UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear is now online

The first episode of Mr Cole's artist film series UNIVERSAL EAR is now available to watch online in full.

UNIVERSAL EAR is a lost adventure serial charting Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission: to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.”

Mr Cole and his roaming, ever-evolving Universal Ear Studios team have made it their business to (p)reconstruct this unfound serial of the future, episode by episode into infinity. Other texts, videos and supporting experiments have also materialized.

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear was produced during an artist residency at Nexus Art Cafe in Manchester in May 2010 and premiered at Abandon Normal Devices in August 2012. The film stars Stewart Lockwood and Tuesday Betts; music is by Aidan Smith.

In this episode,  heroic ex-postman Harley Byrne travels back in time to 19^th century Romania, to record the world’s first ever remotely delivered electronic music. But while recovering from a dramatic splash-landing, he finds himself falling head-over-heels for his host, the sultry inventress Nola Luna. Is she really all she seems? Will she let him record her electronic ‘Orchitron’? Or will Harley Byrne finally be thwarted in his ongoing mission: to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever?

A new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR will go into production during Mr Cole's forthcoming EMARE residency at Bandits-Mages in Bourges, France.

untitled (Yma Sumac waiting) screening in Manchester

Mr Cole's video untitled (Yma Sumac waiting) will play at Blank Media Collective's Title Art Prize 2013 Awards and Video Jam Event this Friday.

EVENT: Video Jam

WHERE: BLANKSPACE, 43 Hulme Street, Manchester M15 6AW

WHEN: 22nd November 2013, 18.00

COST: Free

NOTES: Live musical accompaniment by an undisclosed act. A blind collaboration. Wine, mulled cider and art.

Unedited Finale Reel from It's Nick's Birthday with live accompaniment in Manchester

Lurid unedited rushes from the finale of our musical It's Nick's Birthday will play with live musical accompaniment at Video Jam in Manchester this Sunday. Please attend.

 

Unedited Finale Reel from It's Nick's Birthday @ Video Jam 5, Manchester

WHERE: Antwerp Mansion, Rusholme, M14 5RF

WHEN: Sunday 17th March 2013, 19.00

COST: £2

NOTES: Live soundtrack by a mystery guest musician

 

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear to premiere in Manchester this Friday

Thrills in the hills! Love, tussling and deceit at dizzying altitudes!  The first episode of UNIVERSAL EAR has now been completely (p)reconstructed and will premiere at the 4th Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester this Friday.

There’s love, tussling and deceit at dizzying altitudes as heroic ex-postman Harley Byrne travels back in time to 19^th century Romania to record the world’s first ever remotely delivered electronic music. While recovering from a dramatic splash-landing, he finds himself falling head-over-heels for his host, the sultry inventress Nola Luna. Is she really all she seems? Will she let him record her electronic ‘Orchitron’? Or will Harley Byrne finally be thwarted in his ongoing mission: to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever? Find out in...

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear @ Abandon Normal Devices
EVENT: AND 2012 Shorts, Programme 1
WHERE: Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH
WHEN: Friday, 31st August 2012, 1pm
COST: £3 - £5.50 (advanced booking recommended)

 

Down The Rabbit Hole: watch online

Dear Blogspot,

Dazzled by the bright lights of Facebook and Twitter I forgot to tell you the parade film previously alluded to is now complete and ready to view online.

Here it is, anyway, complete with original song by Aidan Smith.

Down The Rabbit Hole premiere in Manchester this Saturday

The Institute's short film of the 2011 Manchester Day Parade will premiere with a free screening at Manchester's Nexus Art Cafe this Saturday at 2pm.

A 5-minute Super-8 odyssey tracing the preparations and parade-day antics of the Nexus Art Cafe float (a giant travelling tea party complete with aerialist owl), the film features a specially composed new song from staff composer Aidan Smith.

The film will show during the lunch rush at Nexus, and all are welcome to venture down into the subterranean cafe to buy a brew and/or pie and/or sweet thing to keep your mouth busy while it plays. The film will be introduced by filmmaker Graeme Cole and aforementioned songsmith Aidan Smith.

There are some preview photos on our Facebook page.

Down The Rabbit Hole @ Nexus Art Cafe
WHERE: Nexus Art Cafe, 2 Dale Street, Manchester, M1 1JY
WHEN: Saturday 18th February 2012, 2pm (cafe open all day)
COST: free

Psychotransitionary datamoshing on parade, with MC John Cage (apologia)

nb: If you are not trained in the interpretation of psychogeographic metering I recommend you start the video and let it play while reading the notes below. It is not meant to be entertaining.

Technical Notes

I AM SO SORRY

It is often said that a film or video should stand up on its own, unsupported by the post-rationalisations of its progenitor. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but anyway in this case the movie is a mistake and I feel I owe you an explanation.

COMPRESSING/DECOMPRESSING EMOTIONAL VALUES

Last week I set out to edit our short film of the Nexus Art Café float at the Manchester Day Parade 2011. The footage had been shot on Super 8 film and transferred, out-of-house, to digital, and I had watched it back in the latter format without any problems. However, when I then imported the same digital file into the Institute’s post-production engines for editing, I was confronted with the images you see in the above video. Something had gone wrong. I assumed it was me.

My first instinct was to delete the file. But since a lot of my work here at the Institute involves the recovery of lost films, I took pity on whatever future-me might have the job of reconstituting the canon of ‘unintentionally datamoshed parade movies of the early twenty-first century’. I saved him or her a job by saving the corrupted file. Anyway, when one ‘deletes’ a digital file it is not actually erased, but only marked for overwriting - and so, if data-energy is never truly destroyed but only restructured, might I not learn more from my mistakes by taking responsibility for restructuring the file's raw information myself?

I set about charting the binary ruins of the video, and it was not long before I began to notice a familiar pattern. Having seen the uncorrupted rushes of the parade, I recognised amongst the rearranged pixels a visual echo of the route we took. There, through the luminous video-fog, could be made out the streets and buildings and the dancers and even some of their moves. But, in addition, the newly fragmented pattern seemed to channel the conflicting feelings I felt on the day:

• The pride I felt in representing with my Nexus comrades and celebrating my adopted city, shattered by self-consciousness and crowded-room loneliness into neat rectangular shards.
• The particular dismal brand of existential emptiness I’ve only previously felt during extended periods of inactivity while playing left-back for the GM Hurricanes, punctuated by the giddy euphoria of eye contact with this old friend or that sworn enemy in the crowd.
• The desire to dance and the fear of falling over, expressed through neurotic video jitter.
  

Somewhere between committing the images of that day to film, and translating it into a digitally manipulatable form, it seemed that the movie had become corrupted moment-for-moment by the emotions I felt on parade. How?

You will remember (and it doesn’t matter if you don’t) that for three months over the summer of 2010 we were asked to vacate the Institute while one of the major search engine companies mapped the dynamic emotionality of the premises for its latest online cartography resource: a (still) unnamed(*1) psychogeographic atlas of the known universe. It so happened that, as they worked in our absence, several expensive pieces of their psychocartographic machinery were irreparably blown due to incompatibility issues with the Institute’s wiring. The workmen dumped the remains in the Institute’s gardens before they left, and since that summer our IT manager(*2) has frequently raided this abandoned equipment for spares. I asked him: was it possible that some kind of ghost codec had hijacked the parade file and decompressed its latent emotionality? Some frustrated algorithm designed for compressing psychogeographically-metered video, now released from its silicon purgatory by the integration of its motherboard into the Institute’s hardware infrastructure?

He told me No, it was not possible, but that as emotion is a matter for the heart and meaning is created in the mind - and if it would make me feel better - I could certainly ‘read’ the video as some kind of pseudo-scientific videograph of the emotions I felt on parade. This did in fact make me feel a bit better. Then he pointed out that nobody else was going to see the corrupted video anyway, which made me feel worse again - yet more determined to salvage the thing.

PIANO HACK

The moving images were saved by mere fact of their re-contextualisation. By considering the broken video from a psycho-transitionary angle, it had meaning again, without even needing to be ‘restructured’. But it still wasn’t much fun to watch, and it needed some sound. It would be dishonest to create and sync up a psychogeographic soundmap after the matter, and besides I didn’t have the processing power to facilitate such an endeavour. Instead, I thought about a song.

The idea of chance discovery and the turning of unfavourable circumstances to one’s creative advantage called to mind John Cage’s invention of the hacked piano, or ‘prepared piano’ as it was known at the time. It is a story that he recounts on Indeterminacy, a recording of 90 one-minute tales ranging from composer-clique gossip to Zen parable. Cage was the most important composer of the twentieth century but he died without hearing the word ‘Pro Tools’. So I decided to rip/sample/steal this most pertinent anecdote of his and add a beat: time, rather than tone, being the fundamental index of music; and beat music being an instant fix for unwatchable movies.

In the original recording of the story, Cage solves a technical problem - how to create percussive music in a room where there is only a piano - by opening up the piano and attaching objects (a pie plate, a nail) to its strings. I decided to hack the narrative so that in the remake he solves the initial problem but creates a new one, accidentally inventing Dance Music (rather than music for a dance) and being unable to un-invent it. This unhappy ending, this punchline of undesired creative productivity, brought the anecdote closer to my own experience.

The audio facilities at the Institute are less than ideal. The track was put together using Audacity 1.2.6 on an iMac with a 600 MHz G3 processor and 256MB RAM for your listening pleasure, though it might have been easier to use tape and scissors. Bring on the interface city where a gesturally operated Protools XI will be embedded in the ambience of bus shelters! In addition to the Cage number, The John Cage Bounce (as the new song was christened) samples The Rose by Nine Circles and Martin Denny’s March of the Siamese Children. There is no original sound.

TRASH BIN

(*1) I suggested they brand it [search engine company name]Hurt. But by the time they read my email, they had apparently lost interest in building a personal rapport with the Institute’s staff and the series of cold but suggestive replies I received seemed to have been generated by a bot or similar
(*2) whom I detest

Nola Luna IV

An entry in the Glossary project

A filmmaker and contemporary of Nanneman, Nola Luna IV’s style was openly trashy - although she preferred to term her films ‘entertainments’ or ‘invigorations’: the opening line of her only (unpublished) novel reads "They both loved industry, and hated abstract films about the aesthetics of industry." She was not always that way, however: her graduation film was a dense, disorienting piece titled A Running Race For Those Who Hate Music.

Luna was the great-great-grandaughter of the real-life historical figure of the same name, who was represented in the UNIVERSAL EAR episode A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear (portrayed by Briony O'Callaghan in the 2010 premake, below). Of Romanian descent, Luna IV lived her whole life in Manchester but only dated the Japanese.

Selected filmography: Furniture Of The Parasite, I Yearn For Yen (a.k.a. This Bastard Is Greedy), Lunatic Jeweller, This Isn’t Goodbye It’s Goodbyeeeee, Wh-what Are The Rules?, Witness To A Prang

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The revolution isn't finished - it's at home watching TV

The revolution in Manchester lasted barely three days, but it gripped the nation’s undernourished imagination and laid the groundwork for a new utopia founded on tolerance, economic equality and cha-cha-cha. I was there - or nearby - and this is my testimony.

Tuesday 9^th August, 2011

Manchester erupts in a frenzy of erotic wanting and violent taking as the disaffected, the dispossessed and the dizzy plunder city centre shops of plasma TVs, training shoes and ‘high-end’ gadgets. Listening in on the wireless, I experience a sense of liberation at the thought of the ordinary, ordered folk of Britain turning on their heels and telling the powers that be: "you say it’s like that, but we say it’s like this." I am particularly inspired by a live report on looting at the Argos, where enterprising rioters have instinctively split into four teams and are working together to obtain the objects of their desire, one team filling in the little order forms, a second processing them, a third team fetching the loot from the storeroom and the final team operating the collections desk. Of course, no money changes hands, but several of the youths involved find the work so enjoyable that they naively leave their CVs behind upon leaving. Before the night is out, they will be arrested, tried and jailed.

Switching off the radio to instead mentally map the chaos by the direction of passing sirens, my mind starts to wander: those first few successful revolutionaries will already be home by now, wiring up their plasma TVs. But is there ever anything on? And besides, aren’t these front room monoliths in fact the inherently exploitative cornerstones of the very capitalist pseudo-democracy we’re up in arms against, pumping out constant reminders of what else we don’t have and why the system to perhaps, eventually, get it all, works? Destroying our environment and our hard work as they break down at a time pre-allotted according to the standard practice of planned obsolescence? And the warrantee isn’t even valid when you stole the telly in the first place.

These thoughts prey on my mind, and it is while I am cooking my tea that I decide to become a revolutionary leader. Seeking encouragement, I text my mum (neither of us has a Blackberry):

This is me: Viva la revolución!

This is my mum: O.K. xx

Wednesday 10^th August, 2011

All night I dream of shooting men in top hats, garrotting bankers with the strings of their own squash rackets and laughing freely but seriously in forest idylls with lank-haired revolutionettes. When one’s very dreams are shaped by the presumption and disinformation of the media one should not sleep in. I rise early and head into town to confront and inspire my people, but most of the other revolutionaries rise late, no doubt tired by a night of rioting and phone-in Bingo on the wide-screen.

An early blow is dealt to the revolution when David Cameron appears on TV to calm the nation and disparage the rioters. Several revolutionaries, seeing our glorious P.M. in high definition for the first time, immediately repent and break back into the very shops they’d previously looted in order to return their plasma TVs and ‘high-end’ gadgets. They are quickly arrested, tried and jailed.

I identify a small band of revolutionaries in Piccadilly Gardens and make myself known to them. I have deliberately not shaved so as to be taken seriously. Robbing the tools of our own oppression, I tell them, has to stop. By stealing such status symbols, we highlight the arbitrary retail value of the desired items and so reinforce our own economic subservience. One of the revolutionaries starts crying and his sister takes him home. I am pleased my words have had an impact but disconcerted when I see a ‘fed’ who has been listening in gives me a nod of approval.

I break for lunch, gazing around the shopping centre at capitalism’s last stand as the red burrito juice of revolt drips down my chin and onto my overcoat.

Despite the electric atmosphere of a town where everyone’s waiting for the punchline, the insurgency fails to materialise. The word on the jealously guarded screens of our communication devices is that it’s "too rainy" and that many of the revolutionaries would prefer to stay in with their new plasma TVs. There are some skirmishes around 10pm when they pop out to loot some snacks but all in all it is a quiet day for the revolution.

Like many of those who returned empty-handed from the previous night’s riots, I start to wonder if maybe I waited too long to move and somebody else got all the best ideology.

Thursday 11^th August, 2011

I rise late having stayed up trying to subvert all manifestations of the mass media as found in my digs. I short-circuited my radio in the sink (partly by accident) but had less success with my record collection. You can’t detourn Cugat - he’s just too good.

The last of the sirens fades into the distance. The morning is spent drawing up plans for the new world order, although to be honest my heart is no longer in it. Most ideas are either self-defeating or too long-term to really get excited about. I settle on the following four-step revolution:

1. Wait for new model of plasma TV to come out. Mobilise comrades by exploiting their desires.

2. Hold pre-riot meeting (new tie?). "This time we won’t steal plasma TVs, we’ll steal MediaCityUK."

3. Non-violent, non-burny revolution.

4. Some kind of lengthy mass indoctrination process for revs and counter-revs alike. Elimination of mutual suspicion, one-upmanship, fetishisation of luxury goods, bourgeois post-industrial concepts of "quality", and television gameshows; and the propagation of mutual respect and empathy, selflessness, slowing down a bit, art as leisure, leisure as art, robot slaves and Cugat.

As I now have no means of following the aftermath of the first, failed revolution, I pop over to the paper shop to buy an MEN. The shopkeeper is in good spirits, boasting about the deterrent power of our "vigilant community": I tell him that "one man’s vigilant community is another man’s vigilante community" but he doesn’t seem to appreciate the nuance and I pick up a TVTimes to change the subject.

The MEN predictably tows the counter-rev line, mocking the revolutionaries for not fully understanding the nature of their own misery and condemning them for rioting in a confusing and ungentlemanly fashion. I mention this to a neighbour as she wheels in her recycling bins, and she sagely replies, "let he who has never lashed out irrationally due to a lifelong build-up of undefined frustration cast the first stone." She is immediately arrested, tried and jailed for incitement to riot.

(In other news, privileged NatWest customers are invited to buy a £12 ticket to a promotional screening of the latest Anne Hathaway flick at Heaton Park. It is not clear where the big screen came from. Bring a picnic. Bring your friends.)

Backgrounds

An entry in the Glossary project

As an idealistic young civil servant, years before the inception of the Catalogue project, Nanneman’s efforts to understand the city of Manchester were frequently outrun by his desire to influence and improve it. Nanneman’s idea for an upturned and sunken city, a metropolis in which the windows of the buildings would lay on the earth’s surface and simultaneously reflect and take energy from the sun, and into the 'back' of which - towards the earth’s core - we would hurry in our harnessed boots in times of climatic or environmental distress, and the right-angled window-roofs of which would form, as we lay upright to sleep, a nocturnal study area for hairdressers and statisticians, may well have been inspired by the bizarre perspectives he experienced during al fresco trapeze sessions. Critics have scoffed that Nanneman would have considered himself, in such a world, a kind of perpendicular god. But such a poke at Nanneman’s architectural earnestness overlooks the importance of his early cityscape sketches to our understanding of Nanneman the man, and to his later work on the Catalogue. Working along the corridor from Manchester’s cliquish city planning department, Nanneman must have known even as he drew that his basement city would never be built: that it would exist only, but not merely, as an imaginary city, perhaps to be wandered by those trapped meanwhile in the penthouses of his own memory and who were deprived, like the sideways city, of physical manifestation. However, the city’s flatness, its submersion, the topsy-turvy topography itself drawn from the dizzying isolation of thousands of hours of trapeze work, would later be transformed into the flat worlds of his redestructivish cinema vision - in the demotion of the third dimension, in the essential separateness of parallel planes, in the partial re-angling of obsolete artefacts to serve new purposes, and in the overwhelming redestructivish tendency to turn in on itself: Nanneman’s city was, at heart, an impulse to release a fleet of steel- and glass-churning ploughs across the cityscapes that he’d always found emotionally inhospitable, and neaten up whatever remained.

It was perhaps in deference to his early urbanist ambitions that Nanneman did not later transform this - his most ambitious - cityscape blueprint into a useable redestructivish Background, instead appending digital fascias to Hanni’s comprehensive videography of Manchester’s outer surfaces, the nature of which can only now be appreciated through the surviving labels - City With Swellings, Tropical Metropolis, Anonymous City, Wooden Town, and so on. Or perhaps the superficiality of these urban visions, in contrast to the complex, warped optimism of his early sketches, reflected Nanneman’s realisation that it would take a force greater than the will of a provincial civil servant to realign the character of a city whose flesh, no matter how smartly swathed in the attire of a communication age it played no small part in creating, remained stubbornly ingrained with the soot of industrial-economic subservience.

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