Next month I will be coordinating a workshop entitled Miscellaneous expertise: performance, unlearning stories and public speech at the MoKS Kunsti ja Sotsiaalpraktika Keskus AVAMAA sympsium in Mooste, Estonia.  This is a collaboration with my good friend Giles Bailey, and the workshop will take place over five days with the dissemination on the sixth.

We proposed Miscellaneous expertise as an experiment using the workshop format; we hope to explore some of the structural components of performance through a patchwork aesthetic, with a concentration on “found” materials, chance, and non-linear constructions.  One potential subtitle was “Performance for non-performers AND non-performance for performers”, though that's a bit too constrictive and I think "unlearning" is a better term to use.

The outcome of the workshop will be a panel discussion that dissects the nature of performance, which of course will itself be a performance, which of course will not be.  If you remember my post about last year’s Mutopia workshop @ AVAMAA, then you’ll know I valued the MoKS approach to creative practice, a flame that will hopefully burn through this.  

Details about the workshop (how to attend, as well as info on the other workshops and projects occurring during the AVAMAA week [Natalia Borissova’s workshop looks amazing, and I wish there was some way to clone myself and do both]) are available on the MoKS website.  If you’re thinking of participating in Miscellaneous expertise, feel free to drop me a line or comment here.  See you in Estonia!

The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde is a stunning work that achieves the history it intended to write while also providing stimulating inspiration about sound and approaches to creating it.  Editor David W. Bernstein presents a series of articles that detail the history, occasionally repeating information but allowing a pluralistic set of viewpoints to emerge instead of a monohistory.  The second half of the book is comprised of interviews, first with the primary actors of the Center (Pauline Oliveros, Ramon Sender, Bill Maginnis, Morton Subotnick and Tony Martin) and then with other figures who were also involved (Terry Riley, Ann Halprin, Don Buchla, Stewart Brand, Stuart Dempster).
 
 
(l-r: Ramon Sender, Michael Callahan, Morton Subotnick, Pauline Oliveros (seated))

I think I found this particularly inspiring because I read this at a time when I've felt rather oversaturated with experimental music, and a bit unsure about how to continue my own experimentation in the field.  I'm about to embark on a stint with Lied Music/Vernon and Burns for the first time in ages, which makes me think a lot about the aesthetics of tape (which I haven't worked with since I left the UK -- I don't even own a working reel-to-reel at the moment).
 

As mentioned in the previous post, Part Oy has offered Helsinki Public School a shipping container to use for classes + events to be housed at the new Kalasatama development.
 


(full-size image)


There will be 9 containers arranged about halfway up the western side of the harbour (where #4 is marked on the map).  Besides us, there will be Dodo, two theatre groups, Kuvataideakatamia, Suomen Merimieskirkko and possibly some others.  The opening event will be on 12.6, Helsingin Päivä.