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The fruits of my video and music collaboration with John Parker will be on view this Fri, May 12, in Toronto. The exhibition is Mods and Rockers, curated by Sally McKay as part of digifest 2006: mods:
Artist teams are:And here is the statement for our piece, anti-phallically titled Rodmocker, which will be displayed on two TV screens with an asynchronous music soundtrack on CD, playing through headphones:
* Myfanwy Ashmore & Lorna Mills
* Chandra Bulucon & Andrew J. Paterson
* Rob Cruickshank & Veronica Verkley
* Tom Moody & John Parker
In Britain in the 1960s, mods and rockers frequently clashed in bloody battles. For this exhibition, however, we ask them to merge in the name of art. Four pairs of artists, one Mod and one Rocker per team, will collaborate on art, video and sound works that illuminate the polarities of the partnership.
Tom Moody and John ParkerThe work was composed in public, on this blog, over the span of about a month. The posts are documented on John's site eyekhan.com.
Rather than have some kind of face-off, or rumble, we are merging sensibilities. The collective inner Mod is the high tech influence in the form of some sophisticated audio software and a newish laptop used to edit and burn the video, and the inner Rocker is the low tech source material: 8-Bit-style tunes on an old Mac (some originally composed in the '80s) and animated GIFs by Tom based on MSPaint versions of Web images of John's work.
We're trying for some sort of parity between the audio and visual material. Pixels and square waves are both medium and subject.
If you're in the Toronto area, I hope you will check it out!
TV sketch artist, documenting the atrocities...
Thor Johnson remixed a piece of mine posted a few months ago:
"Tasteful Triphop (Thorrific Shruti Box Remix)" [mp3 removed].
The original tune is here:
"Tasteful Triphop" [mp3 removed].
Johnson's version is darker and more haunted. It is no longer tasteful, but instead might be described as a combination of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and Can's "ethnographic forgery series," with a modern but gritty digital edge.
Johnson also has a new web video (approx 24 MB Flash file), a psychedelic montage of Dick Cheney's recent, much-booed "throwing out the first pitch" photo op with the debated-and-then-quickly-forgotten clip of American soldiers shooting the wounded in Fallujah. The repressed returns to mingle with the banality of evil (that baseball jacket!).