The Amazing Bending Professor!

Sound Art
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‘City of Bend: Noise Permits’ (website for Bend, Oregon, USA).  My engagement with circuit bending (as it’s called today) first began when I was 16 years of age. I stumbled upon the technique by accident while attempting to fix a portable radio. And so did many other teenagers of my generation, it would seem. In the next four decades, circuit…
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My Diaries

Image, Image & Word, Life
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‘Painting is just another way of keeping a diary’ (Pablo Picasso). ‘Keeping a diary is just another way of painting’ (Pascal Obispo). In July 2014, I published a public diary in order to provide ‘an insight into my activities, challenges, discomforts, and discoveries as an academic and a creative practitioner’ (John Harvey, [website]/’Blog’). Every other diary that I’ve kept is private. The first…
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Expansive (10 05 2014)

Image
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The term ‘gas’, derived from the Greek khaos (chaos), was first used by the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont (1577-1644) to denote an occult principle which he believed inhered all matter. For him, gas summoned the sense of the ‘proper elements of spirits’.  On Saturday 10 May 2014 I gave the opening speech at the Expansive exhibition of works by Rebecca…
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Preface to ‘Art/Sound’

Art History, Image, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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‘What I have in my own mind is a complete fusion of the two concepts’ (Herbert Read, Education Through Art (1943)).  The ‘Art/Sound: Practice, Theory & History 1800-2010’ module will be launched at the School of Art, Aberystwyth University in September 2014. It’s anticipated that this will be the first in a suite of modules, presented under the aegis of the…
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In a Silent Way

Life, Sound & Word
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‘Shhh/Peaceful’ (Miles Davis).  St Beuno’s is a Jesuit centre situated near St Asaph in Wales. The retreat provides training in Ignatian spiritual exercises for people of faith and, sometimes, for those with none. I spent three days there in cloistered silence in order to hear. The practice of silence involves a cessation of talking and the avoidance of unnecessary noise.…
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Transitions (12 10 2013)

Image
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Change can only be proportionate to the amount of force which is put into it (J. G. Bennett, Concern for the Future (15 03 1972)). On Saturday 12 October 2013, I gave the opening speech at the Transitions exhibition of works by former MA students from the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, held at the newly founded Gas Gallery/Oriel Nwy,…
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‘Soh’ What!

Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise! (Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay on Criticism’ (1709)).  The Noises of Art: Audiovisual Practice in History, Theory, and Culture was convened by the School of Art, Aberystwyth University, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, and Aberystwyth Arts Centre on the 4 to 6 September 2013. The delegates comprised established scholars, PhD students, and independent…
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Cover-Up

Art History, Image
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‘If at first you don’t succeed — call an airstrike’ (Banksy, stenciled graffiti, San Francisco,  2013); ‘A desperate disease requires a desperate remedy’ (Guy Fawkes, London, 06 11 1605).  On the streets of San Francisco there is a tit-for-tat battle in progress between graffitists and the proprietors of the buildings they’ve illustrated. The rules of engagement are as follows: one…
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The Noises of Art

Art History, Image, Sound, Sound Art, Sound-Art History
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Noise accompanies every manifestation of our life (Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises (1913)); I think it is in sound’s nature to be free and uncontrollable and to go through the cracks and and to go places where it’s not supposed to go (Christian Marclay).   The boundary between visual art and aural modes of creative practice is porous. Since the beginning…
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‘It’s Gonna Rain’ (‘After a While’)

Sound, Sound Art
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‘Music is the soul of language’ (fortune cookie message, San Francisco, 20 06 2013).  The cookie’s ‘wisdom’ is a misquotation. It should read: ‘Music is the language of the soul’. This has been a commonplace sentiment in music theory over the centuries. It’s derived from a crude essentialization of Plato’s discourse on the nature of music and its relation to…
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