The institutions in question are specifically targeted due to their treatment and relationship with minority and non-upperclass citizens in the United States of America.
≠ Utilizing research as the medium for creation, rather than the basis, No Music Is Swing culls all of its content from music publications prior to 1950: the first five issues of Downbeat magazine, The Academician, and texts on fictional composers.
All of the texts are modified in some way, whether structurally, contextually, or formally, to create the final work.
No Music Is Swing creates an abstracted taste of what rhythm might be able to achieve, yet, in theory, rhythm can never swing, at least as a musical form.
≠ Made completely on 9/3/11 during Hurricane Irene in Brooklyn, NY, _ Quarterly Issue 7: Peace* is comprised of work culled almost exclusively from the internet. From Twitter hashtags to NY1 broadcasts of Mayor Bloomberg to stream-of-consciousness Google searches, Peace* conveys the experience of being locked in a studio with the computer screen as your only means of 'seeing'.
_ Quarterly Issue 7: Peace*
≠ Utilizing the structural removal of architecture from its native three-dimensional environment into a two-dimensional representation, similarly relates to the structural displacement of music and notation. These foundational points of reference were the basis for the artists involved in _ Quarterly 6. The removal of experience through documentation, and the form in which that documentation takes as a result, is a fascinating ground in which to envision the concurrent relationships of physical and aural, flat and dimensional. I provided images of an empty gallery space taken at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts as a reference point for the artists. This series of four, spot color offset printed, newsprint posters was commissioned in collaboration with Showpaper, with the intention that throughout the upcoming exhibition, the printed pieces would be re-united with their original space; and in so doing create a form of 'music', in the sense of a contained set of sounds.
≠ There is, one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea, whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak of some hidden soul beneath; like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod over the buried Evangelist St. John. And meet it is, that over these sea-pastures, wide-rolling watery prairies and Potters' Fields of all four continents, the waves should rise and fall, and ebb and flow unceasingly; for here, millions of mixed shades and shadows, drowned dreams, somnambulisms, reveries; all that we call lives and souls, lie dreaming, dreaming, still; tossing like slumberers in their beds; the ever-rolling waves but made so by their restlessness.
≠ When we get to thinking about everything in terms of survival and profit,
the scratches on the floor cease to have their magic
≠ In the realm of the small: compound vibrations form units of infinite novelty, which emerge to create the fabric of existence. Where novelty occurs, complication of the novel forms follows in a fractal fashion. The complex units then further complicate, forming a network of symbiotic associations.
Until this point in history, our finite languages have had only the capability of mediating thoughts of an individual. But there is another realm of thought that has escaped its measure. Through the means of shared experience and electrical brainwave emissions, conscious beings subconsciously generate a higher form of psychic group-thought called the superconsciousness, the metamind, the nervous system of the superorganism that is humanity. We have not, until now, with electronic communication's capability for rapid, simultaneous group-mediation, been capable of expressing our superconsciousness tangibly.
≠ Almost every human activity or 'accomplishment', whether eating or building a house, is a form of adaptation; while it is especially prevalent amongst things of necessity, adaptation is also found amongst recreation and expression. The approximately 2,000 year old activity of surfing is an archetypal example of humans adapting to their environment, not modifying the environment to suit their needs but instead to conform themselves to its pre-existing structure; the ability to look at the rolling of water over the great vastness of the sea and interpret it into a canvas for personal movement is an exceptionally deep thought process not to be taken as a mere act of recreation. Further on in time, the unrestrained boom of civilization brought with it an expanse of fabricated surfaces, an attempt to cover up the natural surfaces with a controlled substance: concrete. The relation between water and concrete may seem to have little or no similarities at all, yet, when viewed from the eye of a surfer, there is an essential commonality between the two: a surface that, while not intended for the purpose, is perfectly capable of becoming a vessel to express ones self; the paintbrush of this concrete canvas is none other than a skateboard.
The fact that skateboarding has been taken into an arena, into video games, into reality shows, into the world of advertising and appropriated by such menial things as Snakeboards and other such derogatory skateboard modifications (see: skateboardingsucks.com) is really quite a sad state. The feeling one gets when landing a trick is a rush like nothing else, it's a feeling of satisfaction that, because of factors internal and external, you landed something that had a sense of worth. It's redeeming to accomplish something you try to do. The mindset is something that cannot be truly commodified, no matter how hard individuals may attempt to do so; there is an inherent contradiction in the attempt to sell things not able to be sold, you can't package up the feeling, only the tool in which to gain that feeling. What their selling you is not actually skateboarding, it's the attempt at a symbol of skateboarding. Skateboarding has become a fraud, but what hasn't? Everything that at one time seemed to have some sense of honesty and truth has since been exposed, from religion to government to art to skateboarding. Perhaps humans have gone too far in their quest for 'progress' and have instead found themselves in a place where they can no longer adapt. Imagine that, no more adaptation.