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Aesthetics Art Culture Video

You Have to Go Into the Unknown

“Friedrich believed that man should not paint what he saw in the outside world but what he saw inside of himself. Of course, Friedrich’s mind was far from a springtime in bloom so his paintings often focused on cold, dark winters and intensely stark landscapes” – Horses

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Aesthetics Culture

Environmental Micro-Listening Exercise #3 [World Listening Day]

Recording situation: Midnight small town sounds. In the distance the hum of a factory on the night shift can be heard, occasional passing traffic and sounds of nature. Recorded for World Listening Day 2023.

Micro listening is the practice of deliberately focussing on elements of a sound environment that may pass unnoticed in everyday experience. Listening to sounds in this way can lead to a magnification of our experiences. The finer details of sound become magnified enabling us to notice the effects these may have on the psyche. Any sound can be the subject of a micro-listening, recorded sounds or real-life ambiences function equally as well. There is no preference for ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ sounds as there is no ‘nature’ from which human beings are separate from, just one universe which acts upon and is acted upon by us. The point of a micro-listening is to remind the listener that they and the sound form part of the same acoustic environment.

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Aesthetics Culture

Radio.Earth: Near Amsterdam

radio.earth is a participatory radio art project concerning the ecological crisis, its effects on our environment and on the possibilities for action. The project aims to establish a network of collaboration between individuals and organisations interested and engaged in these subjects, with all their respective practices from art and science to activism.

The radio.earth mobilemic is at a periferic location south of Amsterdam, at an allotment near the former village Driemond and along the Amsterdam-Rijn canal, one of the busiest shiproutes in the Netherlands. The allotment is sided by a sort of artificial nature park that suffers from exessive nitrogen deposit. Lot’s of brambles and nettles. operating artist: michiel huijsman”

Watch and listen to the 12 hour ambient stream here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL0IAWjSlrI

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Aesthetics Culture Experimental

Carn Enoch Extratemporal Neo Reimannian Communication Session 080822

Dave Stitch takes his organically installed modular system for a hike and attempts to step out of the sequence of time:

“I’ve been thinking about doing this for a year now after discovering my new favourite hill in South Wales (GB) It’s littered with neolythic etchings on the rocks and seemed like an interesting space to cart our innalogs to for some wild synthing.”

“The main composition was created using the neo reimannian based sequencer grid in the Automannetz state of the O_c, which I studied for an afternoon in order to transcribe musical notes that I had extracted from a tarot reading of 5 cards using my esoteric spreadsheet (which maps the major and minor arcana of the tarot to John Coltrane’s 1969 circle of fifths sketch.)”

“I am besotted with the word ‘extratemporal’ in the context of live electronic recordings. I have always felt that a one take performance captures a moment and takes it outside linear time, to be tapped into again at a later date (if recorded!) I wonder if memories count as recordings?”

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Aesthetics Culture

ENVIRONMENTAL MICRO-LISTENING EXCERCISE #2

Photo by Ave Calvar Martinez
Flatland Frequencies · Environmental Micro-Listening Exercise #2

Recording situation: It is night, recently raining, and the air is filled with a cool, crisp atmosphere. Traffic passes to and fro on its way in and out of town. The sounds seep in through an open upstairs window.

Micro listening is the practice of deliberately focussing on elements of a sound environment that may pass unnoticed in everyday experience. Listening to sounds in this way can lead to a magnification of our experiences. The finer details of sound become magnified enabling us to notice the effects these may have on the psyche. Any sound can be the subject of a micro-listening, recorded sounds or real-life ambiences function equally as well. There is no preference for ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ sounds as there is no ‘nature’ from which human beings are separate from, just one universe which acts upon and is acted upon by us. The point of a micro-listening is to remind the listener that they and the sound form part of the same acoustic environment.

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Aesthetics Art Culture Film

Johannes Binotto – Practices of Viewing: Muted

“On Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter the standard setting for videos is “mute”. More than 120 years after its invention silent cinema has become the default mode.
Today’s practice is supposed to make video consumption smoother. But it could also make us think about the frightening power silence could only attain with the advent of cinematic sound. In muting we might hear something far more unsettling than what words and images can show.”

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Aesthetics Culture

Environmental Micro-Listening Excercise #1

Flatland Frequencies · Environmental Micro-Listening Exercise #1

We present the first in a series of recordings for micro-listening.

Micro listening is the practice of deliberately focussing on elements of a sound environment that may pass unnoticed in everyday experience. Listening to sounds in this way can lead to a magnification of our experiences. The finer details of sound become magnified enabling us to notice the effects these may have on the psyche. Any sound can be the subject of a micro-listening, recorded sounds or real-life ambiences function equally as well. There is no preference for ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ sounds as there is no ‘nature’ from which human beings are separate from, just one universe which acts upon and is acted upon by us. The point of a micro-listening is to remind the listener that they and the sound form part of the same acoustic environment.

Recording situation: underneath the A47. A warm, still summer’s afternoon. Traffic can be heard passing over the road bridge above us and reverberating below. Birdsong can be heard from the wet grassland and riverbanks close by.

Categories
Aesthetics Art Culture

Tree Translation Excercise – Sarah Wood

“Trees sending messages that we can maybe translate if we look hard enough.”

Categories
Aesthetics Article Culture Politics

Music and Rebellion

Arnold Schoenberg – Six Little Piano Pieces

Can popular music be subversive? According to the critical theorist Theodore Adorno the answer is firmly, ‘no’. The reasons for this are related to the structure of contemporary society itself; “We live in a society of commodities—that is, a society in which production of goods is taking place, not primarily to satisfy human wants and needs, but for profit. Human needs are satisfied only incidentally, as it were. This basic condition of production affects the form of the product as well as the human interrelationships.” A Social Critique of Radio Music – Adorno