> Nowhere does this PR give me any clue as to content or the ideas
> driving this work. I only get description about what kind of gadgets are
> being used.
I was thinking the same thing and was formulating a reply, but Dawn
beat me to it.
> I'm just saying that we hype ourselves with this kind of PR
> and I think we should all get better on how we describe our work.
In 1991, I was performing live electronic music with software systems
I built specially to get the kinds of control systems I needed for the
music. In 1992 I was using more sophisticated control systems to work
with choreographers and dancers. The mistake I made publicity-wise was
*not* to emphasise the technology, with the result that I got very
little profile. The publicity material concerned itself with what the
pieces were about, not about the toys used to realise them.
(In the mid-1990's I was pushing the cross-media aspect of the work,
doing artistic collaborations with choreographers. This was an even
worse mistake, since it violated people's preconceptions of the
creative roles being adopted by different artists.)
In 1998 I did an improvised score for a dance project with a Buchla
Thunder (touch-sensitive MIDI performance surface), just to try out
some ideas, and I used the unit again at the SHIFTS 99
technology/performance thing at Chisenhale. Many more people paid
attention than if I had been using a conventional keyboard.
There are two issues here. The first is that the current cultural
climate (the publicity, marketing and press machines in particular,
and the funding bodies) are technology-obsessed. I'm coming across a
huge number of commission calls for technology-related projects, and
it seems that all one needs to succeed in this scene is to have a
group name containing colons or square brackets. (To be a really
adventurous electronic musician, claim to do something algorithmic in
Perl.) All the project proposals I've worked on in the last year have
been highly technology-biased, since that's where the support is. None
of this is related to artistic content.
Secondly, attention is becoming more and more of a scarce commodity,
and it's important to have a hook that people will remember. I'll
sometimes do stuff with the Buchla not because it makes my music or
performances better, but because it sticks in people's
minds. Technology is currently an easy thing to latch onto and use as
a powerful meme in today's cultural environment, and for some people
it's much easier to make a quick artistic judgement based on the tools
rather than the art, which always requires more effort. (To be fair,
it's often difficult to come up with a good meme for the artistic
content of a project - or even impossible for something as abstract as
contemporary music - so the technology has to serve this purpose.)
Maybe things will get better, as the public at large loses interest in
technology for its own sake, and as the current crop of young
art-school technologists grows up enough to realise that tools don't
make art, and (perhaps) as we get better at describing what we do and
what makes it unique and worthwhile. But it's going to take a while.
--
Nick Rothwell Cassiel.com Limited
nick@cassiel.com www.cassiel.com
systems - composition - installation - performance
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