http://www.weightlessanimals.com
NEW WEBSITE AND VINYL PICTURE DISK
BACKGROUND
Weightless Animals Picture Disk is the accompaniment to the website
http://www.weightlessanimals.com,
made by three artists Kaffe Matthews (London), Mandy McIntosh (Glasgow) and
Zeena Parkins (New York), which together explore the sonic environments humans
and animals experience through space travel.
The work comprises a website of interactive sonic space cartoons,
and a nine track album containing more dense musical cargo than the site can
stream. The website and album are accompanying artworks, which contrast and
complete each other, providing
digital and analogue impressions of space sounds and pictures.
Initially the content of the work was fed by research at NASA, Houston, Texas, where the
artists posed the question , “What would be your soundtrack for
space?” to astronauts, mission controllers and Houstonians.
After two years of
extended work , this response
was constructed as weightless animals.
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We are three people who make work from our surroundings. We chose space because it's the
ultimate surrounding and because we love the glamour of human attempts to
navigate it. Our work is made from samples and improvisations, visually and sonically.
We interviewed astronauts, hung out with a mission controller, a rocket
scientist, and spent a long time on line gathering raw stuff.
When interviewed, all the astronauts at different moments
apologised for a lack of poetry in their accounts of what the experience of
space travel meant to them existentially. They distinctly described
themselves as not being artists or poets.
Do they need to be? Do we require anyone to articulate space
for us? Or is it simply enough to see and hear it remotely? Our
work is impressionistic sonic cartoons driven by the enthusiasm many human
beings feel for space ventures. Made in episodes, because that was how we
managed to collaborate over time and distance, each piece grew like a
crystal. We made them and then had to put them together in a click response environment.
The site works like a form of archival space related television, but some of it
is an instrument you can play.
Like astronauts we constantly had to endure weight
allowances, so file sizes are optimized and lean but they still might
take some minutes of your time to appear.
In contrast to the digital aesthetics of the net we also
made this vinyl picture disk as a work mate to the site. It rocks. It's
also annette works first collaboration and first vinyl release.
Oh, you might also like to know some of the questions we asked the
astronauts ......
What does it sound like, going there, being there, coming home?
What music did you take with you to listen to when you were not
working?
Each astronaut is
selected from eight thousand candidates within the fields of science and the
military. We were curious about who these people might be and thought that
discovering the music they liked, would reveal something about them. Their
responses actually revealed more about their chosen occupation. Astronauts have
very little time up there to listen to anything recreationally, they snatch
glimpses of earth from the window while they eat some lunch between heavy
science schedules, maintenance and engineering. Their life support systems
create a constant ambience of around 70 decibels, which NASA have recognised as
officially unhealthy and damaging to astronauts hearing in the long term.
The most specific responses to the question of what music did you
take to space included Joan Baez and Johnny Cash, the American Airlines Easy
Listening Classical compilation, Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand
in D and none. One small token of musical respite actually comes from
Mission Control to wake astronauts up in the morning. Each crew member’s
family are permitted to select a piece of music which is transmitted from
ground to space. We were listening to Columbia’s wake up interactions
before the accident and made a piece from it. We also sampled the jukebox in
the official NASA local, made an astronaut dream at 70 decibels, improvised
around ideas on internal/external spaces, on nothing(there is no sound that we
human animals can hear in space of course) and with live electronic activity
from space transmitted via huge radios, and were so inspired by the hairdos zero
gravity creates that we made hair instruments. And more.
Basically we played with the areas that most intrigued us. You'll
hear some of them on this album and get pictures too at http://www.weightlessanimals.com
Weightless Animals offers an artistic sample of contemporary space
travel.
FOR INFORMATION, INTERVIEWS or IMAGES for weightless animals
website, please contact
Wendy Niblock: (tel) 0141 649 4844
(m) 07961 814834 (e) wendyniblock@aol.com
For vinyl orders or
queries, please contact kaffe matthews @annetteworks@stalk.net
ARTISTS’ INDIVUAL WEBSITES
http://www.annetteworks.com kaffe
http://www.hamandneos.com mandy
http://www.zeenaparkins.com zeena
BIOGRAPHIES
London based sound artist, Kaffe Matthews, has been making and performing new music
via all kinds of digital gadgetry all over the world for the past ten
years. From a background in violin, shopkeeping, zoology, drumming, acid
house engineering and a Masters in Music Technology, she is now best known for
her live sampling performances of events and places in real time: processing in
installation, on stage, in galleries, clubs, concert halls, tents, churches,
the outback, warehouses, or tea rooms.She has also been making a growing body
of composed works through collaborations with a variety of people, things and
processes. (see www.annetteworks.com). From working with kites and the weather,
mobile phone communication to a gallery in New York , a journey through and
around Glasgow city centre in a stretch limo with a female chauffeur as a few
examples, she is fast developing her digital processing skills into
multispeaker systems, making beautifully clear, precise works, rich and
vibrational, now tending towards a sparkling mirrored stillness. She also makes
sonic furniture,(armchairs to a double bed), is writing an opera with the lappetites,
and will be transmitting another radio station project this autumn.
Mandy
McIntosh works in the context of public art and filmmaking.
In her films, she constructs subjective synthetic documentary environments
triggered by actual events, real places or sampled objects. In the past year
she has also worked specifically with craft based communities on Internet based
works. She generally splices organic and electronic material to form aesthetic
hybrids, which refer back to pre technological forms of making and towards a
new visual politic implied by the contexts she chooses to work in. The
documentary aspect of her work is rooted in experimental cinematic traditions.
However, the practice of using computer animation to tell true stories exposes
and exploits many of the formal dilemmas of authenticity, which are faced in
contemporary documentary making. In 2001, her film I am Boy was nominated for a
BAFTA. Her public artworks are generally site specific and community based. She
constructs pictorial interventions using aesthetic vocabularies and techniques,
which explore how aesthetics bring meaning. She has worked in geographically
remote locations and inner cities, her work is inter generational in terms of
community engagement and accessed through the mediums of live art installation,
net based activity, television broadcast and knitting patterns. McIntosh worked
for two years in the Paris fashion industry after completing a four-year BA
Honours course in knitwear design.
Zeena Parkins, multi-instrumentalist, composer, improviser, well-known as a
pioneer of the electric harp, has also extended the language of the acoustic
harp with the inventive use of unusual playing techniques, preparations, and
layers of digital and analogue processing. Zeena makes use of anything within
reach as a possible tool, with which she can play, prepare or otherwise enhance
the sonic of her harps. She accurately describes her harp as a "sound
machine of limitless capacity" and has used among numerous household
objects, alligator clips, bows, jar lids, oversized metal bolts, guitar pedals,
and the Eventide Ultra-Harmonizer controlled by MAX/MSP in order to achieve her
extended palette. Zeena collaborated with Bjork on her last album Vespertine
and toured with the singer playing live harp to audiences throughout the world.
She lives and works in New York.