Jim Andrews
Since the beginning
Works in Victoria Canada

ARTBASE (2)
BIO
Jim Andrews does http://vispo.com . He is a poet-programmer and audio guy. His work explores the new media possibilities of poetry, and seeks to synthesize the poetical with other arts and media.
Discussions (847) Opportunities (2) Events (14) Jobs (0)
DISCUSSION

"disarming" the teaching of history in the Middle East, and video oral histories


New writings on PRIME (Peace Research Institute in the Middle East). These
are descriptions of peace-building projects undertaken by Palestinians and
Israelis working together. PRIME is run by a Palestinian, Sami Adwan, and an
Israeli, Dan Bar-On.

*************************

"Learning Each Other's Historical Narrative" in Israeli and Palestinian
Schools
A Joint Palestinian and Israeli Curriculum Development Project
January, 2002 - December 2007
http://vispo.com/PRIME/leohn.htm

"This project of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME)
focuses on teachers and schools as the critical force over the long term for
changing deeply entrenched and increasingly polarized attitudes on both
sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The goal of the project is to
"disarm" the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian
classrooms.

Specifically, teams of Palestinian and Israeli teachers and historians will
develop parallel historical narratives of the Israeli and Palestinian
communities, translate them into Hebrew and Arabic, and test their use
together in both Palestinian and Israeli classrooms. Unlike other projects
that are limited to revising existing Israeli and Palestinian texts, the
PRIME project aims at engaging teachers on both sides in an entirely new
collaborative process for teaching the history of the region.

At this stage in their polarized history there is not enough common ground
for Israelis and Palestinians to create a single historical narrative.
Rather, the project is designed to expose students in each community to the
other's narrative of the same set of events. For the first time, students in
each school system (beginning with 15 and 16 year olds) will not only learn
what shapes their own community's understanding of historical events, but be
required to confront the historical perspectives and contexts that shape the
other community's sense of reality."

*************************

Establishing a "Localized" Process for A Truth and Reconciliation Commission
In Israel and Palestine To Address Refugee Issues at the Heart of the
Conflict
http://vispo.com/PRIME/truthandreconciliation.htm

"....For this reason, the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East
(PRIME) has developed a new "localized" methodology for approaching
Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation. The methodology focuses on recording
oral histories to document Palestinian refugees who fled, or were forced out
of specific locations within Israel and Jewish-Israeli immigrants who
settled in those same locations, many of them after fleeing the Holocaust or
persecution in Arab lands. It also involves recording local
Palestinian-Israeli encounters that bring together a small number of such
families

DISCUSSION

Re: embedding <img> in email


no doubt. but this isn't much help to Manik, who does not want to hack in
Perl/Python/Ruby (and set up some server space somewhere to store the
images) but just wants to be able to send email with images in it to
Rhizome.

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Quotation (was: why so little discussion?)


> Hi Jim,
>
> I probably have all those plunderphonic tracks on one of my hard
> drives somewhere. I actually bought the original CD from him
> back in the day. I love it, because it is way processed, but you
> can still discern the original sources. But he's obviously doing
> it just to make his own music. None of it is even really
> allusive. Like Michael Jackson's "bad" becomes more of an
> ambient piece; it has has nothing to do with motown or pop. He's
> just treating it all as sound.
>
> I sample a bit of the plunderphonic stuff in this ridiculous mix
> (circa 1991):
> http://www.lab404.com/audio/tbomv/
> The james brown/public enemy break from 5:43-6:13 is all Oswald.
>
> peace,
> curt

A local record shop had a copy of Oswald's Plunderphonics, so I bought it.
Normally I just download music. It's somehow appropriately messed up that
it'd be Plunderphonics I'd have to end up buying. These works were created
between 1969 and 1997, with most of them created in the late eighties or
early nineties. Plunderphonics comes with a 46 page interview with Norman
Igma.

I hear some of the same tunes as Vicki Bennett has used. Whether this is
allusive on Bennett's part or not, I don't know. Probably not, since they
both deal with popular music.

Listening to Oswald's Plunderphonics, I am struck with the resemblances and
dissimilarities with "Abridged Too Far". They are both trying to create new
music, as opposed to simply remixing in such a way that the source material
is more prominent than the mix. The music Oswald uses is almost always from
popular music you would hear in North America from the fifties to the
nineties, ie, rock and roll of one stripe or another (with a few exceptions,
as in "White" by 'Gibbons Cry'), whereas the ATF sounds are from popular
music from Europe and North America from the 20's to 90's.

The earlier pieces by Oswald are less articulate musically, probably because
the technology was less articulate. As the technology becomes more capable
of subtle articulation, the music becomes more originally tuneful and
interestingly percussive.

One can imagine a program that has access to a huge collection of music. The
program pre-listens to each recording and analyses the sound and categorizes
it in samples of various lengths. Then spins a composition based on whatever
logic of composition the programmer has the wit to devise.

All future machines are now possible, by the way, except if they require
faster processing than is now available.

A computer can be any machine.

So it's now no longer a matter of music progressing according to the
technology that is available. All imaginable music machines are now
possible.

But then so is AI.

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: "Abridged Too Far" by People Like Us


Here is Vicki Bennett's show (she's People Like Us) on WFMU "featuring all
things avant retard": http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/PL

ja

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Quotation (was: why so little discussion?)


> There was a Creative Commons radio programme called "The Creative
> Remix" that takes remixing back to classical poetry (the canto).
>
> http://radio.creativecommons.org/
>
> Listening to "Abridged Too Far" I think the difference now is
> Modernist reflexivity: the remixes are very obviously remixes and
> the point of them is that they're remixes. There's an interesting
> compositional negative space aspect to it, but remixes that are
> rough, ready, skippy and stretchy are "orientating themselves to
> flatness".
>
> In the case of ATF (which I am getting more from with each
> listening), there's the problem of camp (pace Sontag) as well. If
> this is untransformed kitsch it's kitsch, but you can't have
> knowing kitsch. And if it's transformative it's academic,
> imperialistic, disenfranchising. Deconstruction is normative.
>
> The sweet spot for all of this would be if the work was
> sympathetic in some way to its source material and engaged with
> it to work on the assumptions of the listener. If the source
> material kept or problematised some context(s). Does ATF do
> achieve this as music or is it strain-to-hear-it "sound art"?

Hi Rob,

Interesting writing. One of the main things I like about ATF is that I find
it brilliantly tuneful, at points. Like in "Cattle Call" and also in "I've
Got You", as I wrote earlier. When the work is tuneful, the point is not
that it is remix, but she is trying to create new sorts of melodies and
harmonies or anti-harmonies(?) that either sound good by the standards of
the original music or by other standards.

Also, I think Vicki Bennett is sympathetic to much of the material. For
instance, about 1/3 of the way into "Ach Du" she takes a, erm, a polka or
something and puts it together with some percussive electronica that, if you
put it on the dancefloor, would rock the joint out for a few seconds. A lot
of this piece is percussive in that she's mixing rhythms toward something
wonderfully varied in rhythm that usually makes 'sense' percussively, ie,
you can follow it percussively.

Concerning 'problematising', there's quite a bit of that, like the change in
the lyrics of 'Kae Sara Sara' I mentioned concerning "I've Got You". Also,
machismo, when it appears, usually 'has the piss taken out of it' as the
brits say. And in "Close To You", I thought I heard some sympathy for the
fate of Karen Carpenter and Marilyn Monroe, and some attempt to relate those
to the music.

Concerning the transformative, well, the album has quite a historical range
of reference over considerable music from the 20th c. It doesn't dwell on
particular tunes for very long; instead it goes through a kaleidascope of
musical sounds and styles yet creates a style of its own. That I haven't
heard before.

Remix for the sake of remix would be pretty dull. What I like about ATF is
that she is actually trying to make listenable, new music in a remix mode.

I had a look at John Oswald's http://www.plunderphonics.com but the links to
the mp3's are 404 (legal issues, i presume). He became very famous for his
remix work and was recently awarded Canada's highest honor for media art.
But I have heard very little of his work, unfortunately. It would be
interesting to compare his approach with Bennett's.
http://www.plunderphonics.com/xhtml/xplunder.html is an interesting 1985
essay by Oswald called "Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional
Prerogative". He talks about quotation quite a bit. "Without a quotation
system, well-intended correspondences cannot be distinguished from
plagiarism and fraud."

ja