The Ghost Other

It’s been a while since I last posted so figured I should do a little round up of things.

Just before London, I had a little walk across the Tay Road Bridge, I think I might have a bit of writing to do about bridges but before I get around to that I made this little kinetic piece titled OooOooOoo:

“The circle, a representation of unity, an endless cycle, a continuous line with no start or end point. Ouroboros, the snake eating it’s own tail, the suit of Disks in the Tarot representing earth, a depiction of consciousness, the internal and external. Rings bind, Pi fails to resolve itself to infinity. Matter cannot be created or destroyed, it simply changes state and position. The world turns, loops and repeats. Loops repeat. Repeat.”

The Atom Town screening on June 23rd went down well although I’m not entirely convinced that I’d recommend getting an overnight bus from Dundee to London if ; A. You are completely unable to sleep on busses, and B. You don’t want to slip into some surreal performance based mental wormhole. But still. My piece was received well, the inclusion of repetitious rhythmical elements (lets not call them beats eh?) came as a bit of a surprise to some, it was genuinely humbling to meet and have a little chat with Ken Hollings and of course it was really nice to see Gair’s film presented in such a lovely space as Arts Catalyst. Afterwards I hung out with Thor and Keung up Dalston way and had a good catch up with the HPLL old guard. You can read some transport based rambling here.

On my return, I started manifesting an idea which had been rattling around for a little while regarding mark making as an audio impulse. Early sketches (if you’ll pardon the expression) using pencil and charcoal on cartridge paper can be heard below.

Marks of Delay by D.Fyans

Other than that, I’ve managed to get a few quite important proposals in for potential works next year (fingers crossed on those) which I’ll hopefully be able to have a bit of chat about soon and also got involved in really short notice in a performance as part of Dundee Live which as synchronicity would have it tied in quite closely with the Marks of Delay pieces.

The Ghost Other by D.Fyans

A live audio treatment of Joss Allen and Joanna Foster’s piece ‘A Slip Of The Other’s Tongue’.The piece uses two typewriters connected by a moebius strip and explores the relationship between text, physicality and audio. This treatment is for four piezo contacts, mixer, a 20 second delay loop, effects processor and control interface. I purposefully restricted the effects to only a few in order to try to focus on restraint and flexibility within a reductive context.

The performance took place as part of the Dundee Live festival in the Central Library in the Wellgate Centre, Dundee on Friday the 8th of July 2011.”

There are a few other irons in the fire but let’s see what happens there. In the meantime, I’m all about Edwin Abbott’s absolutely stunning 1884 published satire/exposition of extradimensional space/time –  Flatland (which you can read online here although I got a nice new copy for about £4 off amazon) and  this morning I took delivery of the mighty Grant Morrison’s Supergods: Our World In The Age Of The Superhero which is part memoir, part academic close reading of comics and part magical conjecture and pantheonic comparisons which make frightening sense of an awful lot of things. I really can’t recommend either highly enough.

D