Tuesday 26 April 2011

Pedal Powered Grain Mill

There is an artist in residence oppurtunity which is being offered by the Woodlands Community Trust and the criteria are that the artist uses the back alleys around woodlands in such a way as to engage the local community.

Now, for those of you who have ever been scouting out for a bit or furniture or pc then you will know that these back alleys are generally just a bit of a dumping ground really and all this rubbish tends to get mixed up with all the mud which gathers here.
SO, all in all they are what you might conisder to be a difficult place to do anything
with, they are not particularly nice places to spend much time and tend to have a funny smell about them.

I have been considering ideas for these spaces and was thinking along the lines of cooking, having remembered the Dalston Mill which was set up as part of Barbican's Radical Nature series of exhibitions and events. This was organised by a bunch of architects who set up a company called EXYZT in their year out and have never turned back (continued their education) since as they are so busy getting commission to make fantastic projects rather than imagining them on a drawing board.

Their idea was to recreate a small-scale version of Agnes Denes Wheatfield - A Confrontation, Battery Park Landfill, downtown Manhattan, 2 acres of wheat planted & harvested, summer 1982


They then managed to build a wind powered mill which powered a small electrical stone grinder into which they could put all the wheat which they had gathered. Making their own flour they brought the community together to make pizza and bread, for free. To view some images of the project, here is a link to a slideshow of Flickr images (alternatively click on one of the links above).

Taking this as my inspiration I would like to propose a mobile table and benches, which will be mounted on the frame of a trailer, upon which people will be able to make dough to bake their own pizza and bread. I will be importing a Country Living Grain Mill which I intend to connect up to an exercise bike, as demonstrated in the video below.



This can be installed in the back of the van which will be used to move the table so that the back doors can be opened up and the flour can be delivered directly onto the table so that people can make their dough instantly!

Richard (SEA4) has very kindly offered to donate his pizza oven with which we will be able to make fantastic pizzas, as we discovered last year.

The deadline for applications is this friday so wish me luck and I am very excited about the implications of this project, both short and long term. Although this may seem to be quite different to my usual practice (sound art) I am equally interested in this aspect of community work and wouldn't want to be labelled a sound artist. There are also various aspects of this work which relate to my public art project last year in which I installed a stile over the gate at the Kelvingrove Bandstand as a passive protest installation about the neglect of such an important historical and social space.

Saturday 23 April 2011

Best Pizza Dough Ever Recipe

101 Cookbooks

"I can make a mean pizza, but it took me a while to learn how. Maybe I should rephrase that - I can make a mean pizza, but it took me a while to find the right teacher. For a long time I didn't really know where to look for guidance - I just knew I wanted pizza the way I'd enjoyed it in Rome and Naples."

Check out the recipe for Peter Reinhart's Napoletana Pizza Dough Recipe

Tuesday 19 April 2011

Susan Philipz

Lowlands Away
Winner of Turner Prize 2010

F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" (1909)

Read by Charles Bernstein as part of the Futurism and the New Manifesto program, February 20, 2009



On the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, poets Charles Bernstein, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Joshua Mehigan, and Alicia Stallings recite historical works, as well as their own contemporary manifestos, in the public space of the Museum's Garden Lobby. This program is a collaboration with Poetry magazine.

Palestinian collective memory and national identity


"The articles in Palestinian collective memory and national identity analyze the evolution and cultivation of modern Palestinian collective memory and its role in shaping Palestinian national identity from its inception in the 1920s to the 2006 Palestinian elections. While collective memory is central for any group feeling, it is particularly important for the Palestinians as a semi-diasporic people who are still engaged in the struggle for statehood." -- Book cover.

Sunday 17 April 2011

Ubuweb Goodies

Whilst doing research for this essay I keep coming upon more and more amazing links which is really hindering my progress but it all just looks so good!


From time to time there's some excellent stuff turning up on Ubuweb. This "discussion" is an attempt to gather some of these.
- Feel free to chip in.

Bring Da Noise: A Brief Survey of Sound Art

By Kenneth Goldsmith
Published: March 1, 2004


Over the past few years, sound art has been more visible in America. The Whitney has been including it in its Biennials and it even had its own section in their "The American Century" retrospective a few years ago. As a matter of fact all over the country, it's not too unusual to walk into a museum, art gallery, or university-sponsored exhibition space and hear nothing but sound. Websites like my own UbuWeb, the San Francisco-based Other Minds, and numerous independent sites of American composers are sprouting up, offering dozens of hours worth of sound art MP3s for free. Once relegated to specialty shops like Printed Matter, Inc. even record stores seem to be carrying these sort of discs. If you're interested in sound art, a trip to Other Music in New York City or to the new airplane-hanger sized Amoeba in Los Angeles will prove fruitful, with offerings from everyone from Vito Acconci to Mike Kelley cramming the racks.

read more here...

Saturday 16 April 2011

FUTURISM & DADA REVIEWED 1912-1959

LTM Recordings

Our CD anthologies Futurism & Dada Reviewed and Voices of Dada feature historic archive spoken word recordings by key Dada artists as well as a small number of more recent recordings, and are widely acknowledged as definitive. The Festival Dada Paris CD features unique recordings of music perfomed at key Dada events in Paris between 1920 and 1923. All CDs are mastered and packaged to a high standard, with booklets containing archive images and detailed historical notes.

Friday 15 April 2011

Alex Ross:The Rest Is Noise

Audio Guide

Here you can listen to brief excerpts of some of the works discussed in The Rest is Noise. There are also embedded videos, images, and links to archives, stories, and sound files elsewhere on the Internet.

Tuesday 12 April 2011

René Clair - Entr'acte (1924)

In 1924, a film named Entr'acte premiered as entr'acte for the Ballets Suédois production Relâche at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris. Relâche is based on a book and with settings by Francis Picabia, produced by Rolf de Maré, and with choreography by Jean Borlin. This short film was directed by René Clair with the music for both the ballet and the film composed by Erik Satie (the last music he composed). For this production, the dadaists collaborating on the project had invented a new flavor of dada or surrealism: instantanéisme. The complete film takes about 20 minutes using such techniques as watching people run in slow motion, watching things happen in reverse, looking at a ballet dancer from underneath, watching an egg over a fountain of water get shot and instantly become a bird and watching people disappear. The cast included cameo appearances of Francis Picabia, Erik Satie, Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. The conductor of the orchestra at the premiere was Roger Désormière.


René Clair - Entr'acte (1924)

Saturday 2 April 2011

The Trucker's Hitch

The most awesome knot on the planet!

Have you ever tried to tie something down for transporting, but just couldn't get the lines tight and/or during transport the lines would continually loosen? Then this is the knot for you! I learned this knot back in the 70s when specialty car racks and ratchet straps were rare or unheard of. I initially used it to tie a canoe on a car rack, both attaching to the rack as well as the lines to the bow and stern of the canoe. Even with all the new gizmos available today, this knot still shines because all you need is a rope and ropes don't hum in the wind like straps.


How to Tie a Trucker's Hitch Knot — eHow.com




Animated Knots by Grog: Slight variation on the two examples given above.