Monday, March 12, 2012

WEEK SEVEN: SOUNDS and SILENCE

White Painting, by Robert Ryman

John Cage composes  4'33" (1952) 
for any instrument. The score instructs the performer not to play the instrument during the entire duration of the piece. It consists of three movements, divided into thirty seconds for the first, two minutes and twenty-three seconds for the second, and the third being one minute and forty seconds -- hence, 4'33".


Bowed Film, Tony Conrad, 1975


Mark presented us with a piece inspired by Tony Conrad's film The Flicker.  You can read about Tony and see images from his works like Bowed Film ,Pickled Film , and Sukiyaki Film (where he throws food at the screen) 
We also watched an excerpt of his video performance Cycles of Threes and Sevens where he describes harmonic intervals usually expressed in musical terms with  a calculator as his instrument.



UK artists Benedict Drew and Emma Hart collaborate on sound/ film/performance works described here.
We recreated their "Untitled 2" for guitar and 16mm film, in which the film is threaded through the guitar strings. For our classroom version we made a group film loop of various colored leaders:





read: excerpts from Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage 1961

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