Riverbank listening 01

I have been working on this project around about 6pm at the junction of the Huntlyburn and the Tweed.

The Huntlyburn is dry and the Tweed flowing.

An opportunity to follow the Huntlyburn tributary riverbed now a path with large cobbles moving and clattering beneath my feet.

Sandmartins whose nest entrances I can now see fly in arcs above. Grass and thick vegetation moves swishing and pulled by the breeze the main river sucks towards it. And the oystercatchers - followers of Bridget - call in alarm as I stravaig through their territory.

A drainage pipe marks the join between wet and dry river beds. And the water of the Tweed flows with a fast fluent sound; and a bass note of glugs as the water passes over the pipe.

How many notes does water flow contain?

Riverbank listening – a world listening day project

An epically poetandgeek kind of way to spend Thursday week by listening to a river and writing about it.

Do you want to join international artists and environmentalists in a global listening project? People from all over the world are invited to spend some time during the day listening to their environment, be it urban, rural or wilderness.

Are you interested in contributing to a creative celebration of the River Tweed and its tributaries or of your own nearest river system?

Celebrate world listening day on the 18th July in this case by lying down by a river junction pool and writing down what you hear...

You can find out more here http://workingthetweed.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/riverbank-listening-a-world-listening-day-project/

Folkpoet Thursday 19th April London England

A new night of live arts and literature at Island Arts Studio in Herne Hill. Curated by spoken word artist Nick Field, artists;, misfits, dandy rebels and charming provocateurs are encouraged to push the boundaries of spoken whirred.

19.30 onwards... 278 Milkwood Road, SE24 0EZ (good poetic address). We think this event carries on and on every Thursday from now until the end of time - let us know if this is wrong.

Discover skilled, honed performers and writers, musicians to cherish and emerging talent at our open(ish) mic. All snugly housed in a lovely, dedicated arts-venue setting.

More information is available here http://nickfieldpoetic.co.uk/#/blog/4554793422/Folkpoet/505704

More on Bob Cobbing

An original recording from 1972,  a selection of Bob Cobbing's sound poems and interview with Charles Amirkhanian recorded in Cobbing’s home. Bob Cobbing (1920 - 2002) was a British sound, visual, concrete and performance poet and a central figure in what has been described as the British Poetry Revival.

Here for the recording http://radiom.org/detail.php?omid=OTG.1972.09.20.c1. You will have to register first.

A glorious minute from Cris Cheek

Cris Cheek is a British poet, artist, interdisciplinary performer and academic currently resident at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. Born in London in 1955, he lived and worked in the UK until the early 1990s. One early influence was working alongside Bob Cobbing at the Poetry Society and the Writers Forum group of poets who met with regularity there.

http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/cheek/skin3b2.wav  and press play for the minute excerpt from Rooftop Fog.

Soundart Radio

Have you ever wanted to make your own radio show? Then Soundart Radio can help you. Poet radio time again.

Perhaps you recorded a show on
 a cassette when you were a teenager and spent a lot of time alone. Maybe you have a list in your head that you could read out. Or perhaps you're a poet who lives in the trees, an angel, a roadkill chef or can recognise birds by their songs. If so, send some poems to poetandgeek.com.

If you are interested in more technical skills, go here: http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/projects/creative-radio-course/

Or just listen to birds and other cool stuff here http://www.soundartradio.org.uk/

Aktuelle Architektur der Kultur Berlin 14th July 2011

AADK (AADK Berlin Gbr) presents AADKunexpected: varied projects (performance, music, live- sound and visual-installations, exhibition, poetry) around Berlin. Something for the holidays...

More information here on AADK and Jochen Arbeit:

http://www.aadk.org/

http://jochenarbeit.com/

Super highway sound art Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik was a sound and video artist born in Korea in 1932 who worked in America and Germany. A global artist, he is often said to be the first video artist. He also coined the term super highway in 1974; one of the first to do so. His last works centred on our fragmentary response to the internet. He died in 2006.

He said that life is half natural and half technological. "Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life". His works TV garden and Video fish seem to exemplify this feeling. You can view the latter here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiOeZxE5twQ. (It is labelled as the former btw.)

Samples of his work can be found here: http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/821234899001/ and http://www.ubu.com/sound/paik.html

More on Nam June Paik at http://www.paikstudios.com/

The rain in the mic

My bout of hayfever (not an asset to a woodsman) turned to a chest infection so my time in Birling Wood has had to be cut short. I think the hot spell brought all the trees in the Borders out at once. After the icy winter, that much pollen air was a shock to even my outdoor lungs.

Bought a scarf and carried on with it wrapped round my face like a smoggy city dweller but no good.

However I persisted until the rain came. Sound equipment doesn't like rain nor the recorder. No good input. Couldn't breathe so have been staying in one of my NFA shelters. Here I have been woken by willow warblers and pied flycatchers, a deer at my windowsill - the house is derelict - but I am able to stay now and then on sufferance amongst the sheep feed. Thankfully the door is good and tight so rodents are kept to a minimum. It's a red squirrel area too and one can be seen most mornings in what would have been the garden ground. Forget-me-knots, gooseberry and currants still remind you of the previous inhabitants.

I stretch my legs up the field of this glacial valley. And there are always hares. Standing like small people and still, they watch me coming. Some people say hares are a witch's form and when they look at you in a red morning light, well, I can't help wondering if that is true.

E-Poetry [ 2011 ] : International Digital Language | Media | Arts Festival

E-Poetry runs from May 18-21, 2011 at State University of New York at Buffalo, United States. The event claims to be the "longest-running and definitive digital literature festival in the world"; previous events have been all over the western world including West Virginia, London, Paris, and Barcelona. 

There is still time for proposals for presentations that are truly exceptional in nature.

The festival promises 4 days of:

• festival performances
• exhibitions
• artistic presentations of poetics statements
• scholarly papers
• talks
• and celebration of creative, visionary, and imaginative poeisis at the cutting edge of the triumphant spirit of the arts in the digital age.

The festival presents world class e-poetry, digital and media arts, multilingual poetics, dance, music, and other forms of avant-garde artistic language, media and scholarly practice.

Find out more about the E-Poetry festival at: http://epc.buffalo.edu/e-poetry/2011/. Also take a look at the Electronic Poetry Centre at Buffalo http://epc.buffalo.edu/ which is interesting. And here is a definition of poiesis http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poiesis which I had never heard of before but probably you like me kind of guessed right both what it means and what it implies.

Sound art/poetry: zebra finches

Sound art is hard to pin down. But that is part of the point. It challenges ideas of the the arts as separate classical entities.

The French sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot explores the contours of artistic control through sound and random generation. For example in his work Index, he has designed a computer program to convert what is typed on office computers into a musical score. This is then played live by an acoustic piano in the same space.  The program uses repetitions and nuances of the office work typing and creates notes, dynamics and other musical terms turning bureaucracy into music. The harder the humans work, the more music but the decisions are left to the computer.

And in the beautiful example below, the musicians are birds.

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's zebra finches jamming at the Barbican Centre, London

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZQ4VmicDeM