TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Monday, February 09, 2004

12:56 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Saw the Nam June Paik retrospective at AGNSW over the weekend, loved the video documentation, especially the TV Bra. Interesting seeing a pioneer of electronic media art who has done things like wearable technology years before anyone else. Inspiring hearing Charlotte Moorman talk about how Paik didn't want her to play traditional music, or even notes, it was abstract aiming to change and effect the video image with each sound. That kind of thing happening in the 70's is part of the cultural context that makes it possible for me to imagine playing bridges as musical instruments, and creating a symphony on a global scale. And Duchamp, of course, anything can be art it's all about context and naming.
I'm worrying about this project, that I won't make it anything like the way I imagine, it will be banal and disappointing.
I worry that I expect too much from life, from people, and love, and myself. I want this work to be imaginative, poetic, sensual, vivid, beautiful, lucid, thought-provoking, moving. Starting to have ideas about how to construct the voice reading text for the spoken parts of the piece I'm doing at ABC, it's time to experiment and see what works. I was never very good at that - like to have a very clear idea of how something will end up and then work towards it. Process, process, process.

Another self-promotion advertisement: the SAMPLES of the BRIDGE SOUNDS are available on this website - they have moved to the DOCUMENTATION page. Click on LISTEN you will need flash player.

Also had an email this morning from Alessandro Ludovico at neural.it saying that Singing Bridges is on their front page - it's down near the end! (Yes I have listed this before but hey, it bears repeating! and the translation from Italian is cute) Check out the site, a great collection of experiments and projects in media, sound and music. "Hacktivism, E-Music, New Media Art."

Today you're on the home/cover:

11.12.03 Singing bridges, swinging steel.
The daily 'soundscape' can hardly do without the architectural structures and the vibrations of the matter, which can produce revealing tones and sounds. Singing bridges is the project of Jodi Rose, who concentrated her research on the awesome steel bridges which populate this world and extracted very fascinating musical compositions from them by amplifying their oscillations. This chorus of steel cables played by the wind and recorded with contact microphones hints at a global network between the separated landmasses they connect and a continuous communication akin to telecommunication lines. After listening to the streamed pieces, imagining a concert of bridges all over the world, as the author tries to do, fills the listener with a sensation of imperceptible vibration which, even if it's perfectly plausible, undermines the impression of stability these big structures usually give and gives them voice and sound in their natural, and sometimes imperceptible, swinging.

http://www.neural.it
check it daily.

http://www.neural.it/english
english news, essays and link.