People sitting in a darkened theater stare at a large reflective surface, while cell phones ring randomly throughout the room. The typical moviegoing experience at Times Square? No, it's a musical piece called Dialtones, which I recently learned about on dratfink's page. This "telesymphony," performed in connection with the Ars Electronica festival and funded by Swisscom Mobile, etc, is a half-good idea that just doesn't know when to quit. Check out the exhausting spec sheet: the piece is a social sculpture, it uses corporate switching systems as a found medium, it employs a lot of clever programming and hardware, it's electronic music, it's live performance, it's an audience participation piece, it has flashing lights, it has graphics, it has Mylar!
This kind of MIT Media Lab product (at least one of the performers went there) just pounds you with technology. It's essentially a loss leader for the tech industry, crafted by geeks whose art sense derives from rock concert multimedia shows. Audience members are asked to register their phone numbers when they arrive for the concert, special ringtones are downloaded to their cells, and then a musical ensemble "plays" the phones in an auditorium by punching buttons on a graphic display. So far, so good, I guess, but do we really need spotlights hitting the audience members when their cells ring? Keychain lights distributed to everyone that glow red two seconds before the tones go off? To see all this activity in a reflective mirror? The visual element is as gimcrack-filled as a Spielberg movie. The piece assumes an audience with near-infinite time, patience, and trust. You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded "custom ringtone," all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own). Thirty minutes of antiphonal chirps, climaxing in the inevitable "crescendo of sound," might be pretty interesting to sit and listen to in the dark, if you weren't also being forced to "participate." The authors dispense grant-panel-friendly nonsense when they say this participation is "active," though. Your creative input consists solely of choosing a ringtone (doesn't the phone company also call this "creativity"?) and deciding what exotic handwaving motion to make when the spotlight hits you. The spec sheet doesn't mention another option you have that would definitely affect the "texture" of the piece: turning off your phone.
An audio recording of Dialtones can be heard on Kenny G.'s radio program on WFMU-FM. (It starts about 30 minutes into this stream.) It's pretty much what you might expect: electronic insect noises a la Richard Maxfield's "Night Music" mixed with Ray Manzarek-like psychedelic organ-noodling. Things perk up a bit in the middle with Scott Gibbons' solo section and some loud skronks made with a vibrating phone on a contact mike. I'm sure the piece is more dynamic in person, where you get all the spatial effects.
haha. for a minute there i thought you were talking aboutkenny g. you had me worried.
The radio name of New York artist and critic Kenneth Goldsmith was chosen for maximum confusion and irritation. Callers to his show give him a hard time about it. My RealAudio player, which provides an unasked-for list of music I might want to check out after playing a particular stream, recommends "Gerald Albright, George Howard, Bob James, Dave Koz, and Najee" for that Dialtones stream.
As coincidence would have it, Kenneth Goldsmith/Kenny G.'s review of Dialtones appeared in the New York Press this week, a day or two before I posted my update. In the review, he takes the "cellphones are ubiquitous, now they're music" tack, and praises Levin for a piece that "sounds great." Having only heard the audio, I wouldn't go so far, and my reservations about the logistics and politics of the piece still linger. Golan Levin talks a good game, and no one can dispute the cleverness of the piece's technology, but hell, the guy only just got his MIT degree. Perhaps it's a bit early to be mentioning him in the same breath with Cage, Ligeti, and Terry Riley?
Here's an absolutely great paragraph from Kenny's review:
You can file this one alongside Wendy Mae Chambers’ car horn rendition of "New York, New York," Donald Knaack’s performances on oil cans and phone books, John Cage’s compositions of amplified cacti, Lauren Lesko’s contact-miked sounds of her vagina, Matmos’ dance music made from the sounds of plastic surgery and Jaap Blonk’s new techno music all made with samples of his mouth sounds. Dialtones raises the bar on these examples by coordinating elaborate technical and telephonic pyrotechnics; it’s a small miracle that Levin was able to pull this off. And far from stopping at the wonders of sheer geekdom, it also sounds great, making this one of those rare instances of computer-based music where the music is actually more interesting than the machines that made it.
Again, I don't agree that the piece is that good. The main point missing from Kenny's analysis is that, goddamit, cell phone rings are an obnoxious form of noise pollution. (Oddly, this comes across much more clearly in Kenny's own, composed-in-the-studio goof [at the beginning of the same stream I linked to above], where he superimposes Brian Turner's collection of silly ringtones [pop songs and the like] over the Electric Light Orchestra's kitsch classic "Telephone Lines.") A question that ought to be considered is: is the point of Levin's piece to "recuperate" this urban blight as music, or is it just another hipster embrace of the latest street fad? (I'd say more the latter.)
Ive noticed the use of cell phone ringing (claxon) incorperated into tv commercials. They unfairly comand your attention the first two or three times you see/here them. then they just make you mad when you see/here them. but its too late they got your attention again.
Tom wrote: The main point missing from Kenny's analysis is that, goddamit, cell phone rings are an obnoxious form of noise pollution. ------ Kenny G sez: Where you're wrong is assuming that there is such a thing as noise pollution. There is no such thing. Adjust yourself, your ears, and it's all music. This conversation between Morton Feldman and John Cage gets to the whole point:
M F: John, wouldn't you say that what we're dependent on we call reality, and what we don't like we consider an intrusion in our life? Consequently, I feel that what's happening is that we're continually being intruded upon.
J C: But that would make us very unhappy.
M F: Or we surrender to it, and call it culture.
J C: Call it culture?
M F: Or whatever.
JC: Give me an example. What would be an intrusion on your life for instance that you would call culture?
MF: Well, this weekend I was on the beach.
JC: Yes.
MF: ... And on the beach these days are transistor radios.
J C: Yes.
MF: ... blaring out rock 'n' roll.
JC: Yes.
MF: All over.
J C: Yes. And you didn't enjoy it?
M F: Not particularly. I adjusted to it.
J C: How? -
MF: By saying that... Well, I thought of the sun and the sea as a lesser evil.
J C: You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment. Very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios - even a single one, not just twelve at va time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least - I think, "Well, they're just playing my piece."
MF: That might help me next weekend.
J C: Yeah, and I listen to it with pleasure. By pleasure I mean I notice what happens. I can attend to it rather than, as you say, surrender. I can rather pay attention and become interested in the ... Well, what it actually is that you're interested in is what superimposes what. What happens at the same time together with what happens before and what happens after.
Thanks for posting that, Kenny G; it's a beautiful passage. Unquestionably Cage opened our ears to hearing all kinds of aural phenomena as music. (Although I don't think I'm being a philistine to say that a cell going off in a movie theatre is just plain rude.) The question here is whether Golan Levin builds on Cage and/or successfully aestheticizes the cell phone. My main argument is that all the visual bells & whistles and chitchat about the programming are a sign of artistic immaturity. He doesn't trust the audience to just listen, he has to do the whole new media dog and pony show.
Also, isn't this kind of a one-off? Is Levin or anyone else ever going to do another "cell phone symphony"?
The question of whether or not there is such a thing as noise pollution recalls Paracelsus' observation that everything has in it a poison; it's just a matter of dosage. A loud enough noise will rip your eardrum: we're not apt to adjust to that. I believe there have been studies showing that listening to music which is distorted by the playback system causes irritation, fatigue, and loss of concentration, in comparison to the same music reproduced "correctly". On the other hand, Rock and other modern music makes intentional use of distortion, and would probably be regarded as noise if heard by a pre-modern audience. Come to think of it, some of our parents called it noise. Still, I have a hard time fathoming those people on the subways with the earphones cranked up to distorted levels, or those tin-rattling vehicles with the blow-out speakers overloading. I don't want my distortion distorted, but I guess somebody likes it. Or at least wants to engage in irritation at a point where art meets activism and aggression.
i love the noise of subways. i miss that.
Tom -
In my review, I dealt with only Golan's *sound*, not his visuals and showmanship, etc. I've never seen 'em.
Judging by the music alone, it's a good CD. Believe me, as I said in the piece, it could've been atrocious (200 cellphones playing Metallica) but he kept it in the realm of abstraction, something chirping cellphones on the streets never really do (you notice that they're usually pop songs or recognizable classics).
So, yeah, is he John Cage? No. But he's an interesting young composer using quotidian means to make intriguiging experimental music.
Kenny G
"if its too loud your too old"
- metaldude
Hi - I just discovered this page several months down the road, sorry to be so late. Thanks everyone, for getting irritated enough at my concert to raise some great points. Good feedback is rare.
Tom takes issue with the visual trappings of the concert. It's true, one alternative would have been to put everyone in a completely black room, and make the event chiefly about the sonic aspects of the mobile phone. There were a few reasons I didn't do this.
The first has to do with my interests in audio-visuality. I'm less interested in composing sound, than in creating contexts which reveal or establish a connection between image and sound. My idea for the Telesymphony actually emerged from some extremely formalist questions I had about the ways in which the audience itself could become the playback surface for an audiovisual situation. Bored of creating works for a projection screen, I was essentially wondering how each person in the audience could become an individually-addressable pixel in a large audiovisual display. The audience's mobile phones presented an expedient opportunity to achieve this (though perhaps too obvious a choice, given the way that they've become fetish gadgets). In any case, I should emphasize that I really don't consider the piece as a work of "music" (e.g. strictly sound), nor did I intend it to be appreciated as such. I think terms like performance art or social sound-sculpture are probably more accurate.
The second reason for all of the visual technologies has to do with a certain didactic interest I have. Simply put, I wanted people to be able to see what was going on. The fact is that it's extremely hard to localize the sound of a cell phone ringing -- it's basically a 3kHz pulse wave drilling in your ear, and sorely lacks the broad-spectrum noise that would allow you to localize it well (either directly or from its reflections). The large mirror and projection system made it possible for people to instantly locate the source of the ringing, and thereby understand what, basically, was happening all around them. You also have to remember that the audience is sitting in an essentially fixed row of chairs -- it's basically impossible to get a global overview of the event, from the vantage point of row 7, seat 9. With the mirror, they could not only see who was ringing, and how many people were ringing in which combinations, but they could also observe each others' reactions. For the same reason that it's helpful to actually *watch* the orchestra when one has the privilege of going to a symphony, I think the event would have been perceived as much more chaotic without the aid of the mirror and lights.
(That said, there were a few people in the audience who told me later that they enjoyed it more with their eyes closed. Even so, I contend that the mirror was still helpful, even for them, in establishing an understanding of what was going on.)
Tom's second chief complaint is that it's inaccurate hype to call the concert "interactive", or that it somehow involves audience participation. To this I have to say, I both agree and disagree. It would have been a great challenge indeed to make a piece of music which really was entirely performed (and presumably improvised) by a very large number of non-trained audience members. I think this is a fascinating art-and-technology research question, and obviously the Telesymphony doesn't come close. I also agree that it's bogus to say that one "actively participates" in the event by having made the commercial choice of a Nokia instead of a Motorola. Although there were some actual ways in which the audience members were [technologically] able to "participate" in the event -- you list them, including the folks who selected alternative ringtones from the ones we offered, or turned their phones off altogether -- I think the issue comes down to a different definition of "participate". Being a technologist and geek, it's easy to think that participation somehow must invove pressing a button and seeing an immediate response representing one's contribution. I'd like to offer a different understanding of participation that I only really understood after creating this concert.
The nearest analogy I have, is that it's like driving in your car and getting rear-ended. When this happens, you don't think to yourself, "He hit my car!" Instead, you think to yourself, "He hit *me*!" People identify with their phones like you wouldn't believe -- it's not some anonymous piece of plastic that they happen to be carrying, but, in an odd way, an extension of themselves. In the Telesymphony, people began to answer their phones *out of mechanical habit*. Many people expressed to me later how unsettled they felt when their phone was ringing -- even though they knew it was nothing more than my performance PC on the other end of the line -- because they kept mistakenly thinking that somebody was trying to contact them. I know its a bit of a stretch, but I contend that these people were very actively participating in the concert, at least psychologically, as more than just observers.
Tom, if you email me your address I'll send you a disc, it has some quicktime videos in addition to the soundtrack. I'm golan [at] flong [dot] com.
Best
Actually, just a short technical clarification, in response to Tom's comment that "You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded 'custom ringtone,' all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own)," and that doing this would require "near-infinite time, patience, and trust."
So, the audience was queuing for seating in any case, as they would have for any ticketed performance. Participants were explicitly informed that their private phone numbers would be entered into an anonymous database to be deleted immediately after the performance. Our custom ringtones were downloaded automatically to their phones, usually within 15 seconds of completing the form. Accepting the new ringtone, and later switching the ringtone back to one's preferred setting presented few difficulties, as ringtone downloading and swapping is a popular pastime in Europe. Altogether we found that the process of registering for the concert added less than two minutes to the time people were already spending on the ticket purchase. Finally, it was a rather patient and trustful audience of art enthusiasts, a major difference, I think, from seeing a movie in Times Square.
Best
This is vaguely similar to, and more interactive than Brian Eno's Compact Forest Proposal installation at SFMOMA in 2001. In that case rather than a set of cell phones the medium was a set of 10 CD players suspended at various locations in a darkened room.
Sound sculpture seems like the right description of Eno's work also. And I was able to interact a bit in the Compact Forest.
The lighting was deep twilight. It took several minutes for the eyes to fully adjust. There was a mannequin in one corner of the room. I watched it for a long time, and sometimes it seemed to move, but that was just my eyes playing tricks.
I was spending the day in the museum celebrating the solstice and my birthday, and parked myself on a bench in a corner of the installation and spent quite a while absorbing the sound, and opening my irises. I could see each new person enter long before they could see me, and observed how they observed.
I was sufficiently still that some of the people visiting the exhibit thought I was a second mannequin. One couple almost jumped when I moved slightly as they approached a little too closely.
I think the spatial characteristics of sound deserve more attention. In the real world, most people seem to use the ears' spatial abilities unconsiously. Regarding mass media distribution of sound (as opposed to concerts or installations), surround sound seems like it's where stereo was in the early days. It's too often executed poorly or is simply way over the top.
Eno was successful in creating a sound sculpture that was subtle yet which tugged the observer away from simple temporal experience of sound toward a consciously spatial experience.
I understand Golan's point about 3kHz. (I studied acoustics and psychoacoustics a bit.) My Mot cell has a built-in speakerphone. If that technology becomes more popular, a broader band telesymphony with better spatial resolution would be possible.
I don't want to say too much more until I watch the disc Golan was kind enough to offer to send. One quick thought, though: if the nature of the "medium" is non-localized, then shouldn't the piece be about that? We've all had the experience of seeing five people reach for their phones when one rings. The anxiety you mention that people feel about "their" phone ringing could and should be built into the piece. But pinning down the sound source with lights and mirrors lessens the anxiety-factor, I would think. Instead of "Is that me?" it's "Oh, this is me!"
Posting late on something Tom said early:
"...isn't this kind of a one-off? Is Levin or anyone else ever going to do another "cell phone symphony"? "
My response: Why not? If cell phones are a part of the fabric of our sound enviroment, like transistor radios on the beach, surely we, (ie: Levin) have only just begun to investigate the pyscho-socio-sound dimensions of the phenomenon?
Further ... and straying right off topic ... it has always slightly miffed me that the ball tossed by Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner and their ilk, has not been genuinely taken up, ie: do the art idea again. We listen to many many people perform other's music and we gain a great deal from the experience. Why don't we perform each other's art? (are we still so hooked on authorship and 'the artist's hand'? is it because we aren't actually interested enough in art to get anything out of 'covering' it? or what?)
Hi, Sally. One artist who did what you're suggesting, and did it in the spirit I think you're suggesting (or maybe not; she's complicated) is Elaine Sturtevant. Starting in the '60s, she began "repeating" other artists' work (she prefers that term to appropriating), right up to calling them on the phone and asking them technical specs on materials they used. From what I heard, Warhol was interested in and supportive of her work, but as you can imagine, she pushed major buttons with others.
There was a mini Sturtevant revival in the early 90s. I remember an Artforum ad with her walking out of an apartment building dressed in the Beuys hunting vest and fedora. Lately interest seems to have died down again. I found a good quote from her on the Net, and an early piece:
Commentaries, commodities, copies,
appropriation, authorship, death-talk,
originality, ... these are for "heroes",
hot dog boys and bubble gum chewers.
Elaine Sturtevant, 1987
Lichtenstein hot dog
Also sort of straying further off topic?
Crap, that Sturtevant Lichtenstein hotdog was taken off artnet and I didn't save it. Here's a Sturtevant Warhol flowers--this one I did save.
Sorry, had to close this thread due to evil spammers. Please email or comment on a more recent post to continue this topic.
|
People sitting in a darkened theater stare at a large reflective surface, while cell phones ring randomly throughout the room. The typical moviegoing experience at Times Square? No, it's a musical piece called Dialtones, which I recently learned about on dratfink's page. This "telesymphony," performed in connection with the Ars Electronica festival and funded by Swisscom Mobile, etc, is a half-good idea that just doesn't know when to quit. Check out the exhausting spec sheet: the piece is a social sculpture, it uses corporate switching systems as a found medium, it employs a lot of clever programming and hardware, it's electronic music, it's live performance, it's an audience participation piece, it has flashing lights, it has graphics, it has Mylar!
This kind of MIT Media Lab product (at least one of the performers went there) just pounds you with technology. It's essentially a loss leader for the tech industry, crafted by geeks whose art sense derives from rock concert multimedia shows. Audience members are asked to register their phone numbers when they arrive for the concert, special ringtones are downloaded to their cells, and then a musical ensemble "plays" the phones in an auditorium by punching buttons on a graphic display. So far, so good, I guess, but do we really need spotlights hitting the audience members when their cells ring? Keychain lights distributed to everyone that glow red two seconds before the tones go off? To see all this activity in a reflective mirror? The visual element is as gimcrack-filled as a Spielberg movie.
The piece assumes an audience with near-infinite time, patience, and trust. You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded "custom ringtone," all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own). Thirty minutes of antiphonal chirps, climaxing in the inevitable "crescendo of sound," might be pretty interesting to sit and listen to in the dark, if you weren't also being forced to "participate." The authors dispense grant-panel-friendly nonsense when they say this participation is "active," though. Your creative input consists solely of choosing a ringtone (doesn't the phone company also call this "creativity"?) and deciding what exotic handwaving motion to make when the spotlight hits you. The spec sheet doesn't mention another option you have that would definitely affect the "texture" of the piece: turning off your phone.
- tom moody 10-10-2002 8:43 am
An audio recording of Dialtones can be heard on Kenny G.'s radio program on WFMU-FM. (It starts about 30 minutes into this stream.) It's pretty much what you might expect: electronic insect noises a la Richard Maxfield's "Night Music" mixed with Ray Manzarek-like psychedelic organ-noodling. Things perk up a bit in the middle with Scott Gibbons' solo section and some loud skronks made with a vibrating phone on a contact mike. I'm sure the piece is more dynamic in person, where you get all the spatial effects.
- tom moody 12-04-2002 7:34 pm
haha. for a minute there i thought you were talking aboutkenny g. you had me worried.
- linda 12-05-2002 2:04 am
The radio name of New York artist and critic Kenneth Goldsmith was chosen for maximum confusion and irritation. Callers to his show give him a hard time about it. My RealAudio player, which provides an unasked-for list of music I might want to check out after playing a particular stream, recommends "Gerald Albright, George Howard, Bob James, Dave Koz, and Najee" for that Dialtones stream.
- tom moody 12-05-2002 2:47 am
As coincidence would have it, Kenneth Goldsmith/Kenny G.'s review of Dialtones appeared in the New York Press this week, a day or two before I posted my update. In the review, he takes the "cellphones are ubiquitous, now they're music" tack, and praises Levin for a piece that "sounds great." Having only heard the audio, I wouldn't go so far, and my reservations about the logistics and politics of the piece still linger. Golan Levin talks a good game, and no one can dispute the cleverness of the piece's technology, but hell, the guy only just got his MIT degree. Perhaps it's a bit early to be mentioning him in the same breath with Cage, Ligeti, and Terry Riley?
Here's an absolutely great paragraph from Kenny's review:
Again, I don't agree that the piece is that good. The main point missing from Kenny's analysis is that, goddamit, cell phone rings are an obnoxious form of noise pollution. (Oddly, this comes across much more clearly in Kenny's own, composed-in-the-studio goof [at the beginning of the same stream I linked to above], where he superimposes Brian Turner's collection of silly ringtones [pop songs and the like] over the Electric Light Orchestra's kitsch classic "Telephone Lines.") A question that ought to be considered is: is the point of Levin's piece to "recuperate" this urban blight as music, or is it just another hipster embrace of the latest street fad? (I'd say more the latter.)
- tom moody 12-07-2002 11:18 am
Ive noticed the use of cell phone ringing (claxon) incorperated into tv commercials. They unfairly comand your attention the first two or three times you see/here them. then they just make you mad when you see/here them. but its too late they got your attention again.
- bill 12-07-2002 8:40 pm
Tom wrote: The main point missing from Kenny's analysis is that, goddamit, cell phone rings are an obnoxious form of noise pollution. ------ Kenny G sez: Where you're wrong is assuming that there is such a thing as noise pollution. There is no such thing. Adjust yourself, your ears, and it's all music. This conversation between Morton Feldman and John Cage gets to the whole point:
M F: John, wouldn't you say that what we're dependent on we call reality, and what we don't like we consider an intrusion in our life? Consequently, I feel that what's happening is that we're continually being intruded upon.
J C: But that would make us very unhappy.
M F: Or we surrender to it, and call it culture.
J C: Call it culture?
M F: Or whatever.
JC: Give me an example. What would be an intrusion on your life for instance that you would call culture?
MF: Well, this weekend I was on the beach.
JC: Yes.
MF: ... And on the beach these days are transistor radios.
J C: Yes.
MF: ... blaring out rock 'n' roll.
JC: Yes.
MF: All over.
J C: Yes. And you didn't enjoy it?
M F: Not particularly. I adjusted to it.
J C: How? -
MF: By saying that... Well, I thought of the sun and the sea as a lesser evil.
J C: You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment. Very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios - even a single one, not just twelve at va time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least - I think, "Well, they're just playing my piece."
MF: That might help me next weekend.
J C: Yeah, and I listen to it with pleasure. By pleasure I mean I notice what happens. I can attend to it rather than, as you say, surrender. I can rather pay attention and become interested in the ... Well, what it actually is that you're interested in is what superimposes what. What happens at the same time together with what happens before and what happens after.
- Kenny G / WFMU (guest) 12-11-2002 7:05 pm
Thanks for posting that, Kenny G; it's a beautiful passage. Unquestionably Cage opened our ears to hearing all kinds of aural phenomena as music. (Although I don't think I'm being a philistine to say that a cell going off in a movie theatre is just plain rude.) The question here is whether Golan Levin builds on Cage and/or successfully aestheticizes the cell phone. My main argument is that all the visual bells & whistles and chitchat about the programming are a sign of artistic immaturity. He doesn't trust the audience to just listen, he has to do the whole new media dog and pony show.
Also, isn't this kind of a one-off? Is Levin or anyone else ever going to do another "cell phone symphony"?
- tom moody 12-11-2002 8:42 pm
The question of whether or not there is such a thing as noise pollution recalls Paracelsus' observation that everything has in it a poison; it's just a matter of dosage. A loud enough noise will rip your eardrum: we're not apt to adjust to that. I believe there have been studies showing that listening to music which is distorted by the playback system causes irritation, fatigue, and loss of concentration, in comparison to the same music reproduced "correctly". On the other hand, Rock and other modern music makes intentional use of distortion, and would probably be regarded as noise if heard by a pre-modern audience. Come to think of it, some of our parents called it noise. Still, I have a hard time fathoming those people on the subways with the earphones cranked up to distorted levels, or those tin-rattling vehicles with the blow-out speakers overloading. I don't want my distortion distorted, but I guess somebody likes it. Or at least wants to engage in irritation at a point where art meets activism and aggression.
- alex 12-11-2002 9:14 pm
i love the noise of subways. i miss that.
- pamela 12-11-2002 11:23 pm
Tom - In my review, I dealt with only Golan's *sound*, not his visuals and showmanship, etc. I've never seen 'em. Judging by the music alone, it's a good CD. Believe me, as I said in the piece, it could've been atrocious (200 cellphones playing Metallica) but he kept it in the realm of abstraction, something chirping cellphones on the streets never really do (you notice that they're usually pop songs or recognizable classics). So, yeah, is he John Cage? No. But he's an interesting young composer using quotidian means to make intriguiging experimental music. Kenny G
- Kenny G / WFMU (guest) 12-11-2002 11:35 pm
"if its too loud your too old"
- metaldude
- bill 12-12-2002 1:51 am
Hi - I just discovered this page several months down the road, sorry to be so late. Thanks everyone, for getting irritated enough at my concert to raise some great points. Good feedback is rare.
Tom takes issue with the visual trappings of the concert. It's true, one alternative would have been to put everyone in a completely black room, and make the event chiefly about the sonic aspects of the mobile phone. There were a few reasons I didn't do this.
The first has to do with my interests in audio-visuality. I'm less interested in composing sound, than in creating contexts which reveal or establish a connection between image and sound. My idea for the Telesymphony actually emerged from some extremely formalist questions I had about the ways in which the audience itself could become the playback surface for an audiovisual situation. Bored of creating works for a projection screen, I was essentially wondering how each person in the audience could become an individually-addressable pixel in a large audiovisual display. The audience's mobile phones presented an expedient opportunity to achieve this (though perhaps too obvious a choice, given the way that they've become fetish gadgets). In any case, I should emphasize that I really don't consider the piece as a work of "music" (e.g. strictly sound), nor did I intend it to be appreciated as such. I think terms like performance art or social sound-sculpture are probably more accurate.
The second reason for all of the visual technologies has to do with a certain didactic interest I have. Simply put, I wanted people to be able to see what was going on. The fact is that it's extremely hard to localize the sound of a cell phone ringing -- it's basically a 3kHz pulse wave drilling in your ear, and sorely lacks the broad-spectrum noise that would allow you to localize it well (either directly or from its reflections). The large mirror and projection system made it possible for people to instantly locate the source of the ringing, and thereby understand what, basically, was happening all around them. You also have to remember that the audience is sitting in an essentially fixed row of chairs -- it's basically impossible to get a global overview of the event, from the vantage point of row 7, seat 9. With the mirror, they could not only see who was ringing, and how many people were ringing in which combinations, but they could also observe each others' reactions. For the same reason that it's helpful to actually *watch* the orchestra when one has the privilege of going to a symphony, I think the event would have been perceived as much more chaotic without the aid of the mirror and lights.
(That said, there were a few people in the audience who told me later that they enjoyed it more with their eyes closed. Even so, I contend that the mirror was still helpful, even for them, in establishing an understanding of what was going on.)
Tom's second chief complaint is that it's inaccurate hype to call the concert "interactive", or that it somehow involves audience participation. To this I have to say, I both agree and disagree. It would have been a great challenge indeed to make a piece of music which really was entirely performed (and presumably improvised) by a very large number of non-trained audience members. I think this is a fascinating art-and-technology research question, and obviously the Telesymphony doesn't come close. I also agree that it's bogus to say that one "actively participates" in the event by having made the commercial choice of a Nokia instead of a Motorola. Although there were some actual ways in which the audience members were [technologically] able to "participate" in the event -- you list them, including the folks who selected alternative ringtones from the ones we offered, or turned their phones off altogether -- I think the issue comes down to a different definition of "participate". Being a technologist and geek, it's easy to think that participation somehow must invove pressing a button and seeing an immediate response representing one's contribution. I'd like to offer a different understanding of participation that I only really understood after creating this concert.
The nearest analogy I have, is that it's like driving in your car and getting rear-ended. When this happens, you don't think to yourself, "He hit my car!" Instead, you think to yourself, "He hit *me*!" People identify with their phones like you wouldn't believe -- it's not some anonymous piece of plastic that they happen to be carrying, but, in an odd way, an extension of themselves. In the Telesymphony, people began to answer their phones *out of mechanical habit*. Many people expressed to me later how unsettled they felt when their phone was ringing -- even though they knew it was nothing more than my performance PC on the other end of the line -- because they kept mistakenly thinking that somebody was trying to contact them. I know its a bit of a stretch, but I contend that these people were very actively participating in the concert, at least psychologically, as more than just observers.
Tom, if you email me your address I'll send you a disc, it has some quicktime videos in addition to the soundtrack. I'm golan [at] flong [dot] com.
Best
- Golan Levin 7-26-2003 10:17 pm
Actually, just a short technical clarification, in response to Tom's comment that "You have to be willing to queue for a seat assignment, surrender your private number (to whom exactly?), and accept the downloaded 'custom ringtone,' all for the sake of one concert (to remove the tone, you're presumably on your own)," and that doing this would require "near-infinite time, patience, and trust."
So, the audience was queuing for seating in any case, as they would have for any ticketed performance. Participants were explicitly informed that their private phone numbers would be entered into an anonymous database to be deleted immediately after the performance. Our custom ringtones were downloaded automatically to their phones, usually within 15 seconds of completing the form. Accepting the new ringtone, and later switching the ringtone back to one's preferred setting presented few difficulties, as ringtone downloading and swapping is a popular pastime in Europe. Altogether we found that the process of registering for the concert added less than two minutes to the time people were already spending on the ticket purchase. Finally, it was a rather patient and trustful audience of art enthusiasts, a major difference, I think, from seeing a movie in Times Square.
Best
- Golan Levin 7-26-2003 11:29 pm
This is vaguely similar to, and more interactive than Brian Eno's Compact Forest Proposal installation at SFMOMA in 2001. In that case rather than a set of cell phones the medium was a set of 10 CD players suspended at various locations in a darkened room.
Sound sculpture seems like the right description of Eno's work also. And I was able to interact a bit in the Compact Forest.
The lighting was deep twilight. It took several minutes for the eyes to fully adjust. There was a mannequin in one corner of the room. I watched it for a long time, and sometimes it seemed to move, but that was just my eyes playing tricks. I was spending the day in the museum celebrating the solstice and my birthday, and parked myself on a bench in a corner of the installation and spent quite a while absorbing the sound, and opening my irises. I could see each new person enter long before they could see me, and observed how they observed. I was sufficiently still that some of the people visiting the exhibit thought I was a second mannequin. One couple almost jumped when I moved slightly as they approached a little too closely.
I think the spatial characteristics of sound deserve more attention. In the real world, most people seem to use the ears' spatial abilities unconsiously. Regarding mass media distribution of sound (as opposed to concerts or installations), surround sound seems like it's where stereo was in the early days. It's too often executed poorly or is simply way over the top.
Eno was successful in creating a sound sculpture that was subtle yet which tugged the observer away from simple temporal experience of sound toward a consciously spatial experience.
I understand Golan's point about 3kHz. (I studied acoustics and psychoacoustics a bit.) My Mot cell has a built-in speakerphone. If that technology becomes more popular, a broader band telesymphony with better spatial resolution would be possible.
- mark 7-27-2003 8:31 am
I don't want to say too much more until I watch the disc Golan was kind enough to offer to send. One quick thought, though: if the nature of the "medium" is non-localized, then shouldn't the piece be about that? We've all had the experience of seeing five people reach for their phones when one rings. The anxiety you mention that people feel about "their" phone ringing could and should be built into the piece. But pinning down the sound source with lights and mirrors lessens the anxiety-factor, I would think. Instead of "Is that me?" it's "Oh, this is me!"
- tom moody 7-28-2003 7:10 pm
Posting late on something Tom said early:
"...isn't this kind of a one-off? Is Levin or anyone else ever going to do another "cell phone symphony"? "
My response: Why not? If cell phones are a part of the fabric of our sound enviroment, like transistor radios on the beach, surely we, (ie: Levin) have only just begun to investigate the pyscho-socio-sound dimensions of the phenomenon?
Further ... and straying right off topic ... it has always slightly miffed me that the ball tossed by Sol Lewitt, Lawrence Weiner and their ilk, has not been genuinely taken up, ie: do the art idea again. We listen to many many people perform other's music and we gain a great deal from the experience. Why don't we perform each other's art? (are we still so hooked on authorship and 'the artist's hand'? is it because we aren't actually interested enough in art to get anything out of 'covering' it? or what?)
- sally (guest) 8-08-2003 7:46 pm
Hi, Sally. One artist who did what you're suggesting, and did it in the spirit I think you're suggesting (or maybe not; she's complicated) is Elaine Sturtevant. Starting in the '60s, she began "repeating" other artists' work (she prefers that term to appropriating), right up to calling them on the phone and asking them technical specs on materials they used. From what I heard, Warhol was interested in and supportive of her work, but as you can imagine, she pushed major buttons with others.
There was a mini Sturtevant revival in the early 90s. I remember an Artforum ad with her walking out of an apartment building dressed in the Beuys hunting vest and fedora. Lately interest seems to have died down again. I found a good quote from her on the Net, and an early piece:
Commentaries, commodities, copies,
appropriation, authorship, death-talk,
originality, ... these are for "heroes",
hot dog boys and bubble gum chewers.
Elaine Sturtevant, 1987
Lichtenstein hot dog
- tom moody 8-08-2003 8:28 pm
Also sort of straying further off topic?
- steve 8-09-2003 7:53 pm
Crap, that Sturtevant Lichtenstein hotdog was taken off artnet and I didn't save it. Here's a Sturtevant Warhol flowers--this one I did save.
- tom moody 2-29-2004 10:25 pm
Sorry, had to close this thread due to evil spammers. Please email or comment on a more recent post to continue this topic.
- tom moody 3-26-2007 2:15 am