Direct Objective

Sounds Unspoken

2009-12-04T15:03:00.005Z

two mini-albums now available to download here
more about Speakers
more about Unspoken Word

People Watching/Harun Farocki revisited

2009-11-16T00:16:00.010Z

People Watching
QuickTime Movie, 7.1Mb 4' 17", 2007

Saturday at Tate Modern, Harun Farocki (prompted by an observation of Sophia Phoca's about how much his work examines processes in the construction of meaning in images through giving as much as possible for the viewer to work with and how, it was implied, this differed markedly from the deliberate obfuscation/alienation techniques of a structural/materialist (her characterisation) approach to deconstruction of representation that has become the default background to British experimental film practice) stated that, while he couldn't be held accountable for what different individuals from different backgrounds might or might not be able to appreciate in any given media work, he considered that he makes work that anyone viewing, whether by intention or accident, would be able to follow and understand. I was reminded that at Documenta in 2007, I captured and posted video of visitors to Farocki's installation Deep Play, which bears witness to the work's wide appeal. Drawn to the broadcast television multiple live and computer generated views of the 2006 World Cup final, the viewers become entranced by the integrity of Farocki's forensic approach to the media spectacle. The video can be viewed again here or by clicking the image above, while views of the installation screens can be seen here.

A season of 22 of Farocki's films is at Tate Modern until 6 December and an exhibition of his installations at Raven Row runs from 19 November to 7 February. From the information available it's not clear whether Deep Play will be one of the works at Raven Row.

Personal Electronics remix

2009-11-10T13:21:00.000Z

Post Office London Street Directory 1909: New Kent Road redacted

2009-10-17T01:24:00.000+01:00

Speaker

2009-09-28T17:29:00.016+01:00

Speaker (M.Mayer) by Steven Ball, 2009, 3:20, stereo

(click image to enlarge)

Speaker by Michael Mayer, 2001, Kompakt Records

Sounds Spoken podcast and playlist

2009-09-26T14:47:00.006+01:00

Ed Pinsent's The Sound Projector Radio Show
25th September 2009
Resonance 104.4FM
Curated and co-presented by Steven Ball
Download mp3

And The Native Hipsters, ‘There Goes Concorde Again’
Heater Volume Records HVR 003 single (1980)
Dajuin Yao, ‘Satisfaction of Oscillation’ (1997)
From An Anthology of Chinese Experimental Music (1992-2008), Sub Rosa SR265 CD (2008)
Neil Mills, ‘Seven Number Poems’
From Experiments in Disintegrating Language/Konkrete Canticle, Arts Council of Great Britain LP (1971)
Caroline Bergvall, ‘Ride’
From Via: Poems 1994-2004, Rockdrill #8 CD (2005)
Caroline Bergvall, ‘Rapid Eye Movement, Part 2′
From Via: Poems 1994-2004, Rockdrill #8 CD (2005)
Simon Wickham-Smith, ‘Three Versions of Appreciative’
From Rapt, DISPOSABLE THUMB RECORDINGS DTR-011 CD (2003)
Jas H Duke, ‘Bloodshot Eyes’
From Poems of Life and Death, NMA Publications, Cassette (1989)
Chris Mann, ‘Maybe if You Hit it Hard 3′
From Maybe if You Hit it Hard, http://theuse.info mp3 (2009)
Chris Mann, ‘Maybe if You Hit it Hard 4′
From Maybe if You Hit it Hard, http://theuse.info mp3 (2009)
Unamunos Quorum, ‘She’s Going With the Boys’
From Strange Visitors, Unamunos Quorum CD (2006)
Arf Arf, ‘Someone Said ‘
From Clanguage, Arf Arf CD (1996)
Arf Arf, ‘Bronson’
From Clanguage, Arf Arf CD (1996)
Bob Cobbing, ‘Computer Poem’ (1968)
From The Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing Early Recordings 1965-1973, British Library NSACD 42 CD (2009)
Konkrete Canticle, ‘Hymn To The Sacred Mushroom’ (1971)
From The Spoken Word: Bob Cobbing Early Recordings 1965-1973, British Library NSACD 42 CD (2009)
Furious Pig, ‘I Don’t Like Your Face’
From I Don’t Like Your Face, Rough Trade RT064 EP (1981)
AGF, ‘Letters Make No Meaning (Weapons No War Germs No Disease)’
From Words Are Missing, AGF PRODUCKTION MDM55082 CD (2008)
Augusto De Campos & Caetano Veloso, ‘Dias Dias Dias’
From Caixa Preta, Edições Invenção single (1975)
Augusto De Campos & Caetano Veloso, ‘Pulsar’
From Caixa Preta, Edições Invenção single (1975)
Peter Roehr, ‘Auf Der Tapete’
From Tonmontagen I+II, suppose koln ISBN 3-932513-35-5 LC 10439 CD (2002)
Gregory Whitehead, ‘Market Share – Mumbo Momo-All About Squid’
From Writing Aloud, Errant Bodies Press/Ground Fault Recordings ISBN 0-9655570-3-0 book/CD (2001)

Sounds Spoken

2009-09-23T00:07:00.009+01:00

Presenting a collection of recordings of experimental spoken word in poetry, permutation and performance. Also contains language.

Sounds Spoken
Steven Ball and Ed Pinsent
The Sound Projector Radio Show
Friday 25 September, 5:30 - 7:00pm
Resonance 104.4 FM
Live from London on radio and webstream.

Sub Zero Degrees

2009-09-15T09:48:00.006+01:00

Musing about the sometimes held misunderstanding between 'structuralism' in British experimental film and the same name given to post-existentialist French philosophy, I was excited to see that Sam Renseiw had appropriated Say Zero, positing an intriguing suggestion of what French Structuralism applied to a moving image work can produce. Refining his text, I attend to the grain of the voice, on the distinction between jouissance and identification in illusion.

Herstory

2009-09-14T00:36:00.000+01:00

Goddess Loop

2009-09-13T00:02:00.001+01:00

In My House

2009-09-12T01:03:00.001+01:00

Je--s

2009-09-11T00:02:00.001+01:00

Free Speech

2009-09-09T23:40:00.008+01:00

The sound pieces that I am posting this week were made in response to a project initiated by no.w.here as part of The Free Cinema School. Based at The Centre for Possible Studies on Edgware Road, London for a good part of August and September, no.w.here has been making a film from moving image and sound material created for the project by anyone interested in participating. I became interested in Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, a short distance from Edgware Road, as a site for gathering material for spoken word sound works. I spent a fascinating afternoon recording some of the speakers and have been experimenting with ways of developing, re-performing and reworking both the sound and the spoken text. The sound pieces being posted here represent the first results of this work, I have donated them and their source recordings to no.w.here for working into the film however seems appropriate. I’m looking forward to seeing the results and how the sound is contextualized when the film is screened this coming Friday 11 September at the Park Nights screening in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion.

Name One Goddess

2009-09-09T22:33:00.001+01:00

I'm Gonna Sing...

2009-09-08T23:56:00.001+01:00

This Global Warning

2009-09-08T00:03:00.003+01:00

Unspoken Word

2009-08-13T22:33:00.012+01:00

I’m currently starting to develop a couple of small projects and to each of them, in one way or another, spoken word is central. That is to say, each will, in one way or another, be a setting of recordings of spoken words. Whether the setting consists of being placed in a context, involving simple editing or more complex manipulation, will depend in degree on the parameters of the project, much of which has yet to be decided let alone realised. Some of the outcomes will be posted here.

I have been thinking about ways in which the spoken word has been used in sound poetry and sound art as well as in pop, experimental and electronic music. I have also been trawling through some old work and remembering how I have experimented with the sound of speech in the past. I thought it might be interesting to compile four pieces I made around ten years ago into a little downloadable collection, a ‘mini-album’, if you like. They are all rather rudimentary and rough experiments with digital sound editing and collage, and it’s interesting, while perhaps not unsurprising how throughout they play within the time-honoured avant concrete conventions of the aesthetics of repetition and the logic of fragmentation. I’m not so sure that’s how the new work will proceed, but we shall see. Or rather, we shall hear.

Click the cover image above to download a zipped file (59.6Mb) of the 'mini-album' (320kpbs mp3 files) or play below.

Track info:
1. Say Zero (5:14, 2000)

This track came out of experiments with a CD containing demos of recordings of actors’ produced by a voice-over agency. The actors’ performances conformed to the conventions for advertisements, information films, radio announcements and so on. They were by turn upbeat, sing-songy, serious, conversational, exactly what you might expect. As this was Australia, they also had that informal casual Australian chumminess. I broke the voices down to phonemes, cut, pasted and created insistent, breathy, stammers of rhythm; some sounded disturbed, quietly obsessed or climactic. This is an extended version of the one minute piece made for Colin Fallows’s Audio Research Editions CD Zero. More about that here.

2. I Was Bugging (4:10, 1998)

Going around the internet at this time was an audio file that purported to be an answering machine message relating a first person account of an episode of casual sex with a stranger, in some detail. At that time such revelations were more rare than they have now become, at a time before people felt it necessary to regale the world with their most intimate thoughts on the web. What was most interesting about the recording though, was not so much the sordid details but the excited relish of the person divulging the event, apparently breathless with gossip about themselves! A slightly slowed down (to obfuscate the gender) and channel separated version of the recording starts the piece, followed by a squelchy spanking rhythmic track made entirely from samples of the recording.

3. The Shape That Has Held Me (5:21, 2000)

Australian visual poet and super 8 filmmaker pete spence sent me a copy of a poem, which surprised me for being a sort of gently surreal existential piece. Surprising because pete’s work is usually characterised by elegant cut-up image-text visual poetry. But this is no straight forward nihilism of being that spence has penned, there is great humour in word play in lines such as "I am a notion I search always to find, like a small lantern of fur sleeping at the foot of my bed, which I carefully avoid waking when I enter the immense collapse of my room". In retrospect my reading of it is rather earnest. Like Say Zero it is mostly rhythmic fractured fragments of the sound of my voice, which has a certain squelchy vivacity, occasionally it breaks into legibility.

4. At Five in the Afternoon - with Lee Smith (13:29, 1999)

This was a collaboration with Lee Smith and it is his very distinctive voice that introduces and sets the tone for this setting of a poem by Federico García Lorca. It was made for a film by Lee that took the poem’s title and we experimented with a number of editing techniques to produce a musical cadence from his reading, and used recording techniques such as shouting from the other side of the room. There are long sections of the sound of traffic, recorded outside the front door of my house (Victoria Street in Footscray could get busy), and the voices from Say Zero make another appearance. I had started to work with Lee on a few sound/music pieces. As well as making wonderful experimental super 8 and 16mm films, Lee was also a guitarist and had a passion for all kinds of music. We were at one point working on a bizarre version of Donovan’s song Season of the Witch, which is alas destined to remain unfinished as I left Australia in 2000 and Lee sadly died this time last year. This is for him.

Watergate Street, London SE8, 13 July 2009

2009-07-14T09:55:00.001+01:00

Mare Street, London E8, 29 June 2009

2009-06-30T08:54:00.003+01:00

The Fly Art of Fine Tipping

2009-06-22T09:12:00.013+01:00

Brut Smog's exhibition survey of British flytipping ended yesterday. If you're wandering the streets of Hastings today you might find yourself a nice hardly worn pair of boots, or perhaps a clothes airer, or maybe some old, but still perfectly functioning TVs, or if you're really lucky a whole new installation, just as these two likely lads found this rather fine sofa installed at a bus stop not far from the gallery.

Cities Methodologies - Aroundabout: Second Person Present

2009-05-23T23:07:00.008+01:00

CitiesMethodologies is an interdisciplinary event on innovative methodologies across the arts and humanities, exploring the city and its multi-faceted realities, showcasing concrete examples that push the boundaries of urban research with exhibits, installations, films and workshops for exchanging ideas.

For CitiesMethodologies I will be presenting Aroundabout: Second Person Present. Aroundabout is an occasional placeblog of hyperlocal ambulations around public spaces along the south-eastern section of the inner-London ring road, using a combination of text, image and video to reflect upon specificities of each location. Aroundabout: Second Person Present will consist of installation and expanded performance presentations based on Aroundabout, by way of an elaboration of the blog, reiterating extant material while adding a performative layer to create an enhanced interpretive context for questions around how subjectivity in place is articulated through a convergence of multiple media.

Private view 18.00-20.00 Wednesday 27 May
Download the private view invitation

After Lethaby performance documentation

2009-05-22T07:41:00.004+01:00

After Lethaby video performance by Martin Blažíček and Steven Ball, Lethaby Gallery, Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London, 20 May 2009.

After Lethaby

2009-05-13T17:28:00.007+01:00

audio-visual performance
Steven Ball and Martin Blažíček
6pm, Wednesday 20 May
Lethaby Gallery
Central St Martins College of Art and Design
Southampton Row
London WC1B 4AP
Free

Beginning on Saturday, Martin and I will capture images and audio around and about Central St Martins’s Lethaby building, interrogating spatial, historical and other phenomena of the space and its use. This will be developed into a one-off live audio-visual performance conceived specifically for the building's gallery. The development of the work will be documented over the days preceding the performance at http://blazicek.net/lethaby.

The performance is part of the expanded cinema seminar series organized by Duncan White for British Artists’ Film and Video Study Collection and follows the Expanded Cartography and the New Live Cinema symposium which runs from 10am – 5pm in G12 Conference Room. For more information see the Study Collection website.

Image from the Museum and Contemporary Collection at Central Saint Martins

Over Magnetic Island

2009-05-10T00:04:00.003+01:00

Over The Borough Island

2009-05-06T08:39:00.001+01:00