I haven’t had much time blogging lately. Here’s some of what keeps me busy at the moment:
One and a half week ago me and Jon Arne Mogstad was driving to Seljord to unstall the LMW installasjon “What goes around comes around” at Seljord kunstforening. I believe we both enjoyed seeing it again. Personally it is always satisifying to see that the technical part is running by the end of the exhibition period. Some years ago I was discussing issues of stability with Øyvind Brandtsegg. I was delivering one of my usual Bergen-like bold and ignorant statements saying that I wanted to work on the edge of what is possible even if it implies that the computers will crash every now and then. Øyvind having worked on technical development for some of the long-term installations of Arne Nordheim totally disagreed. His point has stuck with me. As I have gained more experience with running installations in gallery spaces I have started emphasing the the technical parts should be stable and easy to maintain for the staff at the gallery. Since the discussions with Øyvind Mac OSX has happened and apart from the vast improvement in stability of the OS itself I also feel that the introduction of crash logs also helped improving stability in Max a lot. The last installation I did that had serious stability issues was Lydspor the collaboration with Asbjørn Flø for Ultima 2004.000 As we needed Max to interface to two sound cards to drive 40 speakers we had to use OS9 ( I believe that by now this would also be possible in OSX 10.4). It was not a welcome return. MIDI and USB crashed all the time and the installation had to be guarded at all times to restart it whenever it decided to die. It sort of suited that project as it was dealing with glitches and hardware and software shortcomings anyway but still…
Me and Jon Arne also played around a bit with the volume settings of the audio before starting to dismantle. It is amazing how critical the volume is to complexity and density as well as emotional content and impact. At low volume the installation appeared harmonious and beatiful but increasing the volume somewhat (like 6 decibels) made it turn a lot more complex and less assuring.
During the trip we also found time to see the exhibition at Vestfossen kunstlaboratoium. If you are able to pass by it is highly recommended to see it. Personal favourites included Donald Judd Claes Oldenburg Mari Rantanen (a close friend of Jon Arne) Jaakko Niemel and Pipilotti Rist. I saw the video “I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much” by Pipilotti Rist earlier this year at the media center at Pompidou but seeing it as a projection was a thrill. I couldn’t get the tune out of my head for a week and writing this I can feel how it’s getting sticky again.
The installation “Staged spaces” a collaboration with Karen Kiphoff has been accepted for Høstutstillingen. I arrived in Oslo yesterday to start preparing the installation. Today has been spent carrying equipment mounting speakers make sure that patches work and working on the room for the installation. The staff at Kunstnernes hus is excellent. Ever since I exhibited at Malmökonsthgall as part of Electrohype two years ago I have been appreciating the improtance of a good technical staff at the exhibition space. A lot of the work done today is totally practical. It is the sort of work that will never be dealt with theoretically and no-one will ever get exited about it. But still it is absolutely vital to the final result and involves a great deal of experience and know-how. If this part fails to be done properly everything about the installation will fail.
The installation that will form part of the final evaluation of the fellowship project is getting closer opening at Hordaland kunstsenter at November 3.000 The title of the installation will be “A cubic second”. Last week I had a very good discussion with Hilde Hauan Johnson conserning the design of the room. I was contributing to a workshop arranged by her last autumn concerning acoustics and textiles. I believe that workshop ended up being more useful to me than any of the students.
Finally the Jamoma project is in the middle of a major transform at the moment. Tim has started porting several of the core components to C++. I am trying to help out as best I can by my C and C++ skills feels pretty rusty at the moment.
