eArts roundup, pt. II

by Ben

I’ve been meaning to fill in a quick summary of the rest of the festival (the parts I was able to attend, at least). Sorry to leave you hanging!

I think by far the most common response to this year’s eArts Festival, voiced by performers, curators, and audience members alike, was to curse the disorganization of it all. While it was certainly an improvement over last year’s festival, which I didn’t even know was going on until it was over, getting information about what was going on where and when was much harder than it should have been. There was no clear, central guide; the website was late to come on-line, slow, and hard to navigate (quite an obvious problem for an organization dedicated to cutting edge digital technology); and texts were poorly and erratically translated (despite offers of free assistance from native English speakers).

The biggest problem was in the scheduling, though; it does a disservice to absolutely everyone to book so many simultaneous events. All of the performances were crammed into the first week of the festival, with locations ranging from the Science and Technology Museum in Pudong to Xujiahui Park in Puxi. I anguished over how to schedule my own concert-going, ever worried about missing something brilliant. My biggest regrets were Carl Stone’s first performance on night two of Streaming Objects, Dead J’s set in Xujiahui, and the whole of B6 and Yang Lei’s Feng Shui Omniscience (which sounded very cool, and the more I read about it after the fact, the worse I felt). I couldn’t even catch most of the installations in Xujiahui, since they were on display at the same time as the concerts. There was just no way to be in all those places at once.

But at least they hired top-notch folks to select the actual art, the festival’s saving grace. In the end, most of what I heard was of high quality, and even if it wasn’t, it represented an interesting or otherwise underrepresented voice in new media. So, yes, it was a good and needed festival, and I enjoyed what I was able to catch, but there’s clearly lots of room for improvement.

My performance schedule during this hectic week oscillated between Yao Dajuin’s Streaming Objects three-night opening concert at the Zhangjiabang Riverfront, just behind the Science and Technology Museum in Pudong, and ArtHub’s Final Cut series in Xujiahui Park (organized by Davide Quadrio and Defne Ayas).

October 19
Patience for the Man 忍而为人

I believe this piece was formed at the instigation of Alizia Borsari (also known for a widely circulated photograph of me belly-slamming Final Cuts co-organizer Davide Quadrio that I cannot in good conscience endorse). It was billed as a “work in progress,” and it pretty much lived up to its billing. Mainly, it was short, lasting barely half an hour, to the annoyance of the packed crowd, who had been erroneously informed that the show would last for 2 hours.

I’m pretty lousy at describing choreography, but here goes. There were two female dancers, Nunu and Ling Xi, at times very sculptural and solid and making sharp and brusque gestures, and at other times playacting, which may have been a way of establishing some kind of dichotomy between fact and metaphor, real life and artifice. Or maybe I don’t know what I’m talking about. The two images that stick with me is when one girl was crawling on her knees, and the other girl picked a fight by pushing her over, and then later one of the girls scampered across the stage, acting like a dog. See some pics.

Behind them Aaajiao was doing real-time 3D graphics using Processing, rear-projected on four big panels, and B6 was accompanying with music on his laptop. Aaajiao’s side of things was fairly straightforward Processing stuff, swirls of particles, similar to what you see in Radiohead’s “House of Cards” video (shot without cameras, generating data that you can edit and recompile yourself in Processing). B6’s set was a bit rougher than what I’m accustomed to hearing from him, or maybe it was the soundsystem (which was partially replaced when Yu Yin Tang’s Zhang Hai Sheng 张海生 was called in as last minute audio insurance just before the Christian Marclay show 2 days later), but still a good, supporting set.

When I asked B6 after the show how he was doing lately, he replied, “busy,” which was a bit of an understatement. In addition to this performance, he had put together the Feng Shui Omniscience portion of the eArts Festival, together with Yang Lei 杨磊 over in Pudong, while simulateously preparing for the launch of his new Modern Sky CD Post Haze (a very fine collection of minimal techno) and subsequent China tour.

Anyway, as I said, the show was short, so afterwards I rushed over to Pudong, hoping I might still catch Carl Stone’s performance at Streaming Objects, but it turns out I missed the first three sets.

I didn’t know the first act, Skoltz_Kolgen from Montreal, but I had dinner with them afterwards, and they are quite charming and erudite, and I wish I could have caught their set.

Then Masayuki Akamatsu 赤松正行’s iPhone Snowflakes got another chance. The story I heard was that some official in attendance on opening night (there were a bunch) had had enough and wanted to leave, but he quite reasonably thought it might be rude to leave in the middle of a piece. So he ordered the piece stopped, allowing time for a more respectable exit. Crazy, but it exemplifies my impression the whole festival’s priorities; to have a big, flashy, expensive spectacle, with little regard for the messy art. Anyway, I went out to lunch with Masayuki Akamatsu, along with Carl Stone, Wang Changcun, and two other guys the next day, and he showed me some other iPhones aps he had done; having graduated from large-scale computer systems, he’s taken to the iPhone as an art medium in a big way, and I think he’s right on the money.

And I missed Carl Stone, who was third up, but I took solace in the fact that he’d be playing again the following night.

When I arrived some slow moving, moody music, and subdued color field visuals were washing over the river. The piece must have just started, since it wasn’t until 20 minutes or more later that I was able to identify the work as being by Ulf Langheinrich. Very subtle, but I dug it.

Then last up was the Hangzhou wonder duo of noise guitarist Li Jianghong 李剑鸿 and laptopist (and Mr. Li’s paramour, if I’m not mistaken) Vavabond. Mr. Li cut a striking figure dressed in black, wailing with his axe like a siren out across the water, enveloped in mist from the fog machine, warmed by the glow of stage lights.

October 20
This night, I was all Streaming Objects’s. First up, 8GG’s set struck me as rough and loose, a bit of a disappointment. There were real time sounds and images, a long stretch of scenery going by outside of a car window, with faces floating above. The last section had white dots in a black background, seemingly dynamically spawned, but bouncing around in very predictable trajectories, evoking Pong in a not altogether favorable comparison, with some noisy blips for impact sounds.

It was Brian O’Reilly who really got the party started. I was stunned by the images he had going, stark, also black and white, but complex and biomorphic, frosty landscapes swallowed up in a ball of undulating brainwaves, unlike anything I’d seen before; it was seriously viscerally thrilling. After the show he slipped me a CD/DVD collaboration he did with granular synthesis pioneer and Computer Music Tutorial author Curtis Roads entitled Point Line Cloud, on which he provided visualizations for several of Mr. Roads’s electronic works. Previously I had mentioned that I’ve been working with granular synthesis, and he said something like, “Oh, you don’t need to tell me about granular synthesis!” Little did I realize he was a close collaborator of the guy who literally wrote the book (Microsound, 2001, MIT Press)! He even revealed that he was the friend who mentioned to Mr. Roads, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you need a visa to visit China,” a few days before Mr. Roads’s cancelled appearance at the 2006 MusicAcoustica Festival in Beijing.

Anyway, next on the bill I finally got to see Carl Stone, and he was awesome, mixing in some pre-prepared elements (pianos and things) with material he sampled in realtime from multi-instrumentalist Wu Wei 吴巍, performing on sheng and erhu and occasionally vocalizing. Fantastic balance of space, variety, color, density…awesome.

Last up was Frank Bretschneider, who returned to the idea of simple shapes in black and white, but wow, what a symphony of forms he unleashed from such humble materials! I think he even topped Ryoichi Kurokawa in terms of audiovisual synchronization, very tight, very minimal, but everything impeccably placed and proportioned, a prime example of how two media conspiring together can coalesce into something greater than can be achieved via one medium alone. The girl sitting next to me thought it was too long, and perhaps it was a bit long for a concert setting on a cool autumn night, but I was kept rapt in the mere contemplation of what it must be like to experience his work in a club! A triumphant culmination to Streaming Objects’s three nights of concerts.

I think in general, once the opening night jitters were over with, things went a lot more smoothly at the Zhangjiabang riverfront. (Although that poor, floating video cube in the river made an appearance each night, each time getting a little farther until pow, flatline, blue screen of death. I was really rooting for the little fella. Maybe next year!) In all, a very fresh and necessary sequence of performances.

October 21
Q2008

Feng Mengbo 冯梦波 seems to be the most famous Chinese artist working in “game art” (which always strikes me, as a longtime game developer myself, as a rather presumptuous category, like saying “film art” or “photograph art,” but I won’t go into that here), and having heard that he primarily uses a modified Quake 3 engine as his artistic medium, his set was more or less what I expected. He had modded the game, replacing the typical beefy combatants with nude girls wielding cell phones instead of guns and shooting roses instead of bullets. And that was about it. He ran around the level performing what might be generously described as a kind of virtual improvisatory choreography.

He pulled one kind of cheap trick, which is to turn off screen refreshing; this requires nothing more than the flip of one Boolean variable. It works like this: think of a computer game as a software film projector that calculates each image and flashes it on the screen at a steady rate; then imagine that each new image doesn’t erase the first, but is simply superimposed on top, leaving trippy trails behind moving objects, obscuring the sense of virtual space, a shortcut to achieving a very dense visual composition in a hurry.

A key concern for game artists ought to be interactivity, the primary characteristic that differentiates games from other media. But here there was only a stultifyingly simple nod in interactivity’s vague direction. Audience members were invited to come up one at a time and click a mouse on a table that did I don’t even remember what to the image on the screen. There was no engagement, no transformation, just the equivalent of opening the refrigerator door and watching the light come on, serving no purpose other than to prove that, yes, it’s all happening in real-time.

Talk among the spectators was that this represented an unprecedented level of erotic permissiveness for officially approved art on the mainland. Mr. Feng manipulated his digital girls to tumble perpendicular to the screen, affrording the audience a clear view of all the polygons shaded to look as if the sun don’t shine on them. Particularly titillated were the group of older ladies who faithfully attended Final Cut every night, as the temporary stage in Xujiahui Park displaced their usual evening ballroom dancing practice.

October 22
Christian Marclay’s Screen Play

I plan to make my participation in this performance the subject of a longer post on my own new blog soon, so I won’t go into it here. Stay tuned!

And that was it for eArts 2008 performances!

BTW, you can read Carl Stone’s own account in two parts on New Music Box.

As I mentioned above, I just started my own blog, less than a month old, and I expect to post most of my ruminations from there from now on, so I’ll be less active on GNO. But many thanks to Lawrence Li and Yao Dajuin for inviting me to participate in GNO and providing feedback and guidance along the way! (Also note that Lawrence has an additional blog keeping him busy these days; see what he’s up to over at the Shao Foundation.)




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