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Project Wismar |
Billy the Bomb
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When Emily Putter asked me to conceive a sound piece for her pendulum she recalled a scene in Ridley Scott’s 1992 film 1492: Conquest of Paradise: a huge incense burner swinging like a pendulum through the vast cathedral. As her pendulum was to take the form of a bomb, in order to contextualize the event with that of the commemoration of the 67th anniversary of the bombing of the St. Georgenkirche by the British Air Force in the closing days of the Second World War, and because I am an Englishman, I started to think about this object as something that represents a transcendence of political and cultural differences: transforming the bomb (and incense burner) into an object for the transmission of a more universal message, the human condition and its place in the cosmos.
The challenge was how to achieve this. At first I thought of transmitting recordings of propaganda radio broadcasts from both sides of the cold war conflict. But I quickly abandoned this idea in favour of a music piece that has been ‘constructed’ from detuned radio waves, , the background radiation left over, so the scientists believe, from the origin of the universe. So the bomb has become an object for transmission rather than of destruction, the transmission of a message of peace. Humanity's conflicts are ultimately overshadowed by the infinite natural order of our cosmos and when compared, how little we are and how trivial our differences.
For Emily the pendulum represents “to stay is nowhere”. In a sense my concept echoes this idea as it ultimately asks a fundamental question: “Where are we in the scheme of existence?”
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listen
See interview on wismar tv
(select 'Archiv' for 30/3/12 - then scroll down on right hand side to seventh item 'Bombe bei Nordic Yards')
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Ifitry Fragments |
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Commissioned Score for Centre for Contemporary Arts Essaouria, Morocco
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La fluidité de mouvement
From the ocean to a drop of rain, life emerges and a desert blooms. |
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Lignes de vie
From the traces of drawn lines to the traces of a life in toil with the earth and the simplicity of working on the bare common land; eking out a meagre existence: these are the impressions of life between two apparently disparate approaches, one of the labourer the other of an artist at work. The rhythm of life gives way to erasure, leaving behind the faint traces on landscapes of earth and memory.
listen |
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La mer et l'espace
A walk in spaces; impressions in the sand: erased by time and tide. |
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Fotografia Symphonia
In the blink of an eye and in the lens of a camera, fleeting impressions are captured and digitized as an archival record of a culture from the perspective of another. Still(s) - nothing can halt the disappearance. |
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Sous les étoiles
We are the stuff of stars and, ultimately, we are all reaching for the stars.
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Between Sleeping and Waking |
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The Brownstone Trilogy film
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Land Lines |
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Water Margins |
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Vapour Sketches |
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See it in its entirety at
http://vimeo.com/15691800 |
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