David Crowley, Daniel Muzyczuk (eds.): Sounding the Body Electric: Experiments in Art and Music in Eastern Europe 1957–1984 (2012) [English/Polish]

“In the aftermath of Stalinism, composers and artists in Eastern Europe were given new opportunities to experiment. New recording studios equipped with magnetic tape recorders and later, synthesizers were established, first in Warsaw in 1957 and then throughout Eastern Europe. New and often challenging forms of music were produced in these laboratories of sound.

The connections between the visual arts and experimental music were closer in the 1960s than perhaps any time before or since. Sound and image combined in artists’ films, ‘happenings’ and sounding installations. Experimental forms of notation were also created to stimulate uninhibited musical expression.

The early happenings and actions of the 1960s were associated with intellectual freedom and reform. The exhilaration of experimentation declined during the decade and in the 1970s new critical forms of art emerged which associated sound with surveillance and censorship.

This book accompanying an 2012 exhibition at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź explores both the optimism and the anxiety that was to be found in the experimental zone of art and music.”

The exhibition later moved to the Calvert 22 Gallery in London.

Artists: Collective Actions, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Dłużniewski, Szábolcs Esztényi, László Vidovszky, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Grzegorz Kowalski, Zygmunt Krauze, Henryk Morel and Cezary Szubartowski, Eugeniusz Rudnik, Bulat Galeyev, Milan Grygar, Milan Knížák, Oskar Hansen, Zofia Hansen, Zoltán Jeney, Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid, Katalin Ladik, Jan Lenica, Dóra Maurer, Vladan Radovanović, Józef Robakowski, Bogusław Schaeffer.

Dźwięki elektrycznego ciała: Eksperymenty w sztuce i muzyce w Europie Wschodniej 1957–1984
Publisher Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012
ISBN 9788387937980
222 pages

David Crowley’s presentation at MoMA (video, 50 min)
Sounding the Body Electric: A Conversation (Michał Libera, Art Margins)
Accompanying audio 2-CD

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PDF (exh. guide, Calvert 22 Gallery, London, 2013, added on 2023-12-27)

Never Mind the Balance Sheet: The Dangers Posed by Public-Private Partnerships in Central and Eastern Europe (2008)

In recent years public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been heavily promoted in central and eastern Europe (CEE), often giving the impression that where infrastructure is concerned, PPPs are the only game in town. Yet behind the plethora of conferences, workshops and publications, few CEE countries have implemented more than two or three PPP projects, and even fewer truly successful projects.

As George Monbiot, UK author and investigative journalist, says of the Private Finance Initiative, the British variant on PPP: “The reality is that PFI, or public private partnership as the government now prefers to call it, is a scam. (…) Far from introducing market disciplines, it has become an official licence to fleece the taxpayer. Far from reducing the public sector borrowing requirement, PFI is, as the Accounting Standards Board has noted, simply an an off-balance sheet fiddle. Most alarmingly, the ministers I have spoken to simply do not understand how it works.”

Research and writing: Fidanka Bacheva-McGrath, Eliska Cisarova, Akos Eger, Pippa Gallop, Zvezdan Kalmar, Vera Ponomareva
Publisher CEE Bankwatch Network, November 2008
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
60 pages

The Hidden Costs of of Public-Private Partnerships online resource

publisher

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Sound Exchange: Anthology of Experimental Music Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 1950-2010 (2012) [English/German]

“The long traditions of experimental music cultures in Central and Eastern Europe are diverse and multifaceted, but have been difficult to access until now. With contributions from selected music, media and cultural studies specialists from eight countries, this anthology bundles together elements of unearthing material locally and documents current positions and historical finds by protagonists, as well as musical aesthetic qualities in the history of musical experiments in Central and Eastern Europe. The anthology pursues commonalities and singularities and discusses their relationship with the international history of experimental music.

The often barely known musical and artistic positions portrayed here show a wide stylistic and aesthetic spectrum of electro-acoustic music, composed and improvised music, musical media art and audio art from 60 years of experimental musical culture in the context of decades-long political repression and an atmosphere of increasing openness and international networking following 1989.”

With contributions by Antoni Beksiak, Balázs Kovács, Daiga Mazvērsīte, Gerhard Lock, Hans-Gunter Lock, Māra Traumane, Martin Flašar, Michal Rataj, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Monika Pasiecznik, Pavel Klusák, Slávo Krekovič, Tautvydas Bajarkevicius, Viestarts Gailītis.

Edited by Carsten Seiffarth, Carsten Stabenow, and Golo Föllmer
Publisher PFAU, Saarbrücken, 2012
ISBN 9783897274877, 3897274876
400 pages

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