The fine folk over at Secret Project Robot have organized a contained world of sonic aural sculpture to help you step away from the daily rigors and live in a dream.  This Sturday (aprli the 12th), they are staging an opening reception to celebrate possibilities…

come consider how it can be!

ASTRAL PROJECTIONS + SOUND BY DEATH BY AUDIO

an Audio Visual Sculpture show and Installation

Featuring Work by

Death by Audio

Bradley Eros

Wizard Smoke from Lights

Zach Layton

Josh Thorson, “Grotto”

Sam Zimmerman

Jean Angel and Disney NASAborg

Mighty Robot A/V

Brock Monroe and Nick Hallet

Opening Reception Saturday April 12th 7 to 10

with a performance by Hells Hills

and a puppet show at Live with Animals

Closes May 4th

gallery hours Saturday and Sunday 2 to 6

Secret Project Robot

210 Kent Ave (entrance on river stree)
Brooklyn, New York 11211

Astral Projections—                                                                                    Channeling discrete systems to reconcile the mechanical aura                                                               with our collective unconsciousness.

Though the 20^th Century sought to deconstruct the ideological nature of man made artwork by instilling methods of mass production, mediation and the later use of post structuralist criticism- the denial of the artistic aura may have actually transferred it to the machine.  Though the machine was originally seen as the emancipator, meant to negate the ritual and genius behind art by destroying its origin, the 21^st century has seen it become the grounds for new ritual and new methods of authenticity and creation. 

In fact, the anthropomorphism of the machine has given it a higher cultural value than even past masterpieces and works of art- for the object without origin is closer to god than, even the object created by the genius.  The machine coming from   benign intentions has manifested itself as the dominate force in all post industrialist nations, leaving it with a holiness that people are compelled to worship for fear of its wrath- or “electronic instability”

The machine has become the main path for the transfer of signals and data creating in one sense a very real electronic aura and in another a symbolic and anthropological one.  It is the framework for future myths and personifications.

Astral Projections then emphasizes the use of electronic media as a way to reconnect with the spiritual.  Through the creation of audio visual sculpture, structures will investigate the new religious curiosity surrounding the machine and construct new items of our collective unconscious.  The sculptures will in a literal sense project on to the physical world what the mind is meant to experience in the ethereal.

Living in a digital era A/V sculptors may appropriate images and objects from mass culture, much like the shrine or totems of the past did in their own time. Low tech dollar store light boxes or televisions left on the curbside may be used with high-tech computers, cameras, and projectors to create new semantic messages on the way meaning and spirituality is processed in a technologically based society.

Audio Visual Sculpture explores the synthesis of Audio Visual Content with three-dimensional form. Digital artists can freely experiment with the genre and make sculptures that subvert our usual way of looking at cinematic output- creating new relationships with the viewer, sound and image. By bringing the mechanization to view, A/V sculpture then, is a way to understand digital content as an object with a living aura rather than a simulation.    

the unsilent world

This is your companion for what follows.  This is also a guide, but it shall lay no stones on the path¹. 

i have chosen these bricks, for they shall bind less than skin, to encourage your acts and forestall your fancy

in your head, only by your feet can freedom come to rest triumphant.  in untethered flight you reach the spheres

it is upon the peak where breath crests.  it is there that thought waits. the valley holds the next step

if you shiver freely, unaffected by cold, you may know time, why ghosts may walk unafraid — nothing else more

here, just from the garden, you may reach it.  off the path you loose yourself to mourn the last leaves

what little you know begs for forgiveness, for to forget asks more of those who bore what you have mythologized

what you have wandered through contains all you shall seek to step into, breeding there among the seeds you have scattered

before you came, we hoped to stay warm with that we know and needed not choose between me and them

having always heard you, my heart hunts with you at its side.  ignoring the dead leaves the living without hope

without loam, this earth begs that you wander over the next ridge; there, you might plant what you shall toil

what was a pleasure then shall flower well past the frost.  foresight comes later — a reminder of coming to know

accept resignation except for the chance that a stone lies yet to place before your treading.  you live by leaving

when you left off dreaming, did you hasten to ask how long have you been here and shall you remain

1.  this audio file is also available to download

The show is a collaboration consisting of Pepper’s Project, Secret Project Robot, Live With Animals,Supreme Trading, Supercore,  Printed Matter Book Store, St. Mark’s Book Shop, Spoonbill and Sugartown Booksellers,New York Kinokuniya Books and Monster Island’s Avant Floor.

Through March 30th

extended gallery hours- Everyday from March 22nd to 30th from 1 to 7pm closed on Wednesday the 26th

Secret Project Robot and Live With Animals

210 Kent AvenueBrooklyn, NY 11211

http://www.secretprojectrobot.org/

 New York / Tokyo – PEPPER’S PROJECT, a Tokyo-based gallery and art project, is pleased to present a group exhibition, OTHER PAINTING – Japanese Emerging Artists’ Painting Exhibition – , at four different locations throughout Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It will showcase 19 young Japanese emerging artists, representing new movement of paintings in Japan.This project started at Pepper’s Gallery, Tokyo, in June 2007. A curator and assistant director of Pepper’s Gallery, Asuki, thinks that there is a new movement in painting in the current art scene. This new scene has been happening internationally and he finds his interest especially in younger generation of Japanese Artists and curated a series of group exhibition called OTHER PAINTING. In March 2008, the series is coming to Brooklyn, NY, hosting four group exhibitions at four different locations in Williamsburg area. This is their first time to present a large scale of group exhibition in NY. It is also an extension program of Japanese Young Artists Book Fair_2nd which is happening at five locations throughout NY in the same duration.

OTHER PAINTING director Asuki With:

Yu Hashiguchi

Yoshikazu Sakanashi

Tomohilo Shimizu

Sheena Koguchi

WilliamsRuriko

ToriiKosuge

YoheiTomomi

KoizumiAsami

IsojimaHonda

KazuhiroMisuzu

NomaHisako Akagi

Minato Abe 

Well, then, the train stopped, as they do, as the next station came into our path.  Its plain and platform of waiters shifted to ours, and in all the reshuffling (all these new bodies to accommodate then ignore) I turned my attention to the action of the young woman’s hand on a pen on a page and was distracted by the resulting image developing there on the page.  It was a good likeness, remarkable in its detail for the efforts with a ball point. Well, then, there was another round of the stop, “new cups!” game and with this turn, the young lady upped herself and left for a different plot.  I took her seat and returned to the book I had intended to focus my glancing at, but took a moment to glance back over to the young man being sketched and compare him to the image made by the sketching.  He had been an idle young man.  He sat, occasionally shuffling the controls of his music player,  in a black pea coat not from a surplus shop, jeans of a jean color that hid, slightly, the shape his legs made, black shoes very much like the Keds sneakers the girls felt encouraged to wear when I was in middle school and quite insufficient, so it seemed, for any purpose other than making his feet seem quite in danger in their purposeless, brown eyes, and brown hair.  Well, as you can imagine, he had been quite unremarkable — an archetype on that very train (often lousy with this variety of character), but the version of him rendered on the little pad had become rather romantic.  All the modern trappings — the plastic seats, florescent light, utilitarian lack of detail, stale air, the hum drum that hang about in commuter spaces reminding one that one is, indeed, commuting – had been reserved from the capturing glances leaving a somewhat unwashed, idle, idol.   

My very own glances then back at the book; I forgave the young woman her invasions.  Perhaps vampires are romantic after all.

Before he was our uncle, Bob Dylan bantered something between songs, bantered something like “it must be good for somebody, this sort of song…”, and I suppose he meant good for singing but he suggested something beyond.   

That was before.  That was simpler times, or so the yarns would urge you to believe.  That was youth chatting, yearning for majesty and transformation — the big show, the big sell, the big boys.  That was before everyone told everyone that bob’s songs were good for everyone.  That was when he gave them away because they were good for someone.  That was before he had to hide from them. 

He said then, also, and he has said since that the songs were not by him, that they were, perhaps, of him.  That was the old folkie lore.  Old songs became new songs.  Sounds shifted and lines of ballads twisted from mouth to ear to mouth.  The songs spoke of what was and when sung again spoke to what will.  The chain of words and notes, tribal babble, the music of spheres where man came to come around.  Inside the utilitarian ethos employed by that folk revival, songs meant a lot because they came from the people and remained for the people — that democratic idea, before and after all.  The feed of man then passed along as the seed of man.  Songs are good for you, like broccoli or a healthy appreciation of Byzantine iconography, like opera or (if you think the New Yorker magazine knows how to best raise the childish appreciation of pop music) Lil’ Wayne. 

“It must be good for somebody, this sort of song…”.  Remember, that was when Bob gave them away.  They were good for somebody.  They were not good for everybody.  They were not good, perhaps, for even him.  This was before Bob threatened the Newport crowd and the Newport folk threatened “Maggie’s Farm” with an axe (as the yarns have said had happened), and it is clear that even then he did not buy into the myth that the songs of mankind would furnish mankind with redemption (nor would he have agreed with the lines “Songs mean a lot/When songs are bought” as spun by Pavement decades later – no redemptions, nowhere).  Songs were and, despite all that has come to change as the times are, are good for only somebody.  

But what sort of song is good for people when the grand We evidently hungers audaciously for hope and for everybody all together now?  What sort of song is good for somebody that wants to believe in change for everybody?  If Uncle Bob threatened a polarized people with the prophetic winds of times a-changing, if that sort of song was good for lots of somebodies (and it does seem it was, for we speak of it still now), what sort of song feeds a polarized people hoping the times will change?   

Fergie, the child actor now grown into multi-national star, suggests, “I hope you know/That this has nothing to do with you/It’s personal, myself and I … It’s time to be a big girl now/And big girls don’t cry” with her sort of song.  Her sort song is the song most often downloaded in the last year.  Her sort of song is personal and her sort of song has evidently been good for a lot of people if we choose to buy the Pavement line.  But is this personal sort of song (one that even speaks of hope) good for change?  Is this sort of song good for those who stand for change if “the time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness and anger” or is it a song that is good for those who hope to take comfort away from all that pain – a sort of song that’s good for somebody only on their own?  Or is it the sort of song, like the sort of song sung by Christina Aguilera, that is good for people looking to inflict pain upon those who set bombs and hope to destroy hope to inflict change back to fabled, simpler times?  Is it the sort of song that will help another candidate arguing for a change that suspiciously rests upon a return to supposedly happier times fight tears as the press sets its teeth for her?  

Any of these changes and any of these or those somebodies said to aspire for change scarcely differ from the Bob that changed his name to make himself over in the mask of the old(e) soul, the mythical man of the people that sang for the people in order to rise up from the people.   Fundamentally, all these somebodies want “nothing to do with you” and nothing to do with nobody.  The change they seek, if it is indeed change at all, is an illusory stage above all the other somebodies down where all the dirt scrapes and the pain, the anger, and the pettiness is actual.  Perhaps that “sort of song” that was “good for somebody” had to be shed because that sort of song was not good for that Bob that hoped to sing the sort of song that spoke with the wind and knocked at heaven’s door.  Perhaps that sort of song was not good for promising the “pastures of plenty” sung about in the sort of song that was supposedly good for everybody.  That there pasture is a personal place and can not be populated by the grand We.  Perhaps that sort of song purported to be good for everyone, but the singer or the listener that took it on preferred to be alone. 

The split there is not slight.  The sort of song that is good for somebody can not be good for everybody.  Any song may very well be good for somebody, for a few somebodies.  If we believe that the grand We harbor hope in change and unity (as, indeed, it publicly portends to), any song will never do because that change calls for too many sorts of songs that are good for too many somebodies. On the ground, on the lonesome road with its anger, fear, and pettiness and above it all – in that frontier of hope, in a singular sublimity – there is a complete cacophony.   

Perhaps he was right, before Bob bantered, before big girls stole away, before bombings and torture by rock’n’pop, and Barack begged to bring all the somebodies together to believe in hope (and before Bill’s Hillary stopped thinking about tomorrow to think about tomorrow), when John Cage wrote a sort of song that sung “nothing is accomplished by writing a piece of music” for silence.  Perhaps that sort of song is good for somebody that wants change.           

–img: mcb

–wrds: bb