Craig Dworkin: No Medium (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, art, art theory, attention, body, book, conceptual art, dada, film, fluxus, literature, media, music, painting, paper, phonograph, sculpture, sex, silence, temporality, time, translation, typography
“In No Medium, Craig Dworkin looks at works that are blank, erased, clear, or silent, writing critically and substantively about works for which there would seem to be not only nothing to see but nothing to say. Examined closely, these ostensibly contentless works of art, literature, and music point to a new understanding of media and the limits of the artistic object.
Dworkin considers works predicated on blank sheets of paper, from a fictional collection of poems in Jean Cocteau’s Orphée to the actual publication of a ream of typing paper as a book of poetry; he compares Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing to the artist Nick Thurston’s erased copy of Maurice Blanchot’s The Space of Literature (in which only Thurston’s marginalia were visible); and he scrutinizes the sexual politics of photographic representation and the implications of obscured or obliterated subjects of photographs. Reexamining the famous case of John Cage’s 4’33”, Dworkin links Cage’s composition to Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, Ken Friedman’s Zen for Record (and Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film), and other works, offering also a “guide to further listening” that surveys more than 100 scores and recordings of “silent” music.
Dworkin argues that we should understand media not as blank, base things but as social events, and that there is no medium, understood in isolation, but only and always a plurality of media: interpretive activities taking place in socially inscribed space.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2013
ISBN 0262018705, 9780262018708
219 pages
Interview with the author (Critical Margins)
Author’s lecture at Penn Poetry & Poetics (video, 19 min)
Reviews: Johanna Drucker (Los Angeles Review of Books), Michael Leong (Hyperallergic).
Commentary: Richard Marshall (3:AM Magazine).
Donald F. McLean: Restoring Baird’s Image (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · electricity, engineering, history of technology, image, phonograph, sound, technology, television, video, vision
Betty Bolton recorded in c1932 by engineer John Logie Baird in an early television experiment (GIF via Continuo Docs)
John Logie Baird, Britain’s foremost television pioneer, experimented with video recording onto gramophone discs in the late 1920s. Though unsuccessful at the time, his experiments resulted in several videodiscs, some 25 years before the videotape recorder became practical. These videodiscs – called Phonovision – remained neglected over the decades, considered by experts as unplayable.
In the early 1980s, the author sought out and restored the surviving Phonovision discs. Using computer-based techniques in an investigation reminiscent of an archaeological dig, the author has not only revealed the images on the discs but also uncovered details of how the recordings were made. The Phonovision discs have now become recognised as one of Baird’s most important legacies.
In 1996 and 1998, amateur ‘off-air’ recordings of the BBC’s 30-line Television Service (1932–35) were found, giving us our first view of what viewers were then watching. The author’s restoration overturns established views on mechanically scanned television, providing us today with a true measure of Britain’s heritage of television programme-making before electronic television.
As well as helping to explain a poorly understood and complex period in television’s history, this unique book, heavily illustrated with previously unpublished or rarely-seen historic photographs restored by the author, sheds light on the achievements of Baird, the development of video recording and the definition and invention of television itself.
Publisher Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000
Volume 27 of History of Technology series
ISBN 0852967950, 9780852967959
295 pages
eContact! 14(3): Turntablism (2013) [English, French]
Filed under journal | Tags: · experimental music, music, music history, phonograph, sound, turntablism
“In this issue of eContact!, interviews with contemporary turntablists show the many performative approaches possible with the turntable (accompanied by audio and video examples). Historical journeys back to the invention of the first devices to record and play back sound present the precursors of turntablism and offer a reflection on cultural and technical changes and similarities throughout the last century. Readers will even be encouraged to experiment with turntablism themselves, with instructions how to create their own personal record player out of cardboard. The many perspectives on sound creation with the turntable featured in this edition give an idea of the richness of the genre and the fascinating possibilities of the turntable.” (from the Editorial)
With contributions by Karin Weissenbrunner, Michael Heumann, Christopher DeLaurenti, Wolfgang Fuchs, Institut für Feinmotorik, Ian Andrews, Michael Hansen, Ignaz Schick, Daniel Neumann, Sylvain Fortier, and Andreas Engström. The issue also contains audiovisual galleries of the works by Alexandre Bellenger, Maria Chavez, Billy Roisz and Vinyl Terror & Horror, as well as wiki entries, columns, reviews and electroacoustic jukebox.
Editor jef chippewa
Publisher Canadian Electroacoustic Community, Montreal, January 2013
Turntable wiki (CEC’s open resource)
View online (English, HTML articles)
View online (French, HTML articles)