Hi Crew, here are some links to Observation Class presentations and Workshop Activity Sheets

(Remember to sign in with your RMIT google account)

Week 1 – Observation Context Presentation – Link

Week 1 Observation Activity Prompts – Link

Week 2 – Observation Context Presentation – Link

Week 2 –  Observation Activation Prompts – Link

Observation template HERE

Mapping your Observations

Create a poster for both Listening and Looking. Kind of like a mind map

You could aim for Russell Crows bedroom in a Beautiful Mind

Great night at Testing Grounds with Joseph Norster. Fantastic spread of food, fire and of course roaming the streets with projector backpacks

Specific to site – Student collaboration Rmit

A video posted by Robbie Rowlands (@robbie_rowlands) on Aug 12, 2015 at 2:18am PDT

Manipulated and looped sounds

Specific to site – student sound collaboration RMIT – LIFT OFF

A video posted by Robbie Rowlands (@robbie_rowlands) on Aug 12, 2015 at 2:19am PDT

Packed the class into a lift with a laptop symphony and sent them off!!

Alan Lamb is an Australian artist, composer, and sound sculptor.

He is best known for installations of large scale Aeolian harps, such as his album Primal Image, which consists of contact microphone recordings of kilometre long spans of telegraph wire on 12 acres (49,000 m2) in rural Baldivis south of Perth purchased for that purpose.

Great visit to Testing Grounds. Joseph covered the history of the original YMCA building and the site once abandoned stuck in high arts turf war allowing Testing Grounds to fill the void.

Greta future collaborative potential here!!

We Have Decided Not To Die is an unusual short film. A modern day allegorical triptych, three figures under go transformation through three rituals. Though not a story in any conventional sense, We Have Decided Not To Die succeeds in taking audience on an emotional journey. Aurally intriguing, often stunning and always beautiful, Danielís short film has been winning fans from around the festival circuit.

Video HERE

More from Ivan HERE

Adam Magyar – Stainless, 42 Street (excerpt) from Adam Magyar on Vimeo.

TOKYO REVERSE – EXTRACTS #01 from Simon Bouisson on Vimeo.

With the help of Germany’s then 61 Jewish communities, a list was compiled of all the Jewish cemeteries that were in use in the country before the Second World War.

The names of these 2,146 cemeteries were engraved on an equal number of paving stones, which were removed from the alley crossing the square in front of the Saarbrücken Castle, the seat of the Provincial Parliament.

Initially, the work was carried out without a permission, in secret and illegally. The stones were removed at night and replaced with engraved ones. All stones were placed with the inscribed side facing the ground and therefore the inscription is invisible.

The project was eventually approved by Parliament and retrospectively commissioned. Castle Square in front of the Parliament was renamed The Square Of The Invisible Monument (Platz des unsichtbaren Mahnmals).

Takes place in a state-run Ukrainian school for the deaf. The film, which has neither dialogue nor music, follows a new pupil as he is inducted into the violent world of the school’s social hierarchy.

Liu Bolin (Chinese, b.1973) creates compelling works that combine Performance Art, photography, and protest.

In his Camouflage Performance works, Liu covers himself in paint to immaculately fade into the backdrop of a photographed scene

Ted Talk with Bolin HERE

Crowd Theory is an ongoing series of photographic performance events exploring ideas of community and the nature of crowds. Each staging involves up to 400 people who are particular to the site of that production. For each event, a time and place has been specified and a group of people are assembled, but their specific actions on-site are left undirected and uncontrolled. Through this random orchestration of bodies in site-specific venues, Crowd Theory seeks to expand upon accepted definitions and perceptions of what it is that constitutes a ‘community’ and how this converges with the notion and implications of a ‘crowd’. The subsequent mural-sized photographs that remain as evidence of these encounters create a vision of what happens when large groups of people gather at sites of significance to themselves, how they choose to be represented within these locations and how in turn, these spaces potentially represent and define their inhabitants.

Link HERE

The succession of images of this ‘happy’ moment reflects a lifelong project to open up what I term as ‘the suspicious gaze’; this work investigates a recent fixation against a particular group of people. At the core of my artistic practice is the passage of time as a tool for relaxation of that suspicious gaze, and in general an attempt to reconsider what we see.
For this piece more than 50,000 photographs have been captured and after a lengthy selection process, 600 projected photos were carefully composed to create this continuous moment in time.

More HERE

In the event of Amnesia the city will recall explores the  relationship between the individual and the metropolis.  These works are not structured events for a traditional audience, they are questions proposed to the site.  Open actions which rely on the surrounding dynamics to embellish them.  The city as audience, collaborator and performer is emphasised in this piece. 

Link to video HERE

John Cage talks about Silence

HERE

Ah, the sounds of Earth. We Earthlings listen to them all the time. A baby cries. A bus rolls by. The wind keens and rain falls. These sounds and many more are included on NASA’s Golden Record, a compendium of the sounds of our planet that traveled out into space with the twin Voyager 1 and 2 missions in 1977.

The phonograph disk itself was 12 inches and made from copper plated in gold. Previously, the tracks on the album were available as individual clips, but NASA this week released them as a whole recording available to listen to on streaming music service SoundCloud.

You can pretend you’re an alien way out somewhere in the universe, encountering a Voyager spacecraft and listening to an audio introduction to what Earth was like in 1977. You’ll hear crickets, footsteps, Morse code, laughter, fire, a barking dog and an elephant.

The sounds on the record were chosen by a committee headed up by famed astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. As NASA notes, it was “intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials.”

The Golden Record was created before the age of the Internet. Would a new Golden Record today skip the sounds of a horse and cart and instead include a cell phone ringing or the clicking of a computer keyboard? While you contemplate that question, take a few moments to listen through the original recording and flash back to what people in 1977 wanted aliens to hear about our humble planet.

Here

PANEL DISCUSSIONS

MEMORY: SOUND, SITE AND OBJECT THROUGH THEORY, PRACTICE AND THE EMOTIONS

A collaboration between the Centre for Contemporary Photography and ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions

SESSION ONE

Wednesday 5 August 2015, 6pm
Gold coin donation
No bookings required

http://www.ccp.org.au/news.php?id=274

“Memory is a dynamic process. Cues in our environment are used to retrieve previously stored information from memory. Can we always trust the information that is retrieved? New memories are formed by filtering information through attention and storing that information as context-dependent episodes. What are the consequences of delegating this storage to digital devices like smartphones? This talk will discuss our current theoretical understanding of memory, what this theory tell us about false memories, and the benefits and detriments of supplementing our memories with digital storage”

Daniel R. Little
PhD, Cognitive Psychology, The University of Western Australia
A Psychological Theory of Memory and False Memory

Interesting article about helping the homeless. The idea of housing someone is highlighted as priority. What i see as key here is that it isn’t just a house they are considering it is a support structure with services, care and support. This is where I think the notion of house ‘Structure’ transforms into the idea of home ‘Support’.

http://www.theage.com.au/comment/how-to-fix-homelessness-give-the-homeless-a-home-20150730-ginpeo.html

“An artist is someone who sees the structure of order and recognises them as arbitrary”

Emily Bitto, The strays

We visited the Grainger Museum today. The aim was to consider how you can challenge and expand your creativity. The bonus was the Patrick Pound site/museum intervention where he had access to the Grainger collection which included personal items from his life and arranging them and interweaving objects from Patricks own collection to expand and create new readings.

Kangaroo pouch tone-tool 1952

Also check this site dedicated to Grainger that shows his homes, drawings….Link

Hi crew, thank you for a great class today. Your descriptions and discussions regarding ‘Your place’ were incredibly rich and poetic. I’m looking forward to seeing/hearing your responses.

We are going to the Grainger museum for this Thursdays afternoon class. 1:30 sharp out the front.

Bring note pad, camera/recorder just in case there are moments to capture.

Bring $5 for entry fee

Address is Gate 13, Royal Parade, Uni Melbourne, Parkville.

You can catch tram up Swanston to Grattan and walk down or tram at Queen Vic Markets No. 19 and get off at stop 11.

See you there.

“House enacted a slippage between the experience of the insideand outside, site and object, public and private, home, materiality (solid space and actual home), and the body.”

“Because it included the solidification of everyday space, it implicated and provoked the viewers presence and participation, only to disrupt them.”

The present body, the absent body, and the formless: Uros Cvoro

http://www.clarerae.com/work/climbing-the-walls

Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the recording back into the room, re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated. Since all rooms have characteristic resonance or formant frequencies (e.g. different between a large hall and a small room), the effect is that certain frequencies are emphasized as they resonate in the room, until eventually the words become unintelligible, replaced by the pure resonant harmonies and tones of the room itself.

The recited text describes this process in action—it begins “I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice,” and the rationale, concluding, “I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have,” referring to his own stuttering.

Here he records a room and plays it back into the room and records it again without text. The sound of each room was evoked by sonic time layering: In each room, he recorded 10 minutes of it and then played the recording back into the room, while at the same time recording it again. This process was repeated up to ten times. As the layers got denser, each room slowly began to unfold a drone with various overtones.

This work is a sonic presentation of four deserted rooms inside the ‘Zone of Alienation’ in Chernobyl, Ukraine. Jacob Kirkegaard deliberately picked rooms that once were active meeting points for people: A church in village Krasno, an auditorium, a gymnasium and a swimming pool.

Living room spray-painted white and motion picture of the unpainted room projected back onto itself.

the Wikisinger from Touché Videoproduktion on Vimeo.

This guy sings the same song in 15 different locations. Hear what happens!
No artificial reverb added.

The Wikisinger sings the same song in different environments experimenting with natural reverb, early reflections and short delays.

One of the scenes is recorded in an anechoic chamber without any sound reflections.

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

Directed by Vincent Rouffiac
Produced by TOUCHÉ Videoproduktion
http://www.touchevideoproduktion.com
https://www.facebook.com/touchevideoproduktion
Contact: touchevideoproduktion@gmail.com

Composed, written and performed by Joachim Müllner
https://www.facebook.com/InTheCanopy
http://www.inthecanopy.fr

In association with:
IRCAM – http://www.ircam.fr
Les Gens Du Son – http://www.lesgensduson.com
Studio Davout – http://www.davout.com

Image : Vincent Rouffiac, Gérald Massoubre
Sound recording : Jean-Philippe Gréau, Matthieu Lechartier
Choreography : Georgia Ives