[BL006]
by MUWN, K. R. Seward & Mean Flow

Experimental / Avantgarde

So many springboards, so little time.

Unable to speak with any knowing or good sense about my colleagues or their work here, I’ll just try to go general and specific at the same time.

Have had the good fortune to run across a few visual artist folk, but maybe more like one or two could A) get lost and found in their looking at anything and 😎 share this rather personal experience with another. The one or two would look and look and look patiently. Were one to see what they drank in, albeit retinally (Duchamp somewhere laughing, we’ll say), well, that would be quite a photonic swim.

Though also, visual artists have their own tastes and lives and educations in and out of art history. So. Nothing comes unmediated.

One of my self-descriptors would be “hyperintuitive”. Not so sensually attuned as artists looking close and long, nor cooks cooking the right ingredients just such a way. That close work might well decribe others, including my colleagues here. Me? Not so much.

Tuned somewhat perhaps to possibilites, to avenues of noise. Playing in those broad streets, maybe in traffic. More along those lines, thus the expression “hyperintuitive”. Yeah, more what I do and how.

So while some sense things slowly and keenly, I just make things in ways I hope to draw others into sensing slowly and keenly.

Not sure how that plays, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

For now, at least.

One boulevard of noise, that is mentioned by composer Nicolas Collins in his how-to book, website etc. and done by the likes of Reed Ghazala, is the “laying on of hands”. This is when circuit benders mess with battery-powered sound making gizmos & toys, maybe explore future bends, by putting one’s hands on a circuit. The most straightforward thing that might happen is one’s skin surface becomes another path for the flow of electrons, one with the resistance of skin conductivity, etc. Thus later in bend designs, Ghazala, Collins and others beside might run wires out from points of interest to touch points outside for the hands to touch. The player’s fingers thus become something like variable resistors. (Being well in to the “hyperintuitive” zone of such construction, two wires leading out of the gizmo for easy grabbing, is way more likely. But that slack construction and the more concerted one both come along with the notion of the “laying on of hands,)

Another thing, not so much done here, is close to that. Body capacitance. It’s not just for theremins anymore.

Proximity of limbs and such can change a circuit. Not being an electronic engineer nor a technician, can only say it happens. Simplest example is listening to a radio in a room. And as you or others in the room move around, the reception might drop out. So some circuits respond to where we are. Change values within that create different pitchs, variations in volume.

Since you may have read enough for now. Or know more about all this, perhaps forgetting more than I ever knew. Will just leave you with one fun word, a very broad avenue: inductance. That’s enough.

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