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The Glass Bees Featured in Sheepshead Bay Blog

Thank you to Samantha LoSapio and all of the folks at Sheepshead Bites for this review! This gives me increased confidence that we're onto something here. See the full article.

If you thought traffic was bad at the Sheepshead Bay Road bus stop, teeming with Kingsborough students late for their 9 a.m. class and exasperated espresso fiends tweeting about their frustration, wait until you have to push your way off the back of a gondola.

Oh, you heard right; we said gondola.

New York City’s own Atlantean harbingers in their own right, Christopher Williams and Jason Das of experimental musical project known as the Glass Bees, recently embarked on a morning-long acquisition of a variety of media taken or inspired by the southeastern coast of Brooklyn, including our very own Sheepshead Bay, to form a multimedia experience called Venice, Brooklyn...> Read more.

Also, as a side note, the New York Academy of Sciences has announced that they will be holding an event on December 2 looking at the findings of the New York Panel on Climate Change. Modeled on the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the NPCC is looking closely at the potential implications of climate change for New York City and the region. The report will also be published as a volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Some Thoughts on Venice, Brooklyn

Venice, Brooklyn was a shotgun multimedia improvisation assembled and performed by the Glass Bees on September 20, 2009. Early that morning, Jason Das and I traveled to areas along the Atlantic coastline in southern Brooklyn, specifically visiting neighborhoods and marshland that scientists have predicted to be vulnerable to the effects of climate change in the coming decades. We visited Dead Horse Bay, Floyd Bennett Field, Gerritsen Beach, and Sheepshead Bay, documenting them with sound recorders, photographs, watercolor sketches, and video, and collecting objects we found there. Later that day, we presented an improvised performance in the front vestibule of Envoy Enterprises, a gallery in Chinatown, New York City. Our field recordings, visual footage, and physical detritus became the raw material for a sound collage and temporary installation. Amplified sound was broadcast into the street, and visitors were invited into the gallery to listen more closely on headphones. All materials and sounds we presented were gathered, created, displayed, performed, and disassembled within an 11-hour period.

In a formal sense, Venice, Brooklyn was a significant stage in the ongoing evolution of the Glass Bees. From our inception, a core goal has been to adapt and respond to the situations in which we find ourselves, improvising with the materials we have at hand. But although we first formed as a purely musical project, our approach to improvisation is increasingly open to experimentation in other registers. In this case, our perambulations early in the day were conducted in the spirit of the Situationist dérive. Our motions were an attempt to actively engage with the city, getting lost while discovering corners previously unknown to us, paying close attention to things typically unobserved, exposing hidden histories, and finding utility in objects that have no use. Although we set out that morning with a general sense of what we were looking for, what we returned with was largely accidental. Our installation in a gallery in Chinatown constituted an improvised, impressionistic remix of what we had experienced earlier in the day.

We developed this project in response to a call for proposals issued by the Conflux Festival. Conflux is a New York City-wide gathering of visual and sound artists, writers, urban adventurers, and the public, created to “investigate everyday urban life through emerging artistic, technological, and social practice.” Our interest in climate change and its potential effects on the city came out of my work as a science editor. It’s been difficult to avoid thinking about this profoundly depressing issue, and our inability, at all levels of society, to properly reckon with it. For centuries, people up and down the Atlantic seashore have built their lives, their communities, their very dreams on the assumption that land is land, and sea is sea. But the line demarcating these two worlds is slowly crawling uphill, making the precautions we have engineered increasingly insufficient. It is now conceivable that someday the locations we visited could suffer a similar fate as New Orleans, or Venice, or Bangladesh, all of which are in the process of being submerged. What would be lost if these areas were inundated, we wondered, and how are people preparing?

 

Like the haul of some anachronistic anthropological excavation, the evidence we gathered in our fieldwork was largely quotidian, but often telling. The sounds we used during our performance at Envoy were sampled from field recordings of what we encountered—antique bottles washed up on the shore, dumped in the bay decades ago but mysteriously resurfaced as litter once again; a bristle-less hairbrush, corroded clean by the brackish water; a watchdog protecting its owner’s property; a young girl pulling a wagon; shortwave weather reports; and interviews with people we met along the way.  The photographs we took and the watercolors Jason painted were snapshots of life in these places—a row of houses and the canal in Gerritsen, advertisements for new harborfront condominiums at Sheepshead, a path through the marshland, a table of trophies, a pinwheel, a dilapidated barn.

An elderly woman who took interest in Jason’s sketching explained to us that Gerritsen Beach was initially developed as a small community of summer cottages, inaccessible in the winter and occupied during the hot weather. That people have since built out these cabins into larger, more permanent houses just a few feet above sea level suggests an indomitable impulse to claim the coast and its watery pleasures. It also speaks to what Columbia University climatologists Klaus Jacob, Vivien Gornitz, and Cynthia Rosenzweig once described, in a study of the potential effects of climate change for New York, as "littoral environments … caught between the twin pressures of development and increasing coastal hazards." Like the nearby Whitney Mill that years ago served as an industrial focal point of the area, this unique and charming neighborhood of narrow streets, short blocks, and dense housing could someday be abandoned, this time badly flooded or even swallowed by the ocean.

That day we also passed through coastal areas that remain sparsely developed, a buffer zone to mitigate the consequences of storms for the city’s inland settlements. Home to abandoned barracks and functional U.S. Marine and Coast Guard installations, these isolated areas also offer open spaces psychically far removed from the congestion just a few miles up Flatbush Avenue. At Floyd Bennett Field we found a miniature formula 1 race course for remote control car enthusiasts. When we approached holding our audio recorder, the organizer introduced himself, explaining that he’d been afraid we were from the Parks Department, recording decibel levels as evidence for a complaint against him. After reassuring him that we had no intention of causing problems, he told us about the troubles his club faces in finding a permanent place to enjoy their hobby. They’d been evicted form the Aviator Club when the former aircraft hangar was turned into a sports complex, and now made the best they could of an uneven patch of tarmack they’d claimed. As the cars hurtled around the course at startlingly high speeds, his story was one of displacement, of a small but enthusiastic community forced to relocate due to forces beyond their control.

With flood prediction maps in hand, it was not difficult to see that in the long term, the built environment around us was similarly provisional, temporary, and in the process of migration. Scientists now know that certain effects of climate change are irreversible and unavoidable, and governments and individuals will be forced to adapt to a new reality. If they don’t, places around the world including these outlying regions of New York will be endangered, and their residents will be uprooted for higher ground. Many of those places will have an even harder time coping.

In Manhattan, concrete and glass high-rises belie the fact that millions of people live here on islands, and that their settlements rest just feet above sea level. To us it seemed provocative, then, to bring peripheral areas into dialogue with Downtown. Models of the potential effects of severe storms in Manhattan predict that neighborhoods not far from the Envoy Enterprises storefront could also be inundated. Even moderate storms will have the power to render the city’s infrastructure useless, as occurred one morning in the summer of 2007, when an early morning downpour incapacitated the city’s subway system, leaving thousands of commuters with no choice but to hike miles to work. How are we preparing for a potentially far worse sequel? Could we do anything about it if we wanted to?

Fundamentally, the question of what investments and sacrifices we are willing to make to cope with the effects of climate change is a complicated calculus of risk assessment. With so much competing information and so many unknowns about the extent of climate change’s effects, how do we define a reasonable level of preparedness? Such questions are not new, and evidence of the ways in which we have answered them fill the space around us. This is a theme that the Glass Bees have explored before, and in this sense we see Venice, Brooklyn as part of an ongoing project begun in a July 2009 performance we held at Monkeytown, a venue in Brooklyn. There, we (along with sound artist Andrea Williams) improvised a soundtrack to a two-channel video projection created from footage gathered at Fort Hancock on Sandy Hook, New Jersey. Although today it is primarily a destination for weekend getaways to the beach, Sandy Hook has a long and rich military history, dating back to the nineteenth century, when bunkers were dug into the dunes to protect New York Harbor. The fortifications developed as technology evolved, eventually including a Nike missile installation erected in the 1950s to shield the city from Soviet bombers. All of these defenses eventually became obsolete and were abandoned.

No attack ever came against New York, but does that mean that these precautions were foolhardy? We will never know. Because the fossils of this era sit on a sandbar just a few hundred feet wide at some points, however, we might expect that nature’s invasion of the same terrain will have dramatic effects, and strategies against it will become increasingly difficult to devise. Can we live with this? How are we preparing for these changes? The very week that Venice, Brooklyn took place, world leaders met in the United Nations General Assembly, once again averring that something must be done to address climate change, but refusing to make concrete proposals about the measures everyone knows are needed. With a major climate change conference coming up in Copenhagen later this year, prospects are looking increasingly slim that the essential consensus needed to address this complicated, global issue will materialize.

In a small way, Venice, Brooklyn was an attempt to focus on the material reality of what is at risk. Data and statistics can seem abstract to the nonscientist, and it won’t be until people’s lives are impacted in concrete, physical ways that the full extent of the phenomenon will be understood.

Although the trends are clear, climatologists admit that the specific effects of climate change are difficult to predict. New York City will have no alternative but to improvise, to adapt to the changing environment in which we find ourselves...  perhaps not unlike a certain, transitory multimedia installation presented on a stoop in Chinatown.

Visit the Glass Bees for audio and video from this performance.

A Covey of Credos

A good friend wrote to me recently to point me toward the website for Credo, a wireless expansion of the Working Assets telephone program. Credo sets aside a percentage of all of its fees to support nonprofit organizations of its customers’ choosing. According to its website, Credo gives you an opportunity to “choose the mobile company that supports your beliefs.” At the same time, “You’ll get competitive rates, nationwide all-digital coverage, helpful customer service, great phones, and a variety of plans to choose from.” This best of all possible worlds has undoubtedly produced significant support for some worthy progressive organizations, and is a fine example of good corporate citizenship, I thought. Still, I wondered, how much can something like this actually accomplish?

The problem with this type of political action began to come into focus the next day as I read Lawrence Weschler’s absolutely wonderful book Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences. The collection grew from a regular column the author contributed to McSweeney’s Quarterly, and from other publications, in which he traces provocative connections between iconic images from the history of visual culture. Many of Weschler’s convergences begin with playful observations about similar compositional approaches in painting, graphic design, photography, television, and advertising, and grow in layers of resonance through the power of his imagination, some startling research, and his will to extract and articulate meaning from these seeming coincidences.

In Weschler’s world, however, little is pure coincidence. If Newt Gingrich and Slobodan Milosevic seem to share a similarly sculpted doughy visage, it becomes an occasion to contemplate the “fundamentalist, cynical, and manipulative” similarities between the Contract With America and the regime that launched ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko begin to share a sublime sense of human insignificance within the vast cosmological and metaphysical void that surrounds us when seen in the context of images of galaxies and moonscapes published in magazines during the years of their greatest productivity. And the chance fact that Vaclav Havel was photographed wearing a jacket created for the film Awakenings brings an uncanny authority to Weschler’s reading of Oliver Sacks’s tale of “frozen” patients in a Bronx hospital; they become more than allegory for Eastern Europe under Soviet communism, sharing a podium at the prow of a revolution. Weschler’s insights are often startling, and invite a more careful attention to the images surrounding us than we typically maintain.

His speculations also begin to become practical tools in essays like one near the middle of the collection (also published previously here) in which he considers the graphic design of the Solidarity movement in 1980-1981. Solidarity’s posters were an integral part of a potent propaganda campaign to rally Polish nationalist sentiment behind a difficult and often bloody struggle for workers’ rights under Soviet occupation. Weschler points out that the simplicity of images like this one were packed with latent meaning, drawing on a rich trove of images and other materials from national history while making oblique references to contemporary popular culture. He points out that it was often enough for Solidarity’s graphic activists simply to juxtapose bold images with dates of important uprisings in the Polish struggle for self-determination, because supporters of the movement would immediately recognize them. They were willfully cryptic, though not for the sake of obfuscation, and successful because of the issues at stake for Solidarity and the public’s investment in the movement, witnessed in the hunger they endured to support it.

Weschler contrasts the vitality of the Polish images with American political graphic design in the same era, and finds at least one example—for a 1981 march on Washington for labor rights—to be sorely lacking in comparison. Though titled Solidarity Day, the poster projects a mishmash of vague agendas, reflecting a lack of cohesion and determination in the movement itself in the blank stares of the citizens looking out of the poster. In Weschler’s analysis, the posters of Solidarity were not successful only because they relied on a pastiche approach to recycling images and identified with a relevant history, but because there was a clear goal and a strong movement behind them.

Though the essay was written in 1983, what Weschler says could just as easily apply—perhaps even more so—to the situation in which left-spectrum Americans find ourselves now. Weschler’s reading reminded me of a gathering in Washington Square Park held on the occasion of the first anniversary of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center—one of the few dates that actually has resonance for Americans today (although this past year witnessed the stirrings of a purposeful forgetting). Organized by the coalition Not In Our Name, the ostensible purpose was to remember the victims of the disaster and to protest the Bush administration’s already apparent agenda of using it to manipulate public opinion. Over the course of the event, however, we heard speeches protesting American imperialism, meddling in Central America, and failure to support the Palestinian cause. Important problems all, and probably even related to the big picture of which 9/11 and its aftermath form the foreground, but I left confused and wishing that someone with a clear vision and the authority to articulate a limited set of pressing demands had been in charge.

An article that ran in Adbusters last year hit the nail on the head in its parody:

Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal—the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the fuck up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his fucking stilts at home.

The diffuseness of the movement would seep into view again and again. A radio report on a February 2003 protest that ran on NPR during the run-up to the Iraq war featured a chorus of women singing John Lennon’s mantra, “All we are saying is give peace a chance,” as if this articulated any kind of relevant agenda. A March 2004 protest march in New York City trickled out once again into Washington Square Park, with the most audible statements coming from a small group of communists who had seized a patch of pavement near the fountain. Whether you agree with their historical analysis or not is not the issue; it was beside the point of the gathering. The numbers of people who turned out for the event made it clear that there were large segments of the public who opposed the war, but there was still no clear catalyst that could synthesize and channel this expression into any coherent tangible action. The Democrats ignored it until much too late, and even the New York Times, which has been otherwise commendable in its recording of the Bush administration’s failures, has seemed content to report on public protests at arm’s length, a symptom of the inability of the march’s leaders to articulate a lasting vision that sticks.

The final chapter of Everything that Rises can offer a way to think about why public opposition has been ineffective in opposing an obviously and astonishingly inept government in the past many years. In an essay (perhaps in another sign of the Weschler-ness of experience) also titled “Credo,” the author posits his method as a negotiation between two kinds of seeing.

The history of thinking about vision is in fact a history of a continual rejiggering of the relative importance of those two vectors: is it that light rays enter the eye through the corneal lens (whereupon they get sprayed onto a sort of tabula rasa screen at the back of the eye)—or rather, in some sense, that the brain’s or the mind’s, or anyway the self’s attention courses out to the world through that lens (actively grasping and even shaping what it sees, or rather looks at, or rather chooses to tend to)?

For Weschler, seeing what is in front of us and creating a compelling narrative that gives a form to the world are intertwined activities, though it is the latter that makes his writing so compelling. It is his creative repurposing of the raw material on which his essays are based that brings a focus to our sense of things we might otherwise ignore, and that might even suggest a method of extracting a meaning from history. Such is perhaps the case in any good critical writing, but Weschler’s “credo” also hints at a way of existing in the world; it is a philosophy of a creative life.

A hypothesis: Credo as phone company, at least as professed in its undoubtedly focus-group generated promotional copy, is the opposite of this. As effective as it might be in raising funds for organizations worth supporting, such an automated form of feel-good, multifaceted (and therefore utterly without focus), ersatz activism will never engage participants to the point of feeling truly invested in the causes they believe in. Although it helps fund activists who are dedicated and working to effect change, for the broader public this is politics as unconscious abstraction, as convenience, as reduction to fundraising campaigns. It serves as an umbrella to an overstocked supermarket of “causes” that showcases the competing fight for the attention of the left-of-center electorate. It is a sign that, unlike Solidarity, many feel alienated even from the agendas they support, and of the desperate need for a more persuasive lens to focus the public’s attention.

On the Road

Stephen Shore’s solo show at the International Center of Photography focuses on a collection of photos made during extended road trips back and forth across the United States in the 1970s. His project revels in the ephemera of travel—a half-eaten hamburger, a pair of table tennis paddles, an anonymous ladyfriend, a decaying drug store marquee, a lonely intersection in a small Midwestern town, to name just a few.  In lesser hands, any one of these prints would be an ordinary souvenir made by a pretentious East Coast art school student on a post-graduation vacation. Seen together as a set of generously sized prints, however, Shore’s work achieves a slow burn. There is a restless spontaneity to his selection of subject matter that comes from a careful awareness of his constantly shifting surroundings, and yet his resulting documents show acute attention to subtle details of color and composition. For the most part Shore seems to show little interest in making any particular commentary about the places and objects he captures, but concerns himself first and foremost with using them as pure source material to be captured and framed by his sensitive eye. It makes for an understated but quite powerful documentation of a life on the road, and for an intimate, unvarnished portrait of the artifacts of American culture. If you can’t make it to the ICP, check out this online gallery of Shore’s images, and this recent short video documentary on his approach to his craft, and maybe this interview.

Biology and Art: Two Worlds or One?

In an earlier post, I briefly described a New York Academy of Sciences conference exploring the interaction between biology and art. We have just launched an Academy eBriefing covering the event. In addition to a very nice written synopsis of the conference and the issues it raised by my colleague Alexis Clements, be sure to check out the multimedia page for a recording of an utterly genre-defining lecture by French curator and writer Jens Hauser and a fascinating video documentary showing artist Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest projects. There is also a brief but insightful interview with artist Laura Splan about the rationale behind using the tools of biotechnology as artistic media, and lots of links to related web sites, books, and artists.

Dub Housing: Joel Sanders's Architecture of Surveillance

Architect Joel Sanders presented his Mix House project at Postopolis (video if you scroll down here), having been invited following this enticing post from Bldg Blog a few weeks ago (Click here first for pictures and additional information.) The Mix House is not just another modernist contortion, but a dwelling as three-channel audio device. Outfitted with architectural features and parabolic microphones oriented to capture sounds from the street, the backyard, and the sky, it gives the homeowner the ability both to listen in on the soundscape surrounding him, and to mix and record the three inputs into a musical composition from a command station in the kitchen. It's a contemporary twist on what Brian Eno in the 1970s described as his "efforts to produce original pieces ... for particular situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres."€ Here the compositions are not composed for specific spaces, however, but by specific places at particular times. These recordings might then be broadcast as audio perfume throughout the neighborhood, or saved and replayed to color the house's interior like a shade of paint, or furnish it like a 21st-century remix of Erik Satie's Musique d'ameublement.

Sanders explained that the Mix House is the first project he has developed to deal explicitly with the sonic possibilities of architecture. It's an inspiring thought experiment, since it provides a fresh reconfiguring of the ordinarily visual and tactile preoccupations that determine so much of what we experience in our built environments. As Sanders pointed out, citing historical work by Emily Thompson, except for concert hall architecture "we're typically indifferent to acoustics, unless something is wrong."€ The goal of sound design is often to craft space in ways that prevent us from even noticing its sonic character. Though often outfitted with a/v systems these days, it is still unusual that a piece of architecture could be constructed specifically to emphasize and utilize these characteristics. As Bldg Blog points out, the Mix House is a live-in musical instrument, offering its inhabitants an array of opportunities to create art from the ambient environment, and to customize the sound of their own space.

Such an innovative, interactive design is fascinating, but several conceptually unsettling leitmotifs also emerged over the course of Sanders's presentation. Tellingly, the architect placed his project in the context of both the early warning listening systems that England began constructing prior to World War II, and modernism's iconic floor-to-ceiling glass window, which offered the owner the unimpeded ability to monitor and blend into the landscape surrounding him. In this sense the Mix House is also a tool of surveillance, a topic Sanders has also explored in projects like his House for a Bachelor. Here, he sank the front lawn below ground level to give the owner the ability to remain unseen in the dwelling's core while simultaneously experiencing the environment around him. He can walk into the external environment, yet he is simultaneously protected and detached from it. The Mix House incorporates a similar visual sense of what Sanders characterized as "vulnerability,"€ but gives it a sonic turn.

Sound theorist Douglas Kahn is among those who have found a critical importance in the difference between vision and sound. In Noise, Water, Meat, his study of sound in the arts, he observes,

Although light traverses the space between an object and observer just as readily as sound does between an action and listener, the reflection of light is understood not as an action comparable to one that might create a sound but, because of a constancy of action, as the result of a state ... Terrestrially, sound is not only experienced as occurring in between but as surrounding the listener, and the source of the sound is itself surrounded by its own sound. This mutual envelopment of aurality predisposes an exchange among presences...

Moreover, sounds can be heard coming from outside and behind the range of peripheral vision, and a sound of adequate intensity can be felt on and within the body as a whole, thereby dislocating the frontal and conceptual associations of vision with an all-around corporeality and spatiality.

For Kahn, whereas vision is an act of one body perceiving another discrete body in a subjective relationship, hearing is an act of mingling between bodies. Italian Futurist painters like Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla sensed this possibility in paintings like The Street Enters the House and Speeding Automobile representing the turbulence of modern life as an amorphous interweaving and interpenetration of lines of force. Musician and critic David Toop also heard this in his landmark book Ocean of Sound when he described ambient music as an art of "openness,"€ in which the composer recognizes the importance of the sonic dimensions of life and the connections that tie its various elements together. The ambient attitude is not only an aesthetic choice but a political act. Whereas the eye has been conceived in modernity as a tool of subjective perception and interpretation of a world that is "out there,"€ the ear is omnidirectional, permeable, and impressionable, surrendering to the influence of the wider world, while seeking to incorporate it into one's own being. If the eye is an organ of division, the ear is one of community. "There are ear plugs,"€ Toop writes, "but then I just hear the sound of my own shell."

The Mix House's openness, as a machine for listening, is a profoundly wary one, however. One might argue (and Sanders indicated that others have suggested when reviewing his project) that the house could very well achieve the same goal merely by opening conventional windows. However, by adding extra steps of mediation in the form of overengineered prosthetic ears, the architect is exploring a queasy tension between private and public spaces. The Mix House incorporates sounds of the neighborhood within itself, but only if the windows can be shut tight and the sounds can be personalized through manipulation. The inhabitant wants a connection to public space, but interacts with it at arm's length, and only insofar as he can get what he needs from it as wallpaper for his cocoon.

Seen in this light, Sanders's constructions might be providing apt metaphors for certain facets of the way we live now. At the same time that the Mix House offers new artistic opportunities, it achieves them at the expense of the owner's participation in a public space. It is a suitable solution for an age when social interactions and politics are no longer practiced in the streets but on the Web, when friendships happen via corporate-backed networking sites, or when sprawling, gated suburban communities are planned in ways that minimize interaction between families. This is suburban architecture for the age of terror, the age of illegal wiretaps, the age of Megan's Law, when any neighbor could be a threat, or where everyone has something to hide.

Review: Leaderless

By dint of some pre-holiday goodwill on the part of my employer I managed to catch a fantastic show at Printed Matter on Friday afternoon.  Arranged at the back of their new space on 10th Ave. (conveniently located across the street from the meticulously curated 192 Books), Leaderless: Underground Cassette Culture Now focused on some recent iterations of a community of musicians who for decades has released their music on home-recorded cassette tapes. Before MySpace, and even before indie rockers discovered the virtues of the four-track in the lo-fi '90s, a largely unnoticed, loose affiliation of artists created music in their bedrooms and traded tapes in networks that continue to exist outside the typical systems of music distribution. Years ago, Autonomedia published a landmark project called Cassette Mythos documenting the early years of this movement. The show at Printed Matter concentrated on recent artists and labels working in the thriving noise, psychedelic, and experimental music scenes, such as those showcased in the now annual NoFun Fest. Labels represented included Hanson Records, American Tapes, Drone Disco, Fag Tapes, Tone Filth, Heavy Tapes, RRRecords, and Animal Disguise, among others.

We're currently in an age when anyone can have a band and, at least according to the New York Times, can attract an audience and become famous through the Internet. Initially, cassette culture arose out of necessity because it was the easiest and cheapest way to create and distribute idiosyncratic music to a small audience of like-minded enthusiasts. Today, digital recording tools have made it easier than ever to make music, and the Internet now enables anyone with a decent connection to upload music and reach the masses. Web sites like AudioStreet and CD Baby have massified the phenomenon that the earliest cassette traders pioneered, taking advantage of the democratizing possibilities of electronic media and circumventing the traditional model for music distribution.. for better or worse. Whereas a couple of decades ago, there was a virtue in obscurity, the post-Nirvana age gave birth to a suffocating exhibitionism in "alternative" music. If it is possible for anyone to be a star, many are answering the call and trying to become one, which does not necessarily make for an innovative environment. In such a context, what does a willfully obscure cassette culture tell us, and why does it still need to exist?

Visiting Leaderless, I was struck by the sense that these artists use the cassette not only as a recording medium, but perhaps more importantly as an aesthetic artifact. From austere and even elegant packages by Prurient to cheaply photocopied cards containing cassettes covered with melted goop, the tapes included in Leaderless have an often slapdash but refreshing physicality that is disappearing in music in the digital age. In many of the pieces on display, the packaging becomes an integral part of the artistic statement, echoing the alienating sound coated onto the ribbon inside. The cassettes are often seductive in their crypticness, and off-putting in their sheer juvenile delinquency, sometimes simultaneously. (Skull Erection, anyone?) Many contain only a few minutes worth of tape. There is little information about the artists, making each cassette a practically anonymous missive. Most are priced cheaply, and available only through mailorder. The average listener would be very reluctant to call the sound on many of them music.

For the cassette audience, enjoyment of these tapes is not only enjoyment of the sound that comes through one's speakers, but also the awareness that one is privy to something willfully marginal. Difficult to find, the underground cassette is a talisman of one's belonging to an arcane sect, even as "noise" has morphed into a genre with its own stars. (Check out Wolf Eyes, who have recorded for American Tapes, for example.) For the artists represented in Leaderless who have gained some notoriety through more conventional releases, the fact that they continue to operate in this parallel universe suggests that the tactile immediacy of this obsolete medium offers other unique opportunities.

When Ideas Outstrip Reality

A recent play by Carl Djerassi, the inventor of the oral contraceptive, receives its U.S. debut next week at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village. Phallacy tells the story of an art historian who has bet her career on the authenticity of a statue believed to be crafted during the classical era, and explores her reactions when a chemist proves that it is a 16th-century copy.

In addition to being a tale of academic infighting and the prejudices of C.P. Snow's two cultures, Phallacy raises some interesting questions about the value we attach to artistic objects. How much does an artwork depend on its history and social context for its aesthetic value? And what does it mean when that context is the result of the narratives we've composed for ourselves, hobbled as they are with limitations in knowledge, unprovable approximations of truth, and the influences of our hopes and ambitions?

At times the play suggests that the humanities are particularly at fault for playing fast and loose with reality (cf. Alan Sokal), while the rigors of the scientific method give it a better claim to authority. But science is driven by its own hypotheses, and it, too, can be led astray. How, for example, might Djerassi's play shed light on recent scientific scandals like the case of Hwang Woo-Suk and his fabrication of claims to have created human embryonic stem cells by cloning? Or much-publicized hopes that string theory's efforts to reveal an elegant universe will turn out to be an accurate representation of reality, despite the lack of a single experimental test of its claims? Could these be cases in which aesthetics trumps objectivity, blinding researchers to a messier and more complicated truth? Hope is a powerful force, the play argues, and separating the world as it is from the world we desire can be can be a difficult task.

I've been drafted to moderate a panel discussion titled Falling in Love with Hypotheses following the matinee performance on Wednesday May 16, and I'm sure such matters will be among those on the table. The playwright will also be participating, along with Brian Schwartz, codirector of the CUNY Graduate Center's Science and the Arts program, and Roger Payne, an expert on whales and founder of the the Ocean Alliance. So come on down.

Update (5/18): Science Friday has posted a video clip of the play and footage of Carl Djerassi during the panel discussion.

Making an Art of Life

This weekend the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a conference exploring the interface of biology and the visual arts. It was something of a scattershot program, and not completely satisfying. There were some provocative moments, though, and it was interesting to watch a divide emerge between conceptual and figurative methods for visually engaging with the living world, and to catch a glimpse of how this interface might be changing.

In his keynote address, Paris-based curator Jens Hauser established an important distinction that cast a shadow over the rest of the proceedings. Citing works by Wim Delvoye, Eduardo Kac, and other artists who use methods based in biotechnology, Hauser argued for a critical bar to which art interacting with the biological sciences should rise, and that something important is changing. Whereas work a decade ago would abstract images, content, and information from biological objects as source material for largely representative projects, he argued in favor of more recent works that employ biological processes in ways that blur the lines between biology and art. In Hauser's judgment, Kac's genetically engineered rabbit and mice are key examples of this trend.

I didn’t have the sense that any of the artists speaking on Saturday was entirely successful in taking up Hauser’s gauntlet, although there were several high points in the program. Check out Laura Splan’s Blood Scarf, for example, weaved of medical tubing and hooked up to an intravenous feed that fills it with the wearer’s own blood. Many of her pieces explore our queasy relationship with medicine and our bodies. There was also a very entertaining session juxtaposing Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest project and work by Andrew Biewener, a Harvard biologist who studies the mechanics of animal locomotion. For many years, Jansen has been evolving a race of incredible, larger-than-life animals constructed of plastic electrical tubing and able to harness the wind to walk across the Dutch shoreline. See some wonderful video of his creatures at his website, or drive up to Mass MOCA to see his piece in their current show, The Believers.

Michael Joaquin-Grey also presented works that mixed scientific metaphors, although many in the audience seemed more interested in Zoob, a toy system he helped to design. Zoob is a sort of Lego set for the DNA age, and it appears to allow an impressive range of experimentation. For Grey, this tactile experience of play is an important counter-activity to much of children’s play today, which is increasingly conducted on the screen. (On a related topic, see also this interesting article about the vanishing experience of childhood play in open space.)

Running in counterargument to Hauser’s thesis were a number of presentations focusing on the importance of visual representation as a tool for thinking about the tiny scales at which biology happens. For working scientists, images can become essential tools for  organizing data and for thinking about physical entities much too small and complicated to observe with any degree of precision. Columbia University's Wayne Hendrickson explained the importance of computer modeling in his efforts to understand protein structure and interactions, while Jonathan King of MIT discussed the importance of good diagrams to good pedagogy.

Wearing my editorial hat in the coming weeks I’ll be working on producing an eBriefing on the conference. I’ll post a message here when it goes live. For the time being, check out the last arts-related eBriefing we did. You can listen to presentations by V.S. Ramachandran on synasthesia, Margaret Livingstone on what art can tell us about the brain, and Barbara Tversky on good visual communication.

Weekend in L.A.

I’ve never felt much of a draw to Los Angeles, but here are some reasons to make the trip, or at least to experience it vicariously over the Web:

There is a show of new works by Tim Hawkinson on display through September 9 at the Getty Center. If you were lucky enough to see his mid-career retrospective at the Whitney in 2005, you might also have been inspired to make the trip to 590 Madison Avenue to view the Überorgan, a colossal barrel organ/intestine built from plastic detritus and dime-store electronics. The piece will be shown in the Getty’s main atrium, along with an exhibit of zoological forms “using common household and industrial items and reconfigured images of his own body.” You might consider checking out some clips in this PBS video feature, or ponder the similarities between his piece Signature, which signs the artist's name over and over on small slips of paper, and the famous 18th-century automaton The Writer, designed by Swiss inventor Pierre Jacquet-Droz, which writes Descartes' totemic statement "Cogito ergo sum."

I also stumbled across an unusual enterprise co-directed by Margaret Wertheim, perhaps better known as a science writer whose work appears regularly in major publications. The Institute for Figuring is (for the time being) a primarily Web-based museum exploring the interface between art and mathematics. Visit the site to view several online exhibitions, including a feature on Jeanne Mosely and her Business Card Menger Sponge, which also appeared in the most recent issue of the excellent Cabinet magazine.

My interest has also been piqued in the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. It’s exciting to see that closer to home the CLUI has an outpost in Troy, New York, and will be reopening an exhibit on points of interest along the Hudson River. Their website also features lots of online content focusing on unusual land uses across the country. Fans of letterpress printing might also be interested in checking out the International Printing Museum.