Sent i september ble al Khowarizmis Mekaniske Orkester pakket i kassen sin for å ta sin første utenlandsreise. Island og Nordiske Musikkdager 2011 skulle inntas. Det nye konserthuset HARPA var siste stans for DHLs mann i brunt. Det var i en periode da alt skulle skje.

Ellen og jeg hadde termin 25. september og vi hadde akkurat kjøpt og overtatt et hus, leilighet skulle selges og overleveres og alt vi eide måtte ned i kasser det også. Det spøkte for hele Islandsturen og endte med at jeg ikke kunne dra. Heldigvis kunne mestertrombonist, komponist og kyndig i det meste, Christian Jaksjø steppe inn. Han fikk noen timers opplæring og klarte seg utmerket. Selv har jeg bare sett bilder og hørt fra folk som var der, det gikk visst veldig bra. Tilbakemeldingene er svært postitive, noe dere får et innblikk i ved å lese teksten fra Pétur Jonasson. Jeg ba om en liten tilbakemelding og den følger her:

—
To Christian Blom (and to whom it may concern)

I would hereby like to extend our formal thanks to you for your participation in the 2011 Nordic Music Days Festival which was held in Reykjavík, Iceland,  from October 6 – 9.

NMD, which is a purely non – profit organization, is organized annually in different Nordic countries by the respective countries´ composers´ societies under the supervision of the Council of Nordic Composers. Your work/installation “al Khowarizmis Mekaniske Orkester” was opened on Friday morning, October 7th, in the “Stemma” room of the new Icelandic National Concert Hall, “Harpa” and remained open to the public throughout the festival. It attracted many guests, and the word obviously spread rapidly of its ingenuity and of the special atmosphere it created as people enjoyed their private “conversations” with the work.

It was indeed a very important contribution to Nordic Music Days 2011. Aside from the “sound and musical” value, we noted the importance of the visual factor of the tiny orchestra, something which – in addition to the numerous foreign guests and media people who came to Reykjavík solely for the purpose of attending the festival – obviously attracted a number of local and international art enthusiasts as well.

On behalf of NMD2011, I would like to thank you once again for introducing the “al Khowarizmis experience” to us.

With best regards,
Pétur Jónasson, Artistic Director, Nordic Music Days 2011
—

Denne takken vil jeg gjerne rekke videre til PNEK. Tusen takk for transportstøtten!

Mvh
Christian Blom
www.christianblom.com

Kvalifikasjoner
• Initiativrik og selvstendig
• Gode skriftlige og muntlige norsk- og engelskkunnskaper
• Sans for strukturert og systematisk arbeid
• Gode samarbeidsevner
• Stor gjennomføringsevne, arbeidskapasitet, løsningsorientert og evne til å prioritere.

Søkere må ha relevant utdanning på høyskole/universitetsnivå eller tilsvarende kompetanse. Erfaring innen kulturadministrasjon er ønskelig. God kjennskap til kunstfeltet er en fordel. Arbeidssted: Oslo. Lønn etter avtale.

Send en kortfattet elektronisk søknad med CV og ev. referanser innen 18.januar 2012 til pnek@pnek.org.

Eventuelle spørsmål rettes til Per Platou (prosjektleder for arkivet og daglig leder PNEK), mobil 93069406.

Mer informasjon om videokunstarkivet her.

* Pressemelding fra Norsk Kulturråd
* Prosjektbeskrivelse, org.struktur mm.
* Radioinnslag fra Kulturnytt/NRK P2, 28.sept (mp3)
* Lager egen Youtube for norsk kunst (DN, 23.10.11)
* PNEK starter arbeidet med videoarkivet (Billedkunst, 25.10.11)
* Den nære kunsthistorien (Leder i Billedkunst, 25.10.11)

Snapshot fra Mariekes verk “Plan 10″.

Video installation 380
Flying from London to Singapore in the vast technology of the Airbus 380 aircraft. There is a perfect feature, a perfect video installation that is present at all times during the flight. Choose skycam channel from your personal screen. A camera is situated on the highest point in the tail of the aircraft; the image shows the fuselage and (80 metre) wings from which hang the four huge jet engines. It’s hard to grasp the concept of the machine you are in except through this digital window, it’s a seamless live feedback process.

Watching yourself (your machine self) taking off and landing is an exhilarating experience, but tuning in to the perfect blackness of night flying – where the pixels angrily pop and fizz as they search for visual information – lets the mind inhabit the great vast dark outer-ness. When suddenly the video conjurer flashes an apparition via the relentless rhythm of the wing-tip lights (out of shot), the flying spectre momentarily materialises. Example : http://youtu.be/Qy6E3WGD02I

Brisbane

Climate shock. From snow melt fresh to sub tropical humidity.

In Queensland’s Gallery Of Modern Art, I visited Celeste Boursier-Mougenot’s From Here to Ear ( v.13) to hear and see the live bird-powered music machine. I love the random element, where the artist simply sets up a situation, defines parameters and then steps back. Apparently, during the recent floods in Brisbane, the gallery was closed for some weeks. The captive bird population, without the continual interruption from human culture vultures, began to pair off, mate, nest and lay eggs – a reversion to nature while making beautiful music together. I imagine second-generation installed bird musicians carrying the tradition forward.

IMA / Light Cipher
http://www.ima.org.au/pages/home.php
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vixpen/sets/72157626390574735/

For this extended piece at the Institute of Modern Art, I wanted to combine elements from Cipher Screen (2 projector, screen piece) with Light Trap (4 projector light sculpture), hence ‘Light Cipher’. It worked to an extent.

The evening started with my four short 35mm films projected from a Chinese mobile 35mm film projector. The image was screened floor to ceiling; I think the material looked quite impressive. It was the first time I have shown Correspondences, which was (and remains) unfinished – and it held up OK, the audience applauded without irony (I think).

As soon as the 35mm films finished we began the performance. I did a 3 projector version of Light Trap here, the hazer machine was very powerful, maybe too much smoke for a relatively small space (with 80 people in it). For this event I was collaborating with Mike Cooper. A friend and mentor from my early punk rock days in Reading, Mike is a musician who has covered everything from blues to improv/noise, taking in dub, surf music and Hawaiian slide on the way.

Having gone through the hand scratch and pierce process with the three projectors (see http://youtu.be/6vlGDqyVUbU), the light sculpture pulled the audience to their feet and they began to interact with the 3D image. The smoke was turned off, but was difficult to disperse and seemed to linger in the space.

Next I started the two projectors (see http://vimeo.com/user7511925), which also had contact mics attached to the scratch plates – so the whole piece grew nicely in intensity and volume after I had begun the hand grinder and set to work removing the film emulsion.

Light Cipher ended with the destruction of the film loops. As the audience started to leave the smoke also set off the fire alarm and the whole building was evacuated, so we had the added spectacle of fire engines and fire men which I thought capped the evening off pretty well.

Otherfilm
Joel Stern and Sally Golding are the two main protagonists in the Otherfilm organisation. Both are artists in their own right; Joel concentrating on music with a number of avant rock/noise projects and Sally involved in film performance and direct printing techniques with 16mm film. They have collaborated many times on film/sound pieces together.

Otherfilm was largely responsible in arranging for me to perform at IMA in Brisbane. In 2006 and 2007 they organised the Otherfilm Festival.

At the time of my arrival Sally was packing her entire life into boxes in order to make a permanent move to London, where she is now based. Currently both Joel and Sally are participating in the London event ‘ Unconscious Archives #1’ (July 12th 2011)

Greg Boring, Pope Boring
Having told Joel and his co-collaborators that I had in an earlier life been a singer in various bands in the late 70s/early 80s and after a few beers they decided that I should make a guest appearance. The band – coincidently named ‘Greg Boring’, for that evening’s session was re-named ‘Pope Boring’. I have yet to hear the final mix of our endeavours – but they promised to release it to the unsuspecting public, so watch this space.

Melbourne Botanical Gardens
This amazing place also houses a certain bird, which emits a very electronic sounding beep/tweet. I lay listening to the call and response coming from several of these birds hidden in the trees around me. Sequences are and made and repeated, then stretched, broken into and superceded, patterns within patterns, with sudden interval and mapping changes; a seriously rigorous durational composition, endlessly mutable and endlessly fascinating.

Paul’s Place

Paul Rodgers is a friend and colleague who I worked with in the film group Loophole Cinema (1989-99). He now lives in Melbourne in the Fitzroy suburb just north of the city centre. This is a vibrant community with a mass of second hand clothes, book and record shops – along with pubs, cafes and parks.

Pauls place is a second floor studio, filled to the rafters with industrial scrap, wood, rope, books, pulleys, DVDs and film material. I was immediately attracted to his vast vinyl collection; from late 70s to the present, punk/noise/industrial/ post-everything, from ‘Do The Standing Still’, (The Table) to ‘Why Don’t You Eat Carrots’ (Faust), all great stuff.
Paul plays with a number of different bands, including The Infinite Decimals and builds cathode ray machine installations.

We performed Cipher Screen in his studio, advertised via Facebook and SMS, and had an audience of around 16. This I think went really well – with a lot of feedback (and a fair amount of beer) afterwards.

Marcia and Dirk

At the Cipher Screen performance I met Dirk De Bruyn and Marcia Jane.
Dirk De Bruyn is an established filmmaker active since the early 70s. His work includes many single screen films as well as expanded pieces and installation. He is also a professor at the Deakin University in Melbourne.
Marcia Jane’s spatial strobe/flicker work is an interesting combination of technologies, as she wrote to me: “This actually does have 16mm in it, some loops I’ve been making with direct film / collage then making patterns with the images using a JK. Then I optically manipulated the images while video-ing the output; a private performance. From there it becomes a strictly video work largely constructed by editing. Then later in the gallery it becomes a spatial concern: I edit again to suit the gallery conditions”
See her site at: http://www.permutations.net/

—-

Greg Pope
http://gregpope.org/