As promised below, I’m posting the completed video to ‘Algorithm’, a song written and recorded by Perlasix in 1998. It’s a track with some significance to me.
On the Youtube page I jokingly refer to it as the “high-water mark” of our work. In those days we called ourselves ‘Mamboscope’, even had the dot-com domain and a groovy animated GIF logo. Algorithm came about toward the end of a period in which we’d done an Arts Council-funded commission for a community dance group and remixes for Heaven 17 (which appeared on the Retox/Detox album) and Pulp (‘Party Hard’, the last single of This Is Hardcore – the band chose the shitty Stretch’n'Vern dirge instead). Things were on the up, and when I got involved with the nascent Merseyside Music Development Agency, it felt like we were almost part of the “industry”.
Of course, it didn’t last. The infamous spectre of “personal differences” reared up from out of nowhere and took out one, then two of the threesome. Looking back now, it’s as if a lot of growing up was compressed into a very short period around that time. Personal lives outside of the band suddenly became more significant, consumed more time and – in truth – probably offered more hope.
So, here’s to 1998. Still innocent, bright-eyed, slightly dislocated and definitely MDMA’d.
I’m trying my hand at some ‘lo-fi’ animation for Perlasix’s next video. Here’s a preview.
This 5 second clip is from the work-in-progress on ‘Algorithm’, a five-minute track from about 1998 (I think… ?). I’m using Windows Movie Maker to “animate” and effect images prepared in MS-Publisher.
Purists will groan at the inappropriate software being used, but I quite like the fiddly process, the outcome of which is always unpredictabe. I physically move files between a laptop and a desktop PC (running different operating systems) and re-encode the video several times. This, on top of the lo-res source material, added grayscale and grain effects etc., results in a lovely ‘degraded’ appearance.
I’ll post the full version, to music, soon.
Inspired by our friends over at KlingKlang, Perlasix have been digging around in their extensive archive of (in our case, unpublished) music. Unfortunately, we haven’t got the budget for a full ‘Catalogue’-style remastering job.
However, we have been catapulting (well, desperately lugging) these recordings from the 1990s into the present largely by marrying them with new video material.
Two early outputs are now on the Perlasix video page (on this site). Click here.
The second Athens Biennale brings together dozens of contemporary artists and a fistful of curators. This time round, the main exhibition is on the beach at Palio Faliro. The theme for 2009 is ‘Heaven’ – and like the show itself, that’s nice… but hard to find.
Unfortunately I only had a few hours to spare, so was limited to the main exhibition, housed in a cavernous concrete bunker beneath one of the 2000 olympic venues. I’d previously visited the ReMap 2 exhibitions that temporarily occupy condemned properties in the ‘problem-area’ of Metaxourghio. So the Bienniale’s squeaky clean yet desolate main location came as something of a (culture) shock.
The work, however, was worth it – and the venue played its part too: the huge multi-functional space was partitioned into a labyrinthe, with lots of hidden doorways and curtains (and even the occassional obstacle to duck under) giving the whole thing more of a sense of discovery and risk than the exterior suggested.
The work here is mainly multimedia, and the sounds from the various exhibits and installations merged in the rooms to create a sensurround cacophony that only abated when I finally emerged blinking into the sunlight, back in the flyblown carpark somewhere south of the city.
Here’s a collection of impressions at the time:
PS: that cleaner ! Is she for real ? Or is she part of the show ? I still can’t decide, but remember being totally freaked out by her at the time (hence the sudden switch to twitchy “secret filming” mode).
It’s hard to believe that just crossing the Danube can still make you feel like you’re living in a le Carré novel. But if you enjoy that kind of thing, you can still conjure a bit of Iron Curtain Noir in Slovakia.
You wouldn’t guess there was anything amiss from the nicely restored old town, exclusive shops and Porsche Cayennes (black, of course). But step inside a government building – as I am occassionally forced to do – and behold ! Was that the ghost of Andropov, I just saw ? Maybe, because the walls still have ears here. And the phones click and hum strangely in my office.
Now, normally there’s one thing I can rely on at Bratislava airport. And that’s Victor, the chauffeur, and his shiny new Mercedes E-class. So to arrive at 11pm – slightly drunk on Lufthansa hospitality – to find no Victor and no shiny new Mercedes E-class, is perhaps an omen. Especially if you’re slightly drunk.
So a cab, then, to the Hotel Tatra, that concrete bastion of just-about-post-communist civility amidst the business park, mall and chainstore massacre that Brat is turning into. I’m shown not to any “usual suite”, but to a single room. I can’t find the bed at first, but it turns out to be disguised as a sofa. Masters of disguise, those communists. I am so tired I can’t even be bothered to pretend to hunt for bugs (of the listening-device type), a ritual that I usually indulge in to set the tone for my stay.
Morning brings sunshine, breakfast (solidly Central European) and distant memories of the “free video entertainment for your pleasure” on the TV. In fact, I awake to find them still at it, but made it out of the room just before the money shot.
A brutal ministry
I have to admit to a certain wistfulness on this morning’s stroll down from the Hotel Tatra to the Ministry’s imposing brutalist/international-style edifice. Come to think of it, in my year or so of occasional visits to Bratislava, this building is the thing that has changed the most – but the nature of that change seems to sum up the whole place really.
The building was thrown up some time in the seventies, I’d guess. It’s a ten-floor job with a foyer clad in marble. Its public areas are furnished minimally with retro-futurist tubular chrome furniture. It has a cafeteria that works on a bizarre system of tokens that can only be purchased on certain days of the month (and that become a trading currency thereafter). Over the last year or so, the building’s exterior has been cleaned and the windows replaced (the original metal frames contracted in the cold, granting the freezing Central European winter access to the building). Outside, on my last visit, an impressive fountain was just being commissioned by a group of plumbers in rubber waders. But inside it is as it always was: everyone in their one-man shoebox offices, doors closed, radios on. No-one seems to talk much.
My morning of meetings is followed by a pizza and beer at the Black Rose – my favourite perch for talent-spotting. It never disappoints, in particular as the midday temperature hits 30 deg C and the layers start coming off the locals.
More of the same Ministry meetings in the afternoon, before retiring to the hotel for repose – and an absurdly, cloyingly, heavy thunderstorm. Dinner is thus limited to a minibar Bounty washed down with grapefruit juice (it’s either that or Ballantines). I catch up with the money shot between CNN stories.
Tomorrow’s trip to Banska Bystrica promised to be more interesting…
Bratislava – Banska Bystrica
To Banska Bystrica (pron. Bistritza). Although the 7am start doesn’t lighten my mood, at least the torrential rain has abated in favour of a low-flying sky dropping fog into the dips in the motorway east.
Banska lies something less than half-way across the country, and as soon as you’re out of Brat, you run out of decent road – or at least any contiguous stretch of it. Luckily, Victor is driving the E-class. He doesn’t hang about, so the journey takes around three hours, although nearly ending prematurely in the back of a truck as he is fiddling with his cellphone.
After a rest stop in a village somewhere for coffee and an omelette (the restaurant has some animal’s skull suspended above its entrance in welcome), we arrive in Banska, there to meet three people from across the country.
I speak with eloquence lost through faltering consecutive translation and draw a whiteboard-marker approximation of an Escher print I vaguely remember. I pretend it is a flowchart.
To walk through Banska Bystrica is to walk through weirdness. It’s a grand place with crumbling stucco’d mansions, a huge town square with soviet monument contrasting with plaques about “the national uprising” and everywhere wooded hills looming over buildings and at the end of roads. I’m in the foothills of the Tatras, but there is something Transylvanian about the place.
I get back in the E-class and get swished across the cobbles and potholes, back to Brat. And all along, I feel as if I haven’t travelled here through space, but through time.
[this is an edited assembly of three pieces originally written on-the-hoof between Munich, Bratislava and the Slovak outback. They date from Summer 2005]
I am awake among the institution-white linens. Groggily I remember making up my own bed with them. That might have been last night. It might as well have been last year.
I turn to check the time. 5.30am. The institution-grey carpet picks up the first glimmer of morning that’s crept around the polyester curtains. The bathroom door opposite has a red plastic handle. It is curved.
I remember the headache to end all headaches from last night. Gingerly feeling across my temple, left-hand side, I detect no more pain. As if it was all a bad dream. But I know the death that sleeps inside the socket.
Daylight allows me to orientate myself. A shower helps. The bathroom is less than 1.5 metres squared. The shower cubicle is a plexiglass straightjacket. The shower has no thermostat. I look like I am suffering a bout of St. Vitus dance trying to balance the hot and cold taps. I have forgotten soap. None is provided. But if I can watch the water drain away between my feet, I know I’m still alive.
There are snatches of conversation from last night, before the migraine forced me to my room. The place I am in is a former training camp for the East German athletics elite. It’s here that the hormone-manipulated heroes of the workers’ and farmers’ state prepared to herald socialist supremacy to the decadent West. They didn’t have a chance against the epo-drenched enemy. Sport is war. On drugs. I’m living in a relic. And it’s home for a week.
I move quickly through the deserted corridors, out through a heavy double-glazed door and down the concrete steps of the building. Frost covers the earth to the side of the block path, a mass grave of half-covered dead leaves.
[this piece was first written in December 2006 as companion to the travelogue from my journey to A forest, south of Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg and Tempelhof Airport. It has lain dormant since then.]
2009 is the centenary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti’s strident hymn to machines, steam and speed that set off an explosion of creative energy felt far beyond his native Italy.
On the eve of the First World War, Futurist painting plundered the styles of cubism and pointillism, pressing them into the service of trashing all that was old and still, glorifying instead progress through movement, technology and, ultimately, war.
Tate Modern’s Futurism exhibition (open now, until 20 September 2009) presents a timely opportunity to reflect on the movement and its impact on 20th century art. But while the exhibition promises much, it manages to deliver only a cursory glance at this revolutionary movement – and it fails to capture the dynamism of its attempts to break out across genres and artforms.
The Tate’s show, arranged over eight rooms, covers Futurism’s Italian origins, its thematic concerns (including the street, ‘states of mind’, the cabaret and war) and related movements in Paris, Russia and London.
While few of the works shown are immediately recognisable or iconic, there are notable sculptures and paintings by Boccioni, Severini and Balla, and one or two Picassos dotted around.
The exhibition starts promisingly enough, with a display of the hectoring text of the Futurist Manifesto, published in Le Figaro in 1909, and Boccioni’s key sculpture Unique Form of Continuity in Space (1913). The bronze figure applies the Futurist ideal of dynamism to the human form, synthesizing a striding, aggressive and relentlessly advancing motion that leaves the viewer in no doubt that here comes war, “the world’s only hygiene” according to Marinetti.
Boccioni's 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space' (cast in bronze)
This is the exhibition’s powerful statement of intent. But what follows fails to live up to the promise, as the visitor is led into Room 2, at the centre of the exhibition and is promptly lost between Milan, Paris and Moscow. The lack of a printed guide (“for environmental reasons”) and the confusing layout, with no clear route to follow between the remaining rooms, leaves visitors visibly disorientated.
While it’s welcome, the show’s inclusion of Russian ’cubo-futurism’ and English vorticism underlines the fact that there just isn’t enough ‘pure’ Futurist content to fill an exhibition on the scale of the Tate’s requirements. But the curators’ narrow focus on painting and sculpture is self-defeating and misses one of the distinguishing characteristics of the movement: Futurism was born as a concept to transcend artforms. Its adherents published dozens of manifestos, embracing literature, music, photography, film and architecture. And Futurist ideas had a significant influence on each of these areas.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s left to the merchandising outside the exhibition rooms to fill the gap. The catalogue (£25) is accompanied by a good selection of books on Futurism in all its forms. Curiously, Tate has seen fit to produce a CD of Futurist music (£15), including original recordings from as early as 1920. I can’t help think it missed an opportunity to convey the sheer excitement of Futurism by incorporating this and other aspects of the movement in the exhibition.
Unlike the Futurists themselves, the Tate’s exhibition falls short in both scope and ambition.
Maybe you know the feeling: you’re nearly forty, you haven’t picked up a guitar in anger for years. There’s nothing for it, but to get down to a rehearsal studio and start making some noise.
Dignity might be in short supply here, but I’d like to think that we made a passable (first) attempt at invoking the spirit of the early seventies.
We’ve agreed to repeat the exercise on a monthly basis. I won’t be boring y’all with the product. It’s just that I was so excited to be able to play through a Marshall at last.
I’ve been invited to write a chapter for an ICT school textbook aimed at 11-14 year olds in Jamaica. It’s been an interesting experience, trying to reconcile a prescriptive curriculum, rapidly developing tech infrastructure and the creative potential of DTP, presentation and video-editing skills.
My chapter forms the last in the book, so at least all the heavy weight of instruction for the simplest processes and commands can be dispensed with. Unlike earlier chapters, I can simply say “now you can drag-and-drop your object to any area on the screen”, rather than laboriously relating the required sequence of mouse gestures and button clicks.
So, while it’s relatively easy to take the students through an enjoyable few hours of making and sharing a DTP’d flyer for an event, a presentation about a favourite subject and a quick video made up of clips, the question is really about the expectations of the market. And by this I mean the kids, not the curriculum developers in the Ministry of Education.
The source materials they have provided for some of the units illustrate (however anecdotally) a situation that the statistics bear out. Personal device ownership and access to online content is growing at a rapid rate in Jamaica, creating a generation gap that is likely to put educational policy-makers and students on opposite side of a digital skills divide.
Broadband penetration in the Jamaican market was at only 6% in 2006 (it was closer to 60% in the UK) and the costs of personal computer ownership were prohibitive. However, mobile telephony penetration now supposedly exceeds that of the US and 3G networks, exceeding fixed-line speeds, are now being rolled out.
It stands to reason therefore that the 11-14 year olds being handed this textbook may bring a tech-and-media-savvy approach to the tutorials and exercises it proposes. Rather than the ordered, gentle procession of floral source images proposed for the accompanying CD, these kids may want to use the likes of Windows MovieMaker to produce YouTube-style mashups of content they’ve already got on their phones. And they may also want to design and use their content differently, shaping it for use on mobile platforms.
I hope that the book can enthuse its readers to play with the technology and that it gives – to those that want to take it – the freedom to explore its application in their changing world.
It will all come out in the wash.
