mudd up!

If you’ve visited the Studio Museum in Harlem in the past month or two, chances are you heard my installation wafting down from the front two rooms. It was a soft launch of the piece, Radio GooGoo, which officially opens on July 15th. By the end of its Studio Museum run, Radio GooGoo will have created hundreds of hours of “original” “music”, plus the museum will offer free CDs with an hour of Radio GooGoo. I’ll have more info as well as audio excerpts soon… In the meantime, here’s an official blurb:

StudioSound: DJ /rupture’s Radio GooGoo
DJ/Rupture’s Radio GooGoo is a radical audio installation that challenges widely accepted notions of authorship as well as the deep associations attached to musical genres. Radio GooGoo features computer based algorithms that assemble media sounds from a range of radio stations in real-time. Combining and synthesizing these sounds, Radio GooGoo continually broadcasts in the Museum lobby.

I like that they call it ‘radical’ — I would add, importantly, that Radio GooGoo lies at the fertile intersection between ‘radical’ and ‘lazy’; as an Artist, I consider myself an active participant in a venerable lineage of Negro Laziness. I’d write more, but it takes so much work…

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And my actual radio show was broadcast last night. You can listen back here.

A quick note to say I’m working on Some Stuff for a 3-city interactive art/design festival in France curated by Mark Jenkins, whose artwork this is. Details “soon”. It happens July 2-10 in Bordeaux, Royan, and Pointe du Médoc. Vive La France!

This Sunday, July 19, 2009, at precisely 4:30pm, I will play a set at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago’s Union Park. I would tell you to come, but Sunday tickets have been sold out for a month.

So my advice is more specific: gather at ‘Balance Stage’, up close and on time! Especially because it’ll be a short “45 minute set – STRICT set length”. (in Band time, 45 minutes is often enough; in DJ time it passes so quickly.) Which means we will have go in deep, together, from the very beginning, at once and completely.

At first I was a bit worried about being the only DJ at a big 3-day festival. I was gonna invite an MC, or a video artist for projections, or a cellist… Then I decided no. I’m just gonna DJ, as I always do, and if I’m not as exciting to watch as, say, every other act at the festival, then that’s that — you should be dancing anyhow. Life in DJlandia evolves via participation (bouncing around, dutty wine, grinding, etc) not spectatorship, in part because the crowd’s energy & responsiveness to certain tunes or moods actually changes what will get played. A feedback loop. A symbiotic relationship.

Put another way: let’s dance!

OR, it’s better to think of DJs a mediums (rather than performers or Artists or whatever). Grabbing the dictionary…

Medium – (1) a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect (2) a channel or system of communication, information, or entertainment — compare mass medium (3) an individual held to be a channel of communication between the earthly world and a world of spirits (5) a condition or environment in which something may function or flourish.

but mostly, these days, it’s about cumbia. and our homegrown beats. and Kassav’! (Also – where are the cumbia / Mexican music shops in Chicago?)

A week from today I’ll be back home in BROOKLYN, playing the latest installment of New York Tropical. Think hummingbirds.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s Post Production book (the follow-up to Relational Aesthetics), is online as PDF. Excerpt from intro:

These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they manipulate is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.

It’s fascinating to hear an art guy thinking through DJ culture, although, like so many of these texts, Duchamp presides over it all as if the blurry emergent (post-postmodern?) cultural mush of recent years needs a stately father figure. It doesn’t. We don’t.

Elsewhere, Claire Bishop offers a rich critique of Bourriaud: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (PDF). On a basic level, her PDF is better because it contains pictures. And a nuanced support of Mexico-based Spanish artist Santiago Sierra, whose works make me think:

[Santiago Sierra - Line Tattooed on Six Paid People]

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in NYC post-Postopolis news:

Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG is speaking this evening at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, 6pm, free. Which dovetails nicely with the opening reception of a new exhibit at Storefront for Art & Architecture @ 7:30pm.

Geoff talks fast – noticeably faster than most West Coasters – because he’s got volumes of impressive information and speculation to convey. He says:

The title of the lecture is a bit heavy-handed, but it’s called “Designing the Post-Terrestrial.” Expect everything from Native American mound builders to applied geosynthetics to the architecture of Vicente Guallart, by way of weather control during the Beijing Olympics, muon detectors in the rain forest, and Viking archaeology.

A ridiculous amount of things are happening in Los Angeles this weekend (so many that I’m afraid I won’t be able to return to Mashti Malone’s for more faludeh & rose saffron ice cream).

In addition to ongoing POSTOPOLISMO, tweeted here , there is a wealth of For Your Art’s LA Art Weekend events. Like Lucky Dragons performing at LACE’s Resonant Forms festival!

plus a handful of art openings such as

and this one

[Carolyn Castaño, Pablo and Virginia]

“These new works depict portraits of the amorous adventures of Latin American guerrillas, drug lords, presidential candidates and beauty queens.”

this Saturday New York, you’re invited to the opening of “Twentyfirst”, a group (art) show I’ve got a collaborative piece in.

Other artists include: Fritz Haeg – the greatest gardener of our time (no joke !), The Center For Land Use Interpretation, Haegue Yang, Rocío Rodríguez Salceda, Mariana Mogilevich, and more.

Twentyfirst @ the Silver Shed on 119th W. 25th st ph.

Says the gallery:

“Jace Clayton and Rocío Rodríguez Salceda’s collaborative piece takes on generic file attribution and authorship issues of obliterated audio & visual meta-data, reflecting on the potential of cumulative knowledge and the information ecology of memory, erasure, and the recirculating of digital cultural offerings via global formats of compressed data. Clayton is giving away a limited edition CD containing all of his commercially available audio – each bearing the same title (DJ_Rupture.mp3), as Rodríguez Salceda prints found images (all titled “foto_02.jpg”) on edible strips of rice paper, for public consumption. “

Rheim used to send me things in the mail.

(typewritten little cards i would try not to lose but sometimes keeping things can make them harder to find than giving them away.)

now she blogs

with steady hands