Day: September 23, 2007

Good article about Texas avant composer/performer Jerry Hunt by Michael Schell here. Didn't realize he'd died (suicide) in '93. Saw Hunt perform several times and he was always a trip. Here's a classic Hunt description of one of his pieces:

Birome (ZONE): Cube is devised as a reflex memory cabinet with transactional core: the mechanism used is item-element invariant and system transparent; the cube zone is a body-memory exerciser and operates as a continuous "other": a sexual surface trance derivative emulator. The interior surfaces of the cabinet serve as source skrying planes through access points using a system derived from the angelic tablets of John Dee; the core is a composite mannequin arrangement (homunculus) provided with interactive signature translators derived from a serialized variant of Rosicrucian chess (sigil) and is sensitive to participant skrying action. The participant/cabinet/core interaction is arranged in such a way as to cause the core assembly to generate response signatures translated as context codes along a binary interleaved multiplex transsexual spiral: the spiral contains embedded narrative whorls: each whorl generates a string of sound-image derivatives. Deep whorls (cores) use spatial reposition; continuant whorls (narratives) use temporal reposition. Sound and image sequences and stills are parallel threaded into the multiplex spirals.

The system uses an audio/video retrieval mechanism in the surfaces (monitors), sequence and stream interactive with the accumulative history of the participant/cabinet/core exercise. The mannequin artifact assembly was designed with the assistance of sculptor David McManaway.

Hard on the heels of "Digital Political Time Lapse," a second Aron Namenwirth-curated event is coming up Oct. 14--an evening of videos and performance at Galapagos in Brooklyn titled "Abstract Horror." Spent some time this weekend thinking about/working on my 15 minute performance. The current plan is to DJ several of my tunes from the laptop, while an accompanying DVD of looping animated GIFs (converted to video) pulses on a projector in stately, hypnotic, obnoxious fashion. Much potential material has appeared on my hard drive since my last event so I'm in the process of culling that--right now I'm figuring thirteen GIFs at about a minute per, edited so each is broken into shorter segments playing at unpredictable intervals. Some of these look dramatic blown up to 740 x 480. Trying to pick songs and images that will read clearly and work reasonably well on any gear or sound system. But I've never "played" at Galapagos before so I don't know how this will look/sound. Feeling much better about this project than I did a week ago.