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| d_cultuRe : Forum Panelist Biographies | |
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An introduction outlining topics, will be followed by contributions from three panel participants, in conversation across an 8 week period, including John Oswald, Douglas Kahn and Kenneth Goldsmith. The Online Panel Discussion will be introduced and moderated by Lina Dzuverovic.
Oswald began 2004 with the first commercial publication of one of his chronophotics: the Arc of Apparitions is produced on DVD by Avatar/Ohm editions. In February the New Millennium Players performed a retrospective of sixteen of his works (from solo cello to orchestral) of Rascali Klepitoire at the RedCAt at Walt Disney Hall in Los Angeles. And Oswald's own label Fony will be rereleasing his albums from the nineties, starting with Grayfolded (May) and Plexure (August) and Discosphere (November). His new feature-length cinematic chronophotic instandstillness was premiered at the Images Festival of Film and Video in April. An enhanced version entitled instandstillnessence, was on display for the month of September as part of Oswald's solo show of his visual art at the Ed Day Gallery in Toronto. In 2003 Oswald premiered his new solo dance opera Spinvolver, with Susanna Hood, in Berlin in February, followed by performances in several European capitols. In the fall, Aparanthesi, a one note electroacousmatic composition, entailing some research in the perception of sonic morphs, was released on CD by empreintes digitales. Last spring his first Chronophotics to be exhibited in North America, entitled Jacko Lantern, was on display in the window of Pages Books as part of both the Images Moving Pictures and the Contact Festival of Photography, while Stills, his first solo show of images, was held over at Toronto Harbourfront's Premiere Dance Theatre for eight months, and he was the cover boy for the British music mag The Wire. In recent years he composed a "Concerto for Wired Conductor and Orchestra", which premiered at Boston Symphony Hall. He designed the soundtrack and system for Stress, an eight-screen movie by Bruce Mau, showing at the Museum of Technology in Vienna. A new piece entitled "Oswald's First Piano Concerto by Tchaikovsky, (as suggested by Michael Snow)" was premiered in Vancouver by Paul Plimley and the CBC orchestra. Hecomposed a score for the National Ballet of Canada for orchestra, robot piano and the disembodied singing voice of Glenn Gould. For the past four years he has been creating a database of photo portraits for a series of "Moving Stills" or chronophotics. One of his plunderphonie video/photo collages was shown at the Royal Festival Hall Hayward Gallery in London and was immediately sold as a gift to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Of recent works, he wrote, directed and produced a radio play in four interwoven languages (Brazilian, Dutch, English & German); wrote, animated, directed & scored "Homonymy" (for chamber ensemble & cinema); scored the stage version of the silent movie classic "Metropolis"; produced the soundtrack album to the gay porn feature "Hustler White"; as well as appearing as himself in John Greyson's feature film "Un©ut" and Craig Baldwin's "Sonic Outlaws", and he was the subject of one of Moses Znaimer's television documentaries "The Originals". Other recent activities include: a sonic motorcade in Brasilia; and a dance composition for 22 choreographers (including Bill T.Jones, Margie Gillis, & Holly Small); plus commissions from the Lyon Opera Ballet, Dutch National Radio, Change of Heart, SMCQ, Pizzicato 5, and Radio Canada. Other works are in the active repertoire of the Kronos Quartet (they've played his Spectre over 300 times worldwide, & another commission, Mach almost as often), the Culberg Ballet Sweden, the Monaco Ballet, The Deutsche Opera Ballet Berlin, The Modern Quartet, the Penderecki Quartet, and others. His recorded works have been used in productions for radio, stage, concert, television, film, Hollywood movies, computer media and video. Since the mid-70's Oswald has, under the rubric Pitch, researched and presented works that require absolute darkness. These include events, environments, and concerts, and the installation structure Pitch Pivot ('92). In recent years various independent parties in North America have capitalized on this research to present events and culinary experiences in the dark. Oswald is also the founder and co-facilitator of Art Wrestling, a Toronto-based contact improvisation movement jamboree which has occurred weekly uninterrupted for 28 years. In 1990, Oswald's most notorious recording, plunderphonic, was destroyed by prudes in the Recording Industry representing Michael Jackson. He has since released recordings on Elektra, Avant, ReR Megacorp, Blast First, & Swell, featuring transformations of the music and performances of Stravinsky, Metallica, James Brown, Gyorgy Ligeti, Dolly Parton & many others. A box-set CD & book retrospective of his plunderphonics work has just been appropriated from Oswald's Yony label by Seeland. The first disc of his Grateful Dead production GrayFolded was selected as the #1 international recording of the decade by the Toronto Sun. In the same year his album of improvised music, Acoustics was a #1 critic's selection in Coda magazine. The GrayFolded package, completed the following year was selected for best of the year lists in Rolling Stone, The New York Times and many other publications. A recent retrospective CD box-set of Plunderphonic works has been called "mind-numbingly amazing" by Peter Kenneth, Rolling Stone Magazine, and made Spin Magazine's 2001 top 10. 2004 will see the founding of an ad agency called Veracity. Oswald is Director of Research at MysteryLaboratory in Canada. Eye Weekly's '94 year end report anointed him a "God-like being" (in 2003 they have upgraded this to "a god proper"). The Montreal Mirror says "John Oswald is probably Canada's most important composer-musician," and the London (England) Observer has called him "the maddest man on the planet."  
About UbuWeb Concrete poetry's utopian pan-internationalist bent was clearly articulated by Max Bense in 1965 when he stated, ".concrete poetry does not separate languages; it unites them; it combines them. It is this part of its linguistic intention that makes concrete poetry the first international poetical movement." Its ideogrammatic self-contained, exportable, universally accessible content mirrors the utopian pan-linguistic dreams of cross-platform efforts on today's Internet; Adobe's PDF (portable document format) and Sun System's Java programming language each strive for similarly universal comprehension. The pioneers of concrete poetry could only dream of the now-standard tools used to make language move and morph, stream and scream, distributed worldwide instantaneously at little cost. Essentially a gift economy, poetry is the perfect space to practice utopian politics. Freed from profit-making constraints or cumbersome fabrication considerations, information can literally "be free": on UbuWeb, we give it away and have been doing so since 1996. We publish in full color for pennies. We receive submissions Monday morning and publish them Monday afternoon. UbuWeb's work never goes "out of print." UbuWeb is a never-ending work in progress: many hands are continually building it on many platforms. UbuWeb has no need for money, funding or backers. Our web space is provided for a pittance by an ISP sympathetic to our vision. Donors with an excess of bandwidth contribute to our cause. All labour and editorial work is voluntary; no money changes hands. Totally independent from institutional support, UbuWeb is free from academic bureaucracy and its attendant infighting, which often results in compromised solutions; we have no one to please but ourselves. UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, thousands of files and several gigabytes of poetry. Sounds like a marginal situation? Hardly. We've won every prestigious Internet award there is and are acknowledged web-wide as the definitive source for Visual, Concrete + Sound Poetry. UbuWeb is on the syllabus of countless schools; we've gotten queries from Ph.D. candidates seeking information to third-graders researching a paper on concrete poetry. UbuWeb embodies an unstable community, neither vertical nor horizontal but rather a Deleuzian nomadic model: a 4 dimensional space simultaneously expanding and contracting in every direction, growing "rhizomatically" with ever-increasing unpredictability and uncanniness. Abridged from Editors Statement on UbuWeb.
About Electra Electra's recent projects include Sounds Of Christmas by Christian Marclay - an installation and a series of performances at Tate Modern; Once Seen - a touring programme of British video and sound work shown in various venues in Norway; Electric Weekend - talks, interventions and screenings at Electric Avenue Studios and The Ritzy Cinema; Shipwreck Radio - A sound art radio commission (Steven Stapleton & Colin Potter of Nurse With Wound) above the arctic circle broadcast regularly on local radio in Lofoten, Norway; and Sound and the 20th Century Avant Garde - an eight week lecture series held at Tate Modern. 29 January - 23 March 2005 New form in context of copyleft and copy rights. d_cultuRe is focused on audio production, distribution and discussion, seeking to explore the boundary between sound and music composition, in a cultural and political landscape.
Reference Resources, keep up to date with the Online Panel Discussion and make a contribution to the Public Forum. |
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