Curt Cloninger: Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You)

Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You) #1
Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You): 9:23-9:26 pm (2012, 70MB, 2:27 min)

Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You) #3
Again (I Wish I Was A Fool For You): 10:08-10:10 pm (2012, 64MB, 2:33 min)

I love (and increasingly so) Curt Cloninger’s work.
The wonderful series of gif/flash/loop/glitch/kitchen sink audio visual poems on his site, his forays into
datamoshing and his series of live performative/endurance pieces
which, sprouting like green shoots from a rather austere central
European branch manage to be filled with light and nuance and a
-how shall I put it -… a joy which is earned, which is not trivial,
and to which we are invited and which arises out of a heightened sense
of ourselves and of others as embodied beings and of our necessary interconnections…

Here’s Curt’s account of a recent piece, a collaboration with his wife Julie,
for which we post two pieces of documentation. (I don’t know whether Curt sees
them as simply that. I think they are quite lovely in themselves – certainly the video
piece derived from Curt and Annie Abraham’s telematic collab Double Blind,
featured here previously certainly has artistic legs of its own and perhaps should
be taken as something of a precedent.)

Anyway, over to you Curt:

“A 3 Hour performance by Curt and Julie Cloninger. Julie is pre-recorded
on video singing for ten minutes along with Curt playing Rhodes piano.
Her video and audio are then projected and looped in the performance space
while Curt sings and plays guitar live. Both are blindfolded.
A duet across time. The repeated excerpt is from the Richard and
Linda Thompson song “For Shame of Doing Wrong.
Performed at the Black Mountain College campus during the 2012 reHappening festival“.

Eddie Whelan/Grass Giraffes – Better Alone

Better Alone

We’ve followed Eddie Whelan’s work from the very beginning and enjoyed it all the
way.
More than enjoyed, actually. Been impressed and moved by the care, thought and skill
with which he approaches everything and particularly by his forging of a very personal,
nuanced and beautiful
language from the practice of data-moshing.

He has recently turned his talents to the making of music videos
and the constraints of the form, both in terms of time and the unity demanded
by serving a soundtrack make for small jewells of lyric visual poetry.

I gather he also plays on this one, and they,Grass Giraffes, have an EP forthcoming in May.
I’ll certainly be investing in a copy.

Alan Sondheim – What Remains

what remains
what remains (2007, 19.7MB, 1:26 min.)

We need no excuse here to feature more of Alan Sondheim’s singular & remarkable oeuvre.
This one caused a bit of a debate on Netbehaviour in 2007 -some baulked, fearing it to be images
of rending, tearing of the body. Alan says not at all, it’s tantric/ecstatic.
The singer is Alan’s wife Azure Carter.
When he originally posted it, it came with this poem (a sonnet?):

what remains

because of the faces and powers among our second lives
and third and others in-between the others; because of
swollen faces thinned back to pages bones and shadowed flesh
that nothing stays what was simple and illusion

and then poetics rounds and fills the world
among lost pages and inscriptions freed
from every symbol and symbols freed and world;
the less are said the farther truth transcends

because of truths and songs and lights and place
where bodies turn; because of bodies churned and stretched
among beams of those lights and those songs; those truths
nothing stays back nothing; valleys fill with jostled things

and things churn symbols; the world
fills silence; skies get dark kiss; welkin

Bleip – No

bleip
Bleip – No (2001, 14.32 MB, 2:59 min.)

Beautiful visuals and some on point editing from Pleix,
a group of digital artists in Paris, France.
The music on this one is provided by Bleip.

Afrobeats Week – #5 // EL – Obuu Mo (Azonto Version)

EL - Obuu Mo (Azonto Version)
EL – Obuu Mo (Azonto Version) (2011, 89 MB, 4:23 min)

“Look boy, I’m changing my trajectory of isotopes to my temporal place of domicile,
to cause a thermostatical refreshment, to my gorgeous masculine homosapien.
I don’t want any discombobulation by the time I come back. Is that clear?”

Afrobeats Week – #4 // D’Banj Oliver Twist Dance Competition #2

My Backyard Crew - Oliver Twist
My Backyard Crew – Oliver Twist (2011, 18 MB, 3:57 min)

Afrobeats Week – #3 // EL – One Ghana for your Pocket

EL - One Ghana for your Pocket
EL – One Ghana for your Pocket (2011, 45 MB, 3:20 min)

Afrobeats Week – #2 // D’Banj Oliver Twist Dance Competition

 D' Banj Oliver Twist Dance Video Competition
D’ Banj Oliver Twist Dance Video Competition (2011, 33 MB, 1:57 min)

Afrobeats Week – #1 // 2Shy – Azonto Girl

azonto girl promo 2shy
2 Shy: Azonto Girl(2011, 82 MB, 3:39 min)

Q: Why?
A: Because we can

Gabriel Shalom – Small Room Tango

Small Room Tango
Small Room Tango (2007, 7.9MB, 3:43 min.)

Anyone who has attempted this kind of video-sampling-whilst-letting-the-
audio-determine-the-structure will now just how extremely bloody
difficult & fiddly
it all is.
Hats off bigtime, then, to Gabriel Shalom, who not only makes it look
natural & easy but even squeezes poetry from it.