Watch my short ‘videoscribe’ about a workshop with 4 piano players, a guitar, a bass and a saxophone player.
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Tag / artist as facilitator
Bikestruments, the silver return
Political pimp-your bike-workshop, hacked for street politics
A local workshop hosted by a red-green political party with the agenda of promoting the bike as a preferred choice for transportation. The name of the workshop was “Pimp your bike”.
Fonografiti activists ‘hacked’ the event (to which you might question the environmentally friendliness of using spray paint for ‘pimping’ bikes, btw), and ‘pimped’ some bikestruments, spray painting them silver.
After being silverly pimped, the bikestruments were hanged on the same spot where the other – un-pimped – bikestruments had been violently abducted.
Now the question is: Does the ‘pimping’ of the bikestruments, possibly sending the message “we are street”, inspire passers-by to NOT remove them?
Now THIS is a pimped bike!! (Photo by Simon Cordes)
Ceci n’est pas une pub. This is not a commercial.
This qr code links to a recording of a street improvisation by ordinary passers by, facilitated by Akutsk, using the Anthropomorfer. Sound graffiti you may call it, I use the name fonografiti. When using a qr code, we embark on the colonisation of the still rather virginal web based virtual track of the street.
Although the medium is sonorous, the access to the location specific electro acoustic collective improvisation necessarily passes through the visual. The qr code must catch your attention before it can work as a key to the virtual audio track of the place.
QR codes are in many cases used in commercial contexts, and the first thing we need to do is to decolonise this technology from the logic of the market. I’ve met a good deal of people not aware that you can easily make these codes yourself. Using qr codes is probably the easiest way for anyone to interact (virtually) in the street through sound, – and any other media btw.
In order to make sure that people understand that this specific qr code is not a commercial – ceci n’est pas une pub – we must add something, visually, to the code itself. Streetsoundartist Medlyd uses CD boxes on which he paints the QR code. Using a technique that cannot be subject to mass production, Medlyd succeeds in communicating the non-commerciality of the code. And a CD box connotes music. It’s a CD release!
In this photo you see a stencil of a hooded crow on top of a paste up of a QR code measuring 15×15 cm. The obvious handy craft side to the work makes it obvious that this is not commercial, it is ‘street’.
Now scan the code! We won’t sell you anything. We want to share a unique piece of sound art improvised on this specific location using only sounds from this place.
Ceci n’est pas une pub.
Related articles
- QR Codes Gone Wild (greatfinds.icrossing.com)
- Sound art as a street art, who does it? (akutsk.wordpress.com)
Bikestruments, bridgestruments, anti padlock guerilla
Bike bells on bridge (anti padlock guerilla)
From bi- to tri-
Bike bone hanging in bike nerve being attached by bike magnet
Preparing bikestruments in the State Workshops for Art
Related articles
- Spelling out the invisible social wall (akutsk.wordpress.com)
- Help I’m a bike, curate me !
- Giantophone (akutsk.wordpress.com)
- Lefebvre’s Spatial Vision of Revolution (pathtothepossible.wordpress.com)
- Brandalism, An Anti-Billboard Guerilla Art Campaign in the UK (laughingsquid.com)
Help I’m a bike. Curate me !
So it’s official. I’ve often wondered what I should call what I’m doing. Well. It’s art.
I’ve found out that my participation in a sound art project at the Knippels Bridge (a bridge connecting main Copenhagen with the island of Amager), is in fact part of Copenhagen art festival 2012.
Being a part of a part of something to do with art, I’ve been given the possibility to use the “national workshops for art”. So now I’m chopping up old bikes in the official national workshops for art, and therefore I’m making ….. art!
Art art art art art.
In the outset I was planning on doing what whomever could do, namely take parts of old bikes and set them up in the street, and in this particular case a bridge.
It was supposed to be a sort of ignition fuelling a trend where people start putting up things in public space that can serve as “streetstruments”, inspiring to engage in collective activities around sound.
The need to hang things in public space is strong, judging from the padlocks that people put everywhere, inadvertently enhancing the omnipresent focus in public space on reproduction. Well instead of (biological and other) reproduction, streetstruments should inspire people to engage in productive action beyond the twosomeness of the nuclear family and co.
And now I do art. Which is the same as saying I’m a name and a nationality. As in “John Cage (USA)”. Although I have been invited to participate in the festival, I’m not in the programme, for some reason, – as opposed to John Cage. Looking forward to meet him.
I haven’t even been curated. The so-called curator, curating the sound art events at the Knippels Bridge hasn’t contacted me. So I have not had the chance to adhere to some sort of ‘overall concept’, which is generally the way these things work.
So I’m only halfway participating in the festival. Which makes me a halfway artist. And what I’m doing is consequently halfway art.
Which in the end might save my project.
Since it is not really art after all, then it is not really mostly an individualistic project promoting its creator, who is in the programme with a name and nationality (dead or alive), and who has been curated according to the overall so-called concept of the festival, which in the case of Copenhagen Art Festival 2012 is “Art in community”, a concept which is put into play through a large number of individual artists’ individual artworks in (mostly) solo exhibitions.
Since I’m not really an artist after all, I’m not really an expert producer of works of art, that the consumers-recipients-of-works-of-art will consume, after appropriately being guided by an expert knower-of-art or curator. Therefore there is a smaller risk that what I’m doing could not be done by anyone, and that it will actually be done by someone, that there will be people using the street as an instrument, without being curated, without having their name and nationality in a programme.
Related articles
- Building streetstruments: paint-bucket-bass, drain-trombone and sewer-chimes (akutsk.wordpress.com)
- Giantophone (akutsk.wordpress.com)
Building streetstruments: paint-bucket-bass, drain-trombone and sewer-chimes
First workshop: constructing streetstruments
The street dressed for the streetstrument workshop
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Materials from the construction site are lined up according to their characteristics
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The participants are constructing streetstruments
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Sewer chimes
Second workshop: Collective improvisations on electrified streetstruments
Improvising using the paint bucket bass
After the workshops: The streetstruments are left in their street, inspiring passers by to make their own street improvisations
Paint bucket bass and drain-trombone entrusted the passers by
Related posts:
Construction site interacts musically with neighbors
Construction site interacts musically with neighbors
Tubes from the underground. Now getting a sonorous afterlife in a streetstrument/ giving-back-the-noise workshop
Concept: During a street art decoration of the wall around the local metro construction site, akutsk is making a ‘streetstrument’ workshop.
The workshop is going to be in two parts:
- a streetstrument building workshop. In these weeks, I’m collecting debris from the construction. At the event August 11, these objects will be the material for instruments.
- a Anthropomorfer workshop, where the participants form the sounds and improvise collectively via laptop and smartphones
Everything is on location, anyone can join, and afterwards we paste up QR-codes linking to recordings of the impros.
Here is the Facebook event.
Related articles
- Giantophone (akutsk.wordpress.com)
- Collective street improvisations, – how do we get people involved? (akutsk.wordpress.com)
