boxing Pushkin, ostensibly about the life of the famous Russian author, consciously throws the audience into the role of spectator. Meanwhile the very definition of freedom, as embodied by Pushkin, seems to be at stake. While this work is perhaps the least overtly connected to our red thread, even a cursory glance at the synopsis (and the battles over Pushkin’s legacy) calls to mind the violence one witnesses done to language to legitimize this or that regime.

Or this: “Waste equals food” write the authors of Cradle to Cradle, a remarkable book that examines natural life cycles and nutrient flows as paradigms for how to reinvent industrial design in environmentally sane and ethically responsible ways. I mention it here in connection with Wasted, the mini-festival of decayed, destroyed, and degraded sounds-turned-breakbeats (and more) hosted by Jason Forrest and Pure. This gathering feeds its audience-participants with energy, exuberance, and catharsis mined from some of the darkest reaches of our culture. What is wasted here and what is eaten, I will not say, nor will I venture to put into words what reality is under dispute.

* * *

“Create dangerously” urged Albert Camus toward the end of his life. The American civil rights and social justice leader Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that “the world is in dire need of creative extremists.” Both were destroyed early by two of the more nefarious designs of Civilization: the automobile and the gun. What a waste.

We may not have asked for this red thread---I mean the red thread of decay, destruction, and waste running through the lives of humans and non-humans, through our values and wound tightly around our planet---but it is what we have and what we are. To present a program of new music revolving around aspects of the decay, destruction, and waste of our culture, our Industrial Civilization, from material to social decay, from self-destruction to the destruction of our neighbors, from the wasting of our planetary environment to the wasting of our youth---to present works that reflect this historical moment is not necessarily to celebrate it, but to recognize it.

It is to come to our senses as listeners, as artists, as social beings.

It is to know who we are, what we are, and what we must do. It is to be awake, alive, and up to the task.

Doom and gloom? If art should be uplifting, and if the world is in fact in dire need of creative extremists, what could be more uplifting than that?

Callibration

"It's not disillusionment, it's callibration."

---Mihnea Mircan, a curator at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest, speaking at a curators conference organized this week by Stroom in The Hague. He was answering a question about a shift in the way he deals with the political ramifications of his work. See a brief essay by Mircan here.

I am the recipient of a grant from Stroom and was asked to write a short description of my work for an online portfolio the organization maintains. This is what I wrote:

My work, all of it, from music to video to installations to texts and so on, is an attempt to answer a question posed by environmentalist author Derrick Jensen: "What are sane and appropriate responses to insanely destructive behavior?" Or this question, from architect/designer William McDonough: "How do we love all of the children of all of the species for all time?" It is a reply to the call to arms of Albert Camus: "Create dangerously" or that of Martin Luther King, Jr.: "The world is in dire need of creative extremists". It is a recognition of the extraordinary danger industrial civilization poses to the natural world, and a reaction to this danger, spoken in a language the people destroying the planet cannot speak.

Which, as it happens, doesn't change a damn thing. Have a nice day.

Frog with Implanted Webserver

I just returned from the opening night of the Dutch Electronic Art Festival in Rotterdam. I am not happy.

The first work visitors are confronted with is something called Experiments with Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver. Here is the official description of the work:

Garnet Hertz has implanted a miniature webserver in the body of a frog specimen, which is suspended in a clear glass container of mineral oil, an inert liquid that does not conduct electricity. The frog is viewable on the Internet, and on the computer monitor across the room, through a webcam placed on the wall of the gallery. Through an Ethernet cable connected to the embedded webserver, remote viewers can trigger movement in either the right or left leg of the frog, thereby updating Luigi Galvani's original 1786 experiment causing the legs of a dead frog to twitch simply by touching muscles and nerves with metal. Experiments in Galvanism is both a reference to the origins of electricity, one of the earliest new media, and, through Galvani's discovery that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue, a nod to what many theorists and practitioners consider to be the new new media: bio(tech) art.

Let me translate for those readers not accustomed to the morally vacuous language of the wine-soaked art world:

Asshole takes the corpse of a frog---amphibian corposes are easy to come by in these days of human-instigated global warming, toxified water, and poisoned air---sticks some motors in its legs and wires in the gallery, and invites visitors to participate in his shit-brained glorification of an artistically bad, technologically backward, and morally repugnant idea.

(Hey, you don't think it's morally repugnant to use a frog's corpse? How about we use your grandmother's corpse instead? Put her in a clear glass container of mineral oil and click the mouse to make her legs kick. Sorry: if you don't get what's wrong I don't know if I can explain it to you.)

The single redeeming factor in the inclusion of this otherwise utterly useless, horrendously uncreative and straight up tasteless attempt at "art" in the DEAF exhibition is that at the very least it alone demonstrated (brazenly, arrogantly, proudly, shamelessly) something inherent in everything else on display: the absolute affrontery to the natural world necessary to be a good and cooperative "media artist" in this trash heap of a culture.

Your little art goes beep and lights flash and another sixty or so Iraqi children succumb to some strange form of cancer to make it happen. Safely tucked in here at the end of history you make a witty installation with RFID (radio frequency identification) technology---my, what big subsidies you have!---while brown people somewhere else are forced to show their ID cards at (American, British, Israeli, whatever) gunpoint to get to the other side of town.

Besides leaving, there was nothing I wanted to do---as an experiment, of course---so much as shut down the electricity on some of these artists. For good.

Now is as fine a time as any to let you know that I'm just about through reading volume one of Derrick Jensen's heartbreaking call to action Endgame. Jensen---whose earlier work A Language Older Than Words was, until now, perhaps the single most important book I have ever read---is turning my bad attitude even worse.

And yet: You. Must. Read this book. Start here.

Back to cutting off the electricity. I wonder what these "media artists" or "electronic artists" or whatever would do if there were no electricity to juice their little gadgets and installations (and fucking "bio(tech) art"). So much of it---and this is a conclusion Jensen would quickly make if he bothered to dally in the minutiae of this ultimately inconsequential and wine-soaked world---so much of it simply legitimizes and glorifies harmful technologies, often without any meaningful content to at least somewhat call out the culture's persistent violence.

Guess what the theme of DEAF 07 is? Ready for this? Interact Or Die!

Now I suppose this could be understood a number of ways. For example, it could be a call to all of us to start interacting with each other in meaningful ways. After all, it is the absence of our own nurturing of community that allows governments and corporations to set the agenda and limits of human interaction. Or "interact or die" might be a warning that we fail to recognize the fact of interdependence in the natural world we (should) inhabit at the risk of spiritual and ultimately literal death.

But since the natural world was so completely absent in this exhibition (with one or two minor exceptions: a video with leaf cutter ants carrying little national flags instead of leaves, for example) I have to assume that what we were invited to interact with was the unnatural world of these works. The field for interaction is the field defined by these uncreative creations, mobilizing under the banner of the unusually explicit "interact or die" theme to do further violence to lingering memories of the Planet Earth (where once upon a time frogs ate mosquitos, not ethernet impulses, and lived on the banks of rivers, not clear glass containers of mineral oil).

I do realize that I might be alienating myself from the few friends in the art scene here who even bothered to read this far. I know some of this may be unpopular with my computer-programming, electronic musician colleagues. And sure: part of my work exists within the realm of electronic art, insofar as it uses electricity and electronics. (I'm even using electricity and electronics now to fire off this mediated communique.) This is not a fact in which I rejoice, but an issue with which I wrestle constantly.

But this isn't about me. I don't stick ethernet cables in corpses.

Shame (Gregor Samsa-style)

As any regular reader of the irregular writings here knows, supporting artistic freedom and rejecting censorship is important to me. There are moments, however, when humanitarian concerns trump artistic freedom.

I am not sure how I feel about the current trial of Simon Bikindi, a popular Rwandan singer accused of inciting genocide with his music. I am not sure about it because it would set a precedent that would see a good deal of the musicians in the US up on charges of incitement to war crimes.

Surely every patriotic song, from the most hideous country-rock pro-war pap to Ray Charles' otherwise wonderful rendition of "America the Beautiful" have served useful support roles in US wars of aggression over the years. (Jimi Hendrix' "Star Spangled Banner" is a notable exception.) Whether these artists intentionally supported the horrors or -- like the Nazi misappropriation of works by Beethoven, for example -- were simply exploited, can be questioned. But what if making a work of art is in itself cruel, inhumane, dangerous, or murderous?

Last night I performed music in an art gallery where just such a work was exhibited. The work was so sickening that as the artist -- whose name will not receive any popularization here -- set up her work I literally shouted "that's fucking disgusting" more than once. (The artist, drunk, cordially introduced herself later.)

What was the work in question? The artist chose to express herself by placing a translucent box full of live cockroaches atop an overhead projector. As the evening progressed and the lamp of the projector heated the box, the cockroaches, subjected to intense heat, were tortured. For the first hour or so they were absolutely frantic, becoming progressively more aggressive toward each other, and then one by one they were cooked to death, while survivors crushed each other up against the presumably cooler edges of the projection surface. To the depraved delight of some in attendence, this was all visible, many times enlarged, on a wall of the gallery.

I feel intense shame at the part I played in this. Why? Several days ago some friends and I were invited to perform at the after-party of an exhibition opening. For a small fee. Upon arriving at the gallery and seeing what was going on I didn't refuse to play. I didn't refuse to get paid. Aside from loudly registering my discomfort (which probably had as much to do with my low-level insect phobia as my high-intensity objection to anything being tortured) and complaining (read: bitching) about the work to people in the audience after I was finished playing, I didn't deal with the problem. We started our first set with a text of mine that indirectly addressed the issue, but this had been planned in advance, before I knew what kind of horrible shit I would be witnessing. Shame on me for standing on a stage with a microphone, witnessing torture, and "respecting" an artist's right to conduct it.

And what about the audience? I spoke to some people who appreciated the aesthetic effect of giant cockroaches crawling on the walls (we feel at home amidst a hundred Gregor Samsas, no?), but felt this could have been done with film, and thus without degrading the artist or the observers or torturing living creatures. Of the hundred or so people who spent any time in the gallery last night, only one person needed to pull the plug to make the point that needed to be made. But no one dared. A room full of artists and musicians, all apparently creative, all engaged in an orgy of torture (read: destruction) ostensibly on the grounds that to turn off the torture device would be an infringement on someone's artistic freedom.

But it wasn't art we witnessed. It was Abu Ghraib. It was Guantanamo fucking Bay. Projected on the wall was any number of individuals demeaned, tortured, and murdered, demonstrating some sadistic bastard's definition of everything from "freedom" to "justice" to "democracy" or whatever (I've lost track of the inane justifications). Just as last night in the smoke-filled, alcohol-infused art gallery, today we witness and we stand agape. And we do nothing.

We witness well over half a million murders in somebody's "global war on terror", one of every four US veterans of it returning home with a disability (if at all), the legalization of torture and indefinite imprisonment without charge, a million unexploded US-made cluster bombs sprinkled on a tiny patch of Lebanese soil (are they called bomblets because so many of them destroy children?) and it gets me to wondering: who are the cockroaches around here?

Perhaps the work last night would have been a decent sociological experiment if several dozen living beings (yes, oh yes: with feelings) hadn't been sadistically tortured for "art's sake". But they were. And the mark of shame is with all of us who stood on and did nothing.

Pull the plug. Pull the plug. Pull the plug.

---

Coda.

There is a somewhat similar work by Chilean-Danish artist Marco Evarissti: ten living goldfish swimming in ten food blenders. It is the work that made the artist famous (the director of a museum exhibiting the work was taken to court and fined for animal cruelty). Although I personally dislike the work, and I dislike the implication (that it is okay to make a point about human morality by imprisoning a living thing and subjecting it to potential violence), I do not think this work approaches the cruelty of the work I witnessed last night. Why? While Evarissti's work places the mortality of the work's subject directly in the hands of the observer, making the violence implicit, the overhead projector was placed out of reach and the violence was explicit: fundamental to the work. To follow on my metaphor above, the torture and detention centers of the US empire are similarly "out of reach", but the off switch is right there in your hands.