Here
is an attempt to document our 2nd piece made for dOCUMENTA (13).
Viewers are given an ipod and headphones and asked to follow the
prerecorded video through the old train station in Kassel. The
overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in the
viewers brain. Hard to document and harder to explain. We only present
the recorded audio here, but when doing the walk the real sounds mix
with the recorded adding another level of confusion as to what is real
and what is fiction. Wear headphones to get the full effect of the
original binaural recording.
This is a 6 minute clip of a 26 minute piece. Credits for the entire piece follow.
Habitus' explores - through a creative dialectic - the way human
consciousness is shaped by the compartmentalised structures of the
places we inhabit -- primarily the home and workplace - and the
habituated behaviours we perform within these various nodes. The
mechanical actions we carry out each day -- lead to feelings of
disillusionment and disengagement with social reality. The only objects
and 'tools' that have the transformative power to expand consciousness
are those commonly used by shamans in ritualised contexts - to induce
altered states of perception for the purposes of healing, transcendence
and revelation.
Habitus refers to lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Perhaps in more basic terms, the habitus could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste. The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that are prevalent within other disciplines of social science research. It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment.
Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on the notion of Habitus by explaining its dependency on history and human memory. For instance, a certain behaviour or belief becomes part of a society's structure when the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and becomes socialized into individuals of that culture.
On Monday at 1.15 pm in HUMlab at Umeå University Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor at New School, New York will give a seminar on “Hearing Urban Infrastructures: A Sonic Archaeology of the Media-City”. The abstract is:
Abstract: For over a century, scholars and designers
have acknowledged the existence of a spatial form commonly known as the
“media city,” which encompasses both the modern city as represented
through photographs, film,
and digital technologies; and the city as shaped by those same
technologies. In this seminar I argue for the need to acknowledge the
longue durée of the “media city,” and to move beyond ocularcentric
models of urban history. Drawing on the growing body of
research on infrastructure that’s emerging from across the design
fields, and on work in “media archaeology” within my own field of media
studies, I’ll argue that we need to “excavate” the deep history of urban
mediation, and I’ll take as an example an aspect
of the media city that wouldn’t seem to lend itself easily to
excavation. I’m referring to the “sonic city” – the city of public
address and radio waves and everyday conversation. How does one dig into
a form of mediation that seemingly has no physical form?
What can we learn about how our cities have functioned as material
sounding boards, resonance chambers, and infrastructures for various
forms of sonic communication?
I have heard Shannon speak before, have been following her work and have met her as well. This will be a killer presentation for anyone interested in urban space, audio studies, transmediality, digital media and media archeology. If you are in Umeå or within 500 kms of it I suggest attending in person. For others there will be a live stream open upon the hour; http://live.humlab.umu.se/
Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor at New
School, New York. Her research interest include relationships between
the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural,
urban, and conceptual
-- they create and inhabit. Additional areas of interest include,
generally, media and design history and theory; and, more specifically,
media form and materiality; media reception (especially reading) and the
spaces in which we store, access and consume
media; textual theory; and media and spatial poetics. Shannon keeps a lively blog here: http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/
I am featured in a special in The Guardian online on what Punk really means for those who were there. The sterile and still Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective on Punk seems stupid when one considers what Punk was really about; basically freedom, self-expression, non-conformity and anti-boredom. In the UK and the USA these tenants of Punk lasted about 6 months once it had moved beyond the squats, crowded venues and warehouses where things were considered 'dangerous' into the streets and TV screens of the nations.
By the mid-1980s I was a huge fan of Talking Heads, The Cure, The Smiths, The Clash, as well as local Australian bands like The Saints, The Stems, The Hoodoo Gurus, The Screaming Tribesmen, The Wreckery, The Birthday Party, and even Midnight Oil (which was more hardcore at the start).
Living in Queensland, Australia was another reason to be punk. The atmosphere in the state by 1990 was one of cultural siege if you were interested in any form of expression that breached the walls built by 25 years of single party government that was Conservative in the fascist sense of the word. For more on how it was living in Brisbane and being punk in the late 1980s and early 90s the chapter Rock Against Work in Andrew Stafford's Pig City: From The Saints to Savage Garden (2004) contains many references to venues, bands and even gigs I remember.
Punk hit Brisbane like no other city in Australia. The tentacles that
grew out of New York and London from the musical explosion of 1976
affected the receptive waiting enclaves in each major city around the
globe in varying ways. As the music and images of the Ramones, Patti
Smith, early Pere Ubu, Television and the Sex Pistols were heard and
seen, bands formed, systems started and the word spread. Brisbane was
different, for two main reasons: we had Bjelke-Petersen and The Saints.
Bjelke-Petersen represented the kind of crypto-fascist, bird-brained
conservatism that every punk lead singer in the world could only dream
of railing against. His use of a blatantly corrupt police force, and its
heavy-handed response to punk, gave the scene a political edge largely
absent in the other states. And The Saints were the musical
revolutionaries in the city's evil heart - Tales from Pig City
By the early 1990s I was Punk! I had fled Queensland (or Queersland and my friend Monty and his band would have had it). In 1992 I moved to Sydney and spent many nights seeing this band:
Nunbait first formed in Sydney in 1989. The band’s first release was 500-copy run of a self-pressed single,
“Track Trauma” (1990). After winning a battle of the bands at Sydney’s
Lansdowne Hotel, Nunbait secured a contract with Australian underground
label Waterfront Records,
which resulted in a mini-album, “The Hub” (named after a Newtown porn
theatre), in 1990. Nunbait opened for Butthole Surfers (Burland Hall Newtown, 1991), Mudhoney (Phoenician Club Sydney, 1990), Einstürzende Neubauten and The Beasts of Bourbon (Phoenician Club Sydney 1991), Nirvana (Selinas, Sydney, February 1992),Helmet (1991), Fugazi (1991) as well as performing tours/shows with Superchunk and Australian underground acts including Tumbleweed, Cosmic Psychos, and the Celibate Rifles.
