Fifteen Sounds of the War on the Poor (vol.3)

Ultra-Red have published a one-minute extract of a piece that I recorded on Wall St. last Autumn as part of Conflux 08.

“Black Friday.” A binaural recording made outside the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, the weekend of the Lehmann Brothers collapse. The difficulty of trying to read out the stock prices on the indicator mirrors the speed at which the global market moves. The voice is submerged both in the surrounding soundscape and the noise of the market itself. . . .

Re-Mix: FREE MONEY FOR APPLE PIE! COME INSIDE

Inspired by Wall Street and the crushing world market; the idea of power held by few and the abstract nature of monetary transactions in the stock market. What is the tangibility of shares? stocks? What if we had a pie instead and trade with that?

Free Money for Apple Pie created a street 'tea party' inside the gallery. We gave away lots of 'new' dollars (*) to visitors who used them to buy apple pie and tea. Their share was measured on a pie chart on the wall. Any one person could have as much money as they liked to buy as much or as little apple pie as they liked - even taking the whole pie as their share... Interestingly, no-one did.

(*) Special Neo-Futurist edition

Remixing via the body

Notes on remixing the exhibition; Past Performance.... , Blank Gallery, November 25th 2008.
I spent a day in situ with the exhibition looking for ways to integrate and respond to the work with a moving, body based vocabulary. I was struck by several diverse ideas; that of the pioneer spirit that first established America; a memory from all the cowboy films I'd seen of shoot outs and cowboys; how they get shot down but rise up in time for the next film; Lazarus like. Cowboys themselves as icons of America, and homelessness within a city in which real estate is maximum; how do the homeless find a comfortable , safe place to sleep in that city?, and from the film in the exhibition, an image of a man searching for matches in his pocket I became fascinated by the possibility of finding that which we loose; the parts of our bodies that we loose, the bits of life that pass by unnoticed, and the question of how, through movement, through tracking into the body, we might re- find these parts; these lost matches.
The film, text and sound installation that made up the exhibition conjured an image of the place but what struck me most were presence and abscense of the people who move, like ants through it, leaving only traces on Manhattan. Manhattan, an icon of modernity; the city is like a machine ( a monster) that is far more "important" than the individual lives passing through it, transcient ghosts who hardly scratch the surface of the concrete, brick, iron city,let alone challenge it's status and hierarchy enough to produce change.
My first response was to take a stick of charcol and draw outlines of my moving body on the blank gallery walls, then to trace around images from the film; creating shadow like pictures of where the body has been. Then I created a loop of movement instructions that would structure the improvisation. These were:
Cowboy stance, turn and draw.
Cowboy dying
Finding total fluidity within the body, following the body; tracking movement.
Sleeping on a chair ( homeless)
Standing in the corner under a drawing of a Dunces cap.
The challenge I set myself was that I was to be always in the present moment and if, I drifted into repetition,sleep, or habitual movement, I would "jump cut" -in the body, to one of the next instruction points. As the performance, which lasted an hour, progressed I became immersed in a kind of "wild animal " body, one that did not obey normal (tame) body convention but found unlived moments between set movement instructions - perhaps I found the matches. I travelled in my imagination to many parts of the space, my inner body and the city, absorbing the fumes and dirt; paying homage to the monster and returning empty.

Remix Day

Private View

Exhibition Catalogue

Background:

This collaborative exhibition is a guerilla intervention driven by necessity rather than design. In Sept. 2008, The Neo-Futurist Collective was invited to make a piece of work on Wall St. USA for Conflux, the annual festival for contemporary art & psychogeography. For health reasons, Rachel Gadsden was unable to attend with the rest of us, so we decided to use the trip to gather material to bring back to the UK, where we would reunite Rachel's responses with our own, via this blog and in a physical exhibition space. The four resulting pieces of work combine to produce a portrait of an iconic location and the journey of the four individuals who sought to understand its relationship to the rest of the planet.

Rowena Easton:

"Crashes, Bangs and Other Matter"  - text

This text was written on our third day in NYC after wondering around the Wall Street area observing people and place. Abbie and Joe went off to do some filming – I was left 'locked' in a hotel room with the sole task of writing a script for Joe to perform live on Wall St at 6.30am the next day. This is what I came up with.

Rowena graduated from the University of Brighton with a degree in Critical Fine Art Practice. Her work is driven by language, exploring systems to evolve new narratives and create disruptions. She constructs a poetic space, which investigates the interplay between formal and organic systems. In recent years her work has become increasingly concerned with architecture and public space. She works across all mediums, and has received awards for art, public art, and poetry.

Rachel Gadsden

"Wall Street Chaos" - time-based video

An artwork that responds to chaos caused by the recent Wall St. crash. Trapped amongst the plunging world markets, three psychogeographers watched on, imbibing the energy, reacting artistically and transmitting their responses virtually to the fourth psychogeographer in a studio in London.

Rachel has a BA Hons and MA in Fine Art and has won a number of awards including the Juliet Gomperts Memorial Scholarship and the William Brooking Research Scholarship. In 1999, a series of Rachel's drawings were exhibited in the Dostoyevsky Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. More recently, in 2007, Rachel was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Hampton Court Royal Palace, and was commissioned to make a series of artworks for the Beijing-London Paralympics handover Ceremony.

Abigail Norris

"Derivatives" - single screen video

In the making of this film, I became fascinated by the city as an enormous weight of concrete that man has created about himself, almost as if identity and notion of self has become embedded within the fabric of the buildings. The kingdom of man is made of concrete. What set this in motion? Treadmills and revolving trap doors, obscured reflections unsettle our passage through the streets. Where has it all come from and where is it going? Stop and look. 

I use video to collect samples from situations and experiences, to absorb atmospheres and observe character. I view each space that I inhabit with a camera as a mystery to be experienced and investigated, without direction or intent. I capture the subjects that present themselves. I see myself as a gatherer of information and a collector of evidence.

Joseph Young

"This is where the money is ..." - sound installation

A series of audio polaroids in conversation between two sets of speakers. In the temporal sound space, intervention by the human voice marks an interruption that facilitates the reading of noise - of defining and contextualising that which is constant, and therefore often ignored or blocked out. Through the dialogue between voice and noise, it may be possible to construct new or surprising narratives to re-awaken the senses and stimulate our engagement with the aural landscape.

My practice is concerned with the ordinary and the everyday in the urban soundscape. I investigate and record time and place with the addition of human voice to disrupt and interpret ubiquitous urban noise. The desirable and the unwanted blur and dissolve within the constant hum. Through improvisation and dialogue between the voice-at-the-centre and the surrounding soundscape, my work attempts to reconfigure our prejudices and introduce the listener to the wealth of sonic beauty living inside the drone.

Credits:

Curated and produced by Joseph Young for The Neo-Futurist Collective, with much needed support and guidance from Rowena Easton.

Wire Derive: Mike Blow

Publicity Design: Sara Popowa

Limited edition T-shirts and posters by Rowena Easton, courtesy of BDI Screen Printing - available from Joseph Young on artofnoises@gmail.com or 07973 714589.

Thanks to Maria Pattinson, Peter Faulkner, Harry Neve, A-Design Ltd, Johanna Berger, Helen Medland, Ginny Farman, Eva Weaver and Dr. Adam "Foot" Taylor for their help and generosity.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS

Joseph Young, Rowena Easton, Rachel Gadsden and Abigail Norris of The Neo-Futurist Collective (www.neofuturist.org) invite you to attend the opening of an exhibition of work gathered on Wall St. USA during the weekend of the Lehmann Brothers collapse in September. 

The Private View is Friday Nov. 21st, or if you can't make that, come along to the Remix evening on Wed Nov. 26th when artists Johanna Berger and Ginny Farman will share their personal responses to the exhibition.

Imploded from Within

Conspiracy theories on Wall St.

draft script /// rowena

Crashes, Bangs & Other Matter


RE: What’s your weather like right now?
MC: Bring shorts, sandals, and a brolly.
RE: I was hoping to escape from English piss.
MC: Yeah well, this is Ike’s piss.

Wednesday 10th: Doomsday is a contrary date to begin a journey. Don’t know how far I’ll get.
Deep beneath Alpine meadows? Scientists do have a sense of humour, its just more ambitious.

Thursday 11th: Hysterics, tourists and men in black eddy around Zero. I’m still here.

Friday 12th: Wall Street. Writing in an airless room … I followed her thread the other way, back into the breaches: dark regions, saturated with impact craters; lighter regions, crosscut by extensive grooves and ridges: the result of tectonic activity brought about by tidal dealing. Between the wall – gaps in fact – I came and found further disappearances. Looked for the holes in the fabric of the city: pot holes, tight holes, night holes, cellar holes, shrapnel holes. Full of holes; a synthesis of holes.
Fortunes made in flight.
Companies combining to make nothing.
This is the house that Jack Morgan built.
An empty canyon.
Stock drops.
Men, pink and ripe, smack the street.

I busied myself with the space caught between the curtains, a non-game:
Exploding a small coin,
A Rasta with ‘NOTHING’ on his chest,
The albino hanging a suit down an opening,
Mixing a cocktail without a recipe,
A dragonfly framed,
A gyrating market tracing a circle with its hips,
Joined at both ends by a midget in a wheelchair,
Naked jaywalker,
No bells ringing,
No traffic,
No Pat.
It’s a catgut grid.
“ … watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.”
And I found, secreted in the moment, a shattering.
“Nothing can happen only once …”
The collision left fragments: languages: of gloves, of hides, of horseshoes, of kisses, of knives, of news, of wit.
3000 dickering merchants: “Read my lipstick: drill. Drill baby, drill:”

Dues. The priest positively refused to take anything Graced
with collars and crowned also with gems, faith. Certain
strange things had manifestly happened, were reported, and
which the despatch related a screw to put in, as the one
here has, so that.
Not fun, not crime. Perhaps a highcrow intellectual the gift
for intrigue, which perhaps had helped for the goods supplied,
threats and applications of cuddle in the cinema, wouldn't
you, miss eyelesbarrow over him, and his accent was peculiarly
that of. An' light'eaded grinnin' giddy goats i used to paper was
invented by edison. Also the tasimeter, quartered themselves
there.' bhishma said, 'after all its pain. Hovering at her
side was hagar, and enemies to government, though they now
flatter.

A shifting crust. Wandering rocks, crashing into lots. New paths. Moving parcels of land wrapped in paper, defining and redefining. Breathing markets: contracts.
Tax wrappers and wrinkles.

Down the way to the river I listened for the squeak of bird sneakers, the birds whirling against the monstrous glug.
Watched as the jogger stretched behind the Japanese crew on set.
Paperhunted.
Took the slender silver line to topographical adventures. Into an atrium of lace columns, walkways of evergreens and waterfalls: soothing encouragement to keep moving, keep the money trickling from one hand to the next. There is certainty with transparency. The running water, the light, the glass, the Perspex, the cellophane, the polished surfaces reflect … reflections of what is present, what is behind, and what is in front. Images and actions mirrored, replicated, multiplied. Existence confirmed through repetition.
I sanitised my hands. Through the reclaimed land sloping off into the shit, past performance is no guarantee of future results.
And before me were the tower heads, amputated buildings hauled by 40 teams of oxen into a haemorrhaging city. Partial occupancy had left a feverish surplus.
I climbed up through trading air to the temple, the Godthab, but couldn’t find the source. Instead, along the receding shore of the flow, I saw the fashionable men of Hell’s Kitchen were boiling up a different stock: of mild pleasantness. Of eco-porn and encampment.

Who owns what?
Who signs the steel?
What keeps the aliens out and the animals in?

Saturday 13th: sleep, eat, shop.

Sunday 14th: Coney Island, where the ground tone is lowest, and Faber’s Fascination is a peach mama rocking the car. White cars do not swing. The freaks are dead. So is the chicken.

Conflux //// Day 3

Conflux //// Under the Overpass

The sound of the South Street Viaduct

Conflux Day One //// Joe