TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

  

VIEWING ALL POSTS FOR: DECEMBER 2007

Saturday, December 29, 2007

9:47 PM
Posted by jodi rose

The morning after. A very intense, focused and concentrated week.
We made the performance, it was gorgeous. Really beautiful mix of sound and image, the inter-relationship between the beats and luminosity taken from the bridge sounds, folding into the performance as a fantastic human/machine/technology system. Luka's video is spectacular, and Luka's sonic wizardry enhanced mine, both giving new dimension to the bridges. Is this really all only bridge sounds?
The after-party started with champagne and campari, moved on to the ex-yugoslav army barracks squat/art complex, with bears blood at the bar masquerading as a photographic studio, then peach schnapps at an art opening in alcatraz gallery, followed by Sindicate club at K4.
This afternoon had visits from the lovely Matiaz, the sculptor who made the sketch I have on my desktop, and is building the bridge instrument. We talked about materials, design and interaction, and did some collaborative drawing, where he added a tuning key to the strings and took it in a whole new direction. Then the fabulous Dunaj came over - after days of trying to catch up between bridges - and brought catalogues from the city of women festival, and 'humour works' broadsheet of writing and art in the expanded europe, which I look forward to reading on the plane from Klagenfurt tomorrow. She wrote the text about the project that is on codeep website, and is also having it translated into English, we had a great rave about art, politics, film and writing. So now I feel a new rush of enthusiasm and focus, having been given this incredible gift of an amazing bridge to play on, great people to play with, time and space to develop the interaction and model design ideas, and a wonderful week in Ljubljana. Thanks Luka, Andrea, Codeep, Nova for everything.
Now it's back over the Loiblpass and to Berlin for the New Year.

Friday, December 28, 2007

10:39 AM
Posted by jodi rose

the adventures so far include xmas day under a bridge, and turning luka's living room into a media circus for rehearsal yesterday. tonight is the live cinema performance, with the two fabulous luka's making intriguing connections and mixes between sound and image. more on that later.

for now, here is the cinema address - in case you're in Ljubljana tonight - and a note from one of our visitors to the on-site concert/listening.

KINODVOR CINEMA
Kolodvorska ulica 13, Ljubljana
http://www.kinodvor.si

"Hello Jodi!

Here is a photo from you last tuesday. You are really hardcore
artists, attaching cables to the snow ;-)

It was very nice to be at your installation in Fuzine.
I liked it very much.

You can see the movie that I made at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noqHOfNDafo

Cym"

Monday, December 24, 2007

11:33 PM
Posted by jodi rose

happy everything!

from the bizovik bridge, with luka and luka
tested microphone placement and logistics today
having a low-key evening with lindt chocolate and campari

spectacular drive through the austrian alps from klagenfurt airport, and a creatively inspiring evening talking, can't wait to play with it all!

ready for the first on-site bridge listening/recording tomorrow.

Friday, December 21, 2007

3:42 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Kinozvo?enja in Pojo?i Mostovi
Napovedujemo Avdio/Video performans ki se bo zgodil na ljubljanski
obvoznici na mostu Bizovik in v Kinodvor.

Live A/V
Jodi Rose
Luka Prin?i?
Luka Dekleva

Vise?i most Bizovik Torek 25.12.07
kinodvor Petek 28.12.07
Ve? o projektu pa tukaj

http://www.codeep.org/

Friday, December 21, 2007

12:46 AM
Posted by jodi rose

Goodbye to the border guards on the Maria Valeria Bridge.
Now the Danube flows between Hungary and Slovakia with a friendly, peaceful absence of passport controls and soft, porous intermingling. My good wishes and thoughts are with the people in Sturovo and Esztergom tonight.

Random ideas drifting across my consciousness and conversation this past week include: fake is more interesting than authentic (talking with andrew p about bridge sounds at henry's exhibition opening) and don't imagine that you can ever 'not' intervene with the bridge. The act of choosing to record it, of amplifying and placing the microphones is already an intervention. Even before you select a sound. What we choose to listen to creates the framework that already informs what we will hear. All too esoteric again?

One of my much-loved writing group made the following comment at our Antipodean-only final meeting of the year - plus one ultra-reserved Finn, who dealt with the never-ending innuendo and in-jokes remarkbly well, only commenting afterwards that everyone seemed constantly on the verge of hyperventilating... yes, we're an excitable bunch ;) - anyway, the comment was something along the lines of 'what? I never thought you would do low-brow' and I had to admit to enjoying a wide spectrum of brows; low, middle and high, despite my reputation as a highly abstruse abstract philosophical conceptual sound artist.

Which is not entirely undeserved, I grant you.

Conversation with Jacob K. before he headed off to holiday in Cuba, about how to be more precise and rigorous in the selection and collecting of sounds from bridges. Really tuning into the specific frequencies, and feeding them back to create ambient audible tones.

I'm still working out how to do this without impacting on the safety of the bridge, think we need some engineers here to help...

Which leaves me to jump on a plane and go dance on some bridge for a surprise secret christmas day concert, the location of which is unknown even to me. I just hope they remember to pick me up :)

This year was a strange mix of incredibly difficult, just surviving - literally - scraping by and wondering why on earth I do what I'm doing; and absolutely inspiring, feeling so connected with this wonderful community of creative people, and totally focused, fulfilling the intention to complete this wild and quixotic journey to bridge happiness. At one point I was ready to give it all up, to write off 2007 as my 'lost year', and find something else to do with my life. Then somehow focus and faith started to flow back in, all of the loose threads that I had been tearing my hair out over, found a way to untangle themselves and create a new pattern, and of course the magic of a night out dancing helped re-inspire me with joy and wonder.

Here's to Berlin, the City of the Eternal Weekend. And to all the truly magnificent people who keep spontaneously appearing, filled with beauty and poetry to light up the dark nights and warm our souls.

Monday, December 10, 2007

6:09 PM
Posted by jodi rose

So, my conceptual ornithologist found my attempt at a local bird lexicon amusing, telling me that the ducks are male and female of the same species... well, and isn't that two kinds ;) and that the non-red-breasted robins are actually sparrows. I wasn't sure when making that guess, but hey it's nice to be completely wrong sometimes. Good for the soul.

Checking the spelling, I find that the real life James Bond, inspiration for the Ian Fleming character, was a leading american ornithologist, who wrote 'Birds of the West Indies' in 1936, and despite his 'ordinary as possible' name, proves that there is the potential for action and excitement in every kind of pursuit.

Today, I continue my peregrinations along the ufer, in search of sunshine. Watching the swan's heavy bodies lurch along the canal, wing tips splashing in the water, while their feet madly pedal along the surface, I can't imagine how they could ever fly. Sometimes they rise up to a few metres, before landing with a swoosh, using their feet to brake as they skid to a gentle stop. One of them - I like to think it's the same swan, who recognises me as the same human, but it could indeed be any swan and any random human - always swims up to the edge of the bank to say hello, his/her white tail wagging in what seems like a friendly greeting. It makes me happy, anyway.

I heard on the BBC World Service tonight in their review of a book: 'Froth on the Capuccino - How Small Pleasure Can Save Your Life,' that it's the small pleasures are what keep us happy, while the big pleauses become ever more unattainable and unreliable. Sounds reasonable, having spent much time and energy re-calibrating my inner balance to appreciate, embrace and find joy in the minutiae of life. The big moments come and go, but it's all about joining the dots.

Thinking that part of what make me so happy to be living in Berlin - regardless of the daily economic situation or how anything 'turns out' - is that I haven't given ground relative to my desire. This is what I really wanted to do, and here I am. That is enough. Thanks to my post-modern philosophy generator for giving me this information, all those years ago during an ongoing conversation at Mario's in Melbourne.

I had to refresh my understanding of this concept about the after imperfectly describing it for a friend, and found a good introduction here. The Lacanian idea about the 'only'moral imperative, is to 'not give way on your desire,' to not "betray the "law of desire" by way of adopting the "reasonable" demands of the existing socio-symbolic order."

Here's to unreasonable desires and immoral imperatives.

Continuing my walk along the canal in the sun, contemplating the ethics of desire, speech, collaborative practice and socio-economic frameworks. That's what you get for reading the surrealist manifesto and Lacanian theory on a Sunday morning. Working on ideas of cross media exquisite corpse, for a project with transit lounge next year.

"The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine"

"Absolute non-conformism and universal disrespect was the rule, and great good humour reigned. It was a time for pleasure and nothing else... Elements of language attacked each other in the most paradoxical manner possible, and so that human communication, misled from the start, was thrown into the mood most amenable to adventure... Finally, with the Exquisite Corpse we had at our command an infallible way of holding the critical intellect in abeyance, and of fully liberating the mind's metaphorical activity."

Something from the swirl of surrealist intention about doing what is the most fun - that disrupts the socio-economic imperative. A philosophical discourse that privileges pleasure, disorder and the random - embrace the irrational, disturb the flow of meaning, disregard all logic and syntax...

"Your desire entails attending to your unconscious, heeding the formations of the unconscious (slips of the tongue, jokes, bungled actions, acts of forgetting, dreams, symptoms). An ethics of psychoanalysis is an ethics that aims at truth insofar as it aims at the truth of one's desire manifested in these formations... Lacan refers to this as the ethics of "speaking well" (bein dire), which consists in not speaking well at all."

A brief foray into the territory I remember from Luce Irigary, about not speaking well, which I guess was part of the feminist deconstsruction of Lacan et al. To be honest I was never a particularly rigorous theory student, I tended to collect fragments that inspired me, to weave into different meanings and associations - more a poetic resonance than anything else. Well it's funny to see how nothing has changed, and if you can develop a strong enough framework, that any creative practice, no matter how grounded in subjectivity and chaos, will eventually find itself a context, even become recognised as a position of strength and coherence.

Filtering ideas for the program residency about creating traces of the interactions that happen, with collaborative drawings, diagrams, sketches - something for the wall. Playing with media/art praxis in various forms, all tangental yet related. Had a nice comment from a researcher on the Creative Journeys website, saying: 'I look forward to seeing how you will push the boundaries of the technology to suit your own practices.' Indeed. Perhaps we can build some diplomatic cultural bridges, apparently using an orchestra is a safe way to do it. (BBC News on NY Philarmonic Orchestra playing in North Korea.)

Friday, December 7, 2007

2:56 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Collaborations

Local

Derek Holzer Sound Player & Collaboration Consultant

Filip Jonker Sculptor, Impossible Bridge Builder, Bridge Model Design

Jacob Kirkegaard Sound Design, Composer & Installation Consultant

Jasmina Maschina Manifesto Against Function, Musical Consultant & Sound Design

Mika Meskanen Interaction Consultant & Design


Remote

Arup SoundLab Melbourne, Derek Thompson, Acoustic Consultant & Bridge Sonification

Michael Bates, University of Sydney, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, Digital Audio Production, Surround Sound Bridges Composer and sound engineer

Luka Dekleva Play Bridge VJ, Interaction & Instrument Design

Mari Keski-Korsu Video, Documentary, Jopo and more

Sara Kolster Video & Film Artist

Jonathan Nicol Website Guru and Design, Flash Player Virtual Symphony

Nazli Tabatabai-Khatambakhsh Whispers Across a Bridge, Theatre Development

Thursday, December 6, 2007

9:11 PM
Posted by jodi rose

I can't remember what I did last week. All lost in the blur of wasted time. There may have been a dessert party involved, with 3 tiramisu's and at least 20 other assorted cakes, including the world debut of the schwarzwalderpavlova - to popular acclaim - along with the molehillcake. danced the sugar away until 3.

Actually it's been four days of total hibernation, which is helping rest my body while playing havoc with my mind. All those dark thoughts you can run from in company or the pursuit of that next creative thrill.... lurk in the corners and ambush you on the third day of housebound isolation. Although I did have a visit from a sympathetic friend, when it all got too much, and staying connected to the world online, for what that's worth. At least it shows my strategy is working, and once this flu abates I will get back into walking in daylight every single day, and balancing seeing friends with keeping focused on the tasks at hand. Which continue to expand exponentially, as soon as I finish one thing another three leap up to take its place.

Still, I guess that's the creative life for you. If one does persist in the belief that 'whatever you can think of or imagine; you can make it happen,' ...well at the very least it keeps you busy.

Had coffee with a friend last week, in Edelweiss at Gorlitzer Park, trying to get out into that sunshine! Talked about being able to see our 'emotional bodies' and how they would be scratched, dented and bruised into a completely different shape. The self we present to the world - as a relatively coherent, confident, together, legible person - would somehow only be the surface tension over a deeply crevassed canyon of scarred bedrock and sudden sheer drops into dizzying emptiness. (If you let yourself be affected by life, love and the world)

You might think this state of mind is in part related to soaking up the existential ambience of Berlin, all those tormented romantic poets, but it's also part megrims from the flu. Don't mind me. This too shall pass.

There was a lovely melancholy passage in 'High Fidelity', about how you are in danger of just floating away, when you have nothing to anchor you to your life. I think we've spoken about this before, I'm getting more used to the sensation of being in one place now - and dealing ok with the random drifting currents that sweep me along day by day; but there is only one fixed point on the horizon, and I guess you need at least two to navigate by. I guess it's karma, for someone who has been so resolutely unfixed and determined to remain free and open to anything; at some point you realise that what you have given up is perhaps not worth losing for the possibility of a potential that may never arrive.

Talking about the notion of 'deep locality' with Mika, that the more you are part of the global community, networked, online, virtual presence scattered here there and everywhere; the more important it is to be physically grounded in a place that feels like home. Whatever that deeply loaded term actually represents to you. He mentioned things like knowing the local shopkeepers, and your neighbours, and what kind of birds are in the trees... hmmmmm 1 out of 3 and that's only at my favourite cafe, so i went and took an inventory of the birds along the ufer today. Swans, robins, ducks (two kinds), black round waterbirds with white faces, and seagulls. Which I thought were a long way from home, but maybe we're closer to the Baltic than I realised.

Maybe we're all a long way from home, but at least we're here together. I love my Berlin community, there is something particular to this place and the people who are drawn here. Think I just realised that I'm in it for the long haul, having changed my return ticket to Sydney which was originally booked for yesterday, and is now sometime in February - together we will make it through the winter.