Like whoa…

First:

My colleague Chris Tabron has a new blog: .::Light Matter::. where he posts photos.

Second:

I saw Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) State earlier this evening at BAM’s Howard Gillman Opera House. New York: you should be there tomorrow and/or Sunday. As you probably know most everything passes through John Cage before it gets to me, so my criticism is usually related to issues of overbearing narrative/message, decisions in production that seek to preserve/achieve meaning that wind up being reductive in regards to meaning’s potentiality to traverse the space between intention and reception, and other such audience-oriented heuristics. Sundiata is an overhwhelming exception to my redundant critiques, and a welcome one for me. He manages to present a context rife with implications of political critique, yet not born out of a desire to instill those critiques; his performance is fundamentally imbued with poetry, yet fails to access the format’s most tired breaths; he sets up a fecund bed in which the audience may rest their minds, and simply goes to work quietly in the corners: the corners of the space in such a way that the work never imposes (neither on the audience or any part within itself), and the corners of our minds in such a way that the work remains tangential and fragmented enough that it only hints at possible realms of thought, it never asks us to step into them. Over the course of the performance I was engaged mentally, intellectually, emotionally, and spatially. Half-way through I felt that I should do productive things when the time to leave would arrive; I came home and thoroughly cleaned a salvaged step ladder. It’s refreshing to be involved in something that can become a state of exception within the structures that mire me in life; thank you Mr. Sundiata and company.

Third:

I have a performance coming up on December 12th at Tisch (721 Broadway) room 636 from 7:00 PM until 8:00 PM. The performance will be the premiere of Music High for Bouncing Balls–a work that I began conceptualizing at some point in the summer. There will be ten performers including myself–five women and five men (these people as of right now): Zachary Moldof, Christopher Tabron, Daniel Coeyman, Sarah Lasry, Montzerrat Contreras Robles, Maria Amelia Franchignoni, (possibly) Biba Bell, and (possibly) Amalia Cordova. I still need two more male performers, and (possibly) two more female performers; holler at your boy. The composition will not be rehearsed before the performance; the performers will alternate between bouncing balls, and reading texts; time brackets, and dynamic parameters will be used. I am hoping to render a composition that is simple enough to not require specialized knowledge in order to be read, and does not have to be rehearsed ahead of time because it seems like a useful way to approach a compositional practice that grows out of an understanding of sound that privileges indeterminacy and the unaccountability of temperospatial multiplicity.

And on and on…

My contributions to this blog have been less than regular of late.

I recently moved into a studio apartment hwere I live by myself; the kitchen is clean, and so is the bathroom. they will stay this way.

My last performance as interesting to say the least. I have discussed it with a few people of late so I think I have an adequate perspective on it.
This was the performance:I had a sneaker. Inside of the sneaker was an ipod shuffle that was playing my latest composition, Not my Brilliance., and a stereo contact mic. The ipod was connected to a set of headphones, and the mics went to a PA. I had a small sign that gave the title of the performance and asked audience member to use the headphones. I was drawing on the sneakers. Most people did not realize that I was performing, many people performed while I performed, and music was played through the PA while I performed. While all of this was difficult for the normatized conception of artist/performer that resides somewhere within me, it was at the same time quite enjoyable. My performances have gradually transformed from a situation where I present a supposedly captive audience with an emobdied artifact/ideology, to situations where I am making equal demands on both myseld and the audience to access the performance. By access I mean that the performances I have created of late do not neccesarily contain any agency tha allows them to becomes spectacle, or even rise to the din of their setting; I have essentially located myself/myperformance within a quiet ontology. The performance becomes challenging for me because I ahve to deal with the fact that no one realizes that it’s going on, and people are even sitting on/standing on portions of it.
Today I spoke with Nelson Hallonquist about this notion of a quiet ontology and he pointed out one common aspect of performance that has always disturbed me: the congratulatory audience. As Mr. hallonquist so deftly pointed out, a quiet ontology provides agency against congratulatory practices, which is a relief, and in some sense a goal.
I will be performing the second half of this work next month, however this time–after Shimpei Takeda–I will add a live feed of the illustration to a big-screen television. I am not entirely sure how this will affect the perceptibility of my performance, but I look forward to it.

Selling beer is a job that I have.

Holler at your boy.