The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum briefly available to watch online

Our fine colleagues and overlords at the Bandits-Mages organisation have seen fit to make an online copy of UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum available as a salve for the general public during the coronavirus lockdown. It will be public for just two weeks. One of those weeks has already passed. The video is posted below this text; if you can't see it there, you've missed the boat.

At the same time, the good people at the Moving Image Artists organisation have included UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear in their online MIA Screens series. It features a new written introduction by Mr Cole.

These events coincide with the ten year anniversary of the first production of UNIVERSAL EAR in May 2010.

The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum book, film, & exhibition in Bourges

Following Graeme Cole's EMAP/EMARE artist residency of September 2017, an exhibition and outpouring of new materials are due to take place in the city of Bourges, France.

The exhibition celebrates the collaborative (p)reconstruction of yet another episode of Mr Cole's artist film cycle, UNIVERSAL EAR. It contains the movie itself, looping every half-hour; additional video materials and properties from the set; scraps of discarded research; and an artist's book, available to buy from the gallery or online. The limited edition book will be removed from sale at the end of the exhibition.

From November 16th-December 2nd 2018, the exhibition UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum will take place at Le Haïdouc – Antre Peaux, the premises of media arts organisation Bandits-Mages, who hosted the residency. The show is a satellite manifestation of an exhibition of EMAP artists' work, RACCOMMODER LE TISSU DU MONDE (Mending the Fabric of the World), curated by Annick Bureaud, which takes place during this year's Les Rencontres Bandits-Mages.

EXHIBITION: UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum
OPENING EVENT: Friday 16th November, 2018, 20.00 (FREE)

WHERE: Le Haïdouc – Antre Peaux, 24-26 route de la chapelle, 18000 Bourges, France.

WHEN: Friday 16th November - Sunday 2nd December, 2018. Monday to Saturday, 14.00 – 18.00. Sunday on demand.

COST: FREE

Launch of a temporally-limited edition book: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

The Institute is proud to announce the launch of our first book.

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum was created by Graeme Cole with Aleksandra Niemczyk, in response to Mr Cole's EMAP/EMARE residency at Bandits-Mages in Bourges. It is available for just 21 days during this year's Rencontres Bandits-Mages, where this UNIVERSAL EAR episode will also appear in movie form as part of an installation until 2nd December.

Here's the science:

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum by Harley Byrne

229pp, paperback, 12/11-02/12/2018

Reconstructed by Graeme Cole (text) and Aleksandra Niemczyk (illustrations) from the unfound memoirs of Harley Byrne.

Available to buy in a temporally-limited edition during Rencontres Bandits-Mages 2018, 12th November-2nd December.

BUY NOW £8 +£5 postage and packaging (UK & international)

Harley Byrne’s ongoing mission is to capture and make available for download “all the world’s music, ever.” This novella-length extract from his memoirs tells the full story of Byrne’s adventures in Bourges, France, 2187AD.

While working on his escape from slavery in the reverb mines of 32nd-century Detroit, Byrne is tipped off to the existence of a form of ‘rogue sim electroacoustic pop’ created by a pair of sentient statues in 22nd-century Bourges.

But when he arrives in the historical city, he discovers it to be an ontologically dubious virtual heritage site, overrun with corrupt holograms, cyborg saints, and the occasional native telling fisherman’s tales from deep VR.

What’s more, one of the musicians is missing: the lab-cultured, organic statue of Saint Ursinus, recreated from ancient DNA but barely more than an adolescent.

In order to track him down, Byrne must navigate the ever re-loading maze of the city, outwit the crazed busts of Bourges’ most celebrated sons and daughters, and keep hold of his senses under the effects of the curse of the phantom tympanum.

Available for 21 days only, the first UNIVERSAL EAR book was created as part of an EMAP/EMARE artist residency at Bandits-Mages, Bourges, further supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. The book also contains a photographic project - A New Ontology of Hallucination - and Mr Cole’s studio log from the residency. A film adaptation of the adventure will loop as part of a Curse of the Phantom Tympanum exhibition at Le Haïdouc – Antre Peaux in Bourges from 16th November-2nd December 2018.

* Please note this is a small-scale, non-profit art project. We will endeavour to dispatch your book anywhere in the world within 5 days but please bear with us. Queries before and after purchase can be directed to graeme[at]zoomcitta dot co dot uk.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 38

UNIVERSAL EAR EMAN#EMARE residency enters Phase II

The second phase of Graeme Cole’s EMAN/EMARE artist residency with Aleksandra Niemczyk at Bandits-Mages will begin today.

The duo arrived in Bourges two weeks ago to begin preparations for a new episode of UNIVERSAL EAR, an unfound time-travel adventure serial of the future. The new episode is titled The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum, and takes place in a future Bourges in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, holographic and augmented reality meta-levels populated by looping historical monuments wandering impossible virtual heritage spaces. 

Today, the team will take to the studio at ENSA (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Art Bourges) to begin a period of intensive construction and experimentation ahead of the shoot, which is intended to take place during the final week of September. An artist’s book and supporting videos and digital materials will also be produced, with the work intended to be exhibited in 2018. 

The project can be followed on Mr Cole’s blog, Twitter, by joining the UNIVERSAL EAR Facebook Group, and on the official UNIVERSAL EAR website (Tumblr). 

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Image credit: Elly Strigner

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 10

After a fairly nondescript couple of days (hence they have not been described in these pages) of hammering away at the script and malingering around our Bourges digs recovering from Monday night's accident, Thursday begins with a little light leg treatment before we join Robin-Tyrek in the Bandits-Mages van for a trip to the shops.

Niemczyk changes my dressing.

We try to upcycle and recycle as much as possible at Universal Ear Studios, partly out of the belief that it makes little sense to ransack the planet in the name of modulating the soul, but mostly out of adherence to the quasi-mythical cineaste and TVaste Francis Dove's aesthetic school of 'clunkyism'. Of course, we need some things to stick these old bits of junk (and cardboard) together, so we start at Brico Dépôt for masking tape and paint brushes. On the way out, we are shocked to see La Dépôt stocks a range of doors that are both named and styled after the fourteen members of arch-villain Being's girl gang in one of the many unfound UNIVERSAL EAR spin-off series. It's surely a work we should look at in closer detail in the near future.

Who would you cast in each of these roles?

Honing Robin-Tyrek's cardboard-sensing capabilities.

Outside, however, the sky mocks our efforts with row upon row of perfect cartoon clouds and a pink castle that's clearly been made with the cardboard from a giant toilet roll. It is surely time for a classic French 2-hour dejeuner.

We lunch on gourmet fast-food burgers and dreadful coffee amongst the concrete gardens of Bourge's inhuman industrial suburb (which we should actually make a point of boycotting since it's killing the city). Robin-Tyrek fills in some gaps in my knowledge of the local history, particularly the subcategories of fire and pastry, and suggests that the 'ass' of the cathedral that was pointed out to us the other day is just one of many profane flourishes to be found around the building, reasoning that the cathedral took so long to build that the workers just got bored and started freestyling. Now that's what I call heritage!

Next we make the journey to an Emmaüs du Cher outlet packed with dusty, half-broken, once-beautiful things-de-house, from tasteless oversized and completely desirable furnitures to stinking books and haunted ornaments. The counter-intuitive, hand-crafted, and in many cases vernacular nature of these objects is a testament in miniature to a time before the helicopters came to drop Brico Dépôt-sized architectural onesies packed with affordable, car boot-friendly goods across the west's under-exploited sub-suburbs. As we prepare to leap into a project that can't help but highlight the absurdity of the things we label and treat as heritage objects and locations, it sort of makes one want to scrape the filth off those wretched, beautiful former possessions of wretched, beautiful former people and reanimate the DNA in a corrugated-iron warehouse theme park of the bad taste and good times of the city's countless golden ages.

I can't wait for this band to come on.

UNIVERSAL EARLog III: Day 1

I am currently without a digital camera, so this entry has been illustrated with stock photographs.

We are building a team, here in Bourges, for our project: to (p)reconstruct a lost episode of an unfound time-travel adventure serial of the future -

UNIVERSAL EAR: The Curse of the Phantom Tympanum

- and to carry out various other tests, experiments and disciplines. The episode itself is set in a future Bourges where (following the over-zealous efforts of a corrupt heritage minister) wise-cracking holographic statues and ontologically dubious virtual heritage sites have more or less ousted any form contemporary human life (or ‘live heritage objects’ as we might become known).

We are putting together a team, but for now it’s just Aleksandra Niemczyk - my partner in love and art – and myself ‘in the field’, with support from the Bandits-Mages team back at base. Our crew arrives at the beginning of September; Lockwood and Betts will of course rejoin us in their roles as heroic Harley Byrne and his nemesis, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

In the meantime, we’re working on finding a better job description for Niemczyk’s role in this project in relation to mine, aside from her role as production designer: co-pilot? augmenteer? vasulker? I had some idea that the ideal term might be found somewhere in the nomenclature behind ‘three-strip’ film; the idea that we’re each exposing different prime colours of the finished thing. But there’s no word there that would look cool enough on a business card.

Today, we attempted a sort of dérive soumise (does that just about translate as ‘submissive drift’?). Rather than the follow the traditional counter-spectacle spirit of the dérive we embraced city planning and the heritage industry by beginning to follow, as closely as possible, the route of a sinister circle that appears on the city map to demarcate everything that is within an 8-minute walk of the famous cathedral. A circle which, even if its position was quite deliberately chosen for reasons shadier than tourist convenience or to make particular emphases, must still contain some element of randomness, some unexpected ambiences (ambience is a key element of Phantom Tympanum). We hoped, in other words, to grab a slice of the city’s sound life while illuminating some conspiracy that would tear apart city hall and the Alchemists Guild.

The Cathedral of St Etienne of Bourges. (Actual
Cathedral of St Etienne of Bourges not shown).

Niemczyk taped the sound as we went and, if our footsteps give us away on the recording, we were quite disciplined in remaining wordless. Occasional bursts of my Super 8 camera motor when we reached points that were touched by the circle will both augment the ambience and help us to align the film material with the sound material when the former is eventually processed.

Unfortunately, my British foolhardiness led us out on this scientific expedition at the height of the day’s heat and, when we abandoned the project at the exact halfway point, we found ourselves dehydrated and without water in a town whose high streets suddenly seemed devoid of any tabac or even so much as a Tesco Express.

Casting our principles to the wind, we cut back straight through the city, cross-sectioning our sacred circle, past the cathedral, our will fading. The historic stone dissolved like a hallucination or an unconvincing virtual reality transition, into endless sand dunes peppered with melting monuments: we were to die in the desert.

Thankfully we were two, and our mutual encouragement (even when Niemczyk slowed to photograph an abandoned shop or stencilled graffito that briefly rematerialized) saw us reach the south-west of the city and the familiar sight of Le Panier D'Auron grocers where you can always get a litre of water and a plastic-wrapped croissant. Logically, our plight cannot have lasted for longer than 16 minutes, but time is subjective when all you see around you are shimmering mirages of the re-animated, location-specific historical moments you’ve been reimagining in front of a laptop for the past six months.

Tomorrow we will attempt to complete the other half of the circle. Seeing as Niemczyk was on sound duty today, I’ll take it tomorrow – giving us, in effect, one semi-circular ear each on the city. Is there a job title for Niemczyk somewhere in that image?

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.

Recontres Bandits-Mages Program Notes

On Monday, our absurdist cop flick Epizoda ? had its international premiere at Recontres Bandits-Mage. The event's director Isabel Carlier asked me to select some films to play alongside our own, within the themes of this year's encounter. These are the program notes I composed for the event, including some thoughts on my 2017 residency at Bandits-Mages:

The three movies that form the program may not at first glance have much to do with each other. A meta-documentary on love and identity, a post-Tsukamoto monster romance, and a broken-down detective show. But each presents a vision of instability from their surface scaffolding, through their foundations, deep into whatever’s below. In each movie, the potential for transformation is hinted at, but it’s a transformation that is inseparable from destruction. The movies are maintained as much by the volatile portals that open up in the fissures as by the physical substance that weighs them down.

Kaori Oda’s Twitter biography used to read, “Am a camera”. Now it says, “filmmaker / log”. Her identification as a media cyborg does not preclude a profound and troubled humanhood. She watches and she records, but very quietly she also talks. ‘Thus a Noise Speaks’ is ostensibly about gender, sexual and family identity but the video’s mechanical exoskeleton is tangled in these vines. This is the digital human hybrid as a breathing video archive.

Ghazi Alqudcy has a morbid interest in the everyday and a healthy interest in the morbid. In ‘My Parents Are Animals’ we witness degradation, humiliation, excreta and noodles. A park, a kitchen, a doctor’s office become the showgrounds for subversion of the established social, physical and biological rules: yet love, as we know, remains a survival game requiring adaptation, submission, cruelty and affection.

Somehow the free-associating doctor of ‘My Parents’ is a cousin of Detective Inspector Colin Giffard, the English-named Bosnian detective of my own ‘Epizoda ?’. Giffard’s tragedy is that he is the privileged and inevitable outcome of a system to whose underlying code he has been refused access. As with ‘Thus A Noise Speaks’, the generic form and the wet content make for a pensive chimera; however, Kaori’s video nurtures an unpredictable potential for growth, while in ‘Epizoda ?’ we find only rot. Yet, both are processes that require the progress of time. When making ‘Epizoda ?’, I never asked myself if Giffard is searching for salvation: I only knew that this media dinosaur wanted to make it safely to the end.

Residency

When we virtualize our culture it becomes vulnerable to evaporating on a hot day or blowing away in the wind. Decay is history evolving. A stone monument remains alive even if blown apart. Its negative imprint stands sturdy in the memory dust. What do we mean when we talk about protecting our “way of life”? Can it be described as an endless reel of gestures and actions (with periods of snoozing)? Could we reduce it to a choreographic score, save it in scrolls and reanimate it? How different would the playback look if it was scored by Edvard Munch or Charles M. Schulz?

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

Each episode sees Byrne travel to another time and place, where his efforts to find and record humanity’s rarest musics are hindered by his arch-enemy, Being, mysterious mistress of disguise.

It has become my own personal mission to (p)reconstruct these as yet unmade pocket adventures, one by one into infinity.

Inspired by recent developments in ‘virtual heritage’ – hologram Buddhas, hologram dead pop stars, 3D printed replicas of the still-smoking remains of Syrian monuments – I shall follow Harley Byrne to a future Bourges we don’t yet know: a future in which the concrete present overlaps with 3D, hologramatic and augmented reality meta-levels in a manner that is not so much ‘mixed-reality’ as ‘mixed-authenticity’.

What will the great-great-granddaughters of today’s heritage ministers consider important enough to preserve in ever-looping projections, town square battles and beheadings that recur in full digital fidelity each day with sharper regularity than the lighting of the street lamps? Which personal accomplishments and disasters will solipsistic curators make virtual space for in the alleys and byways of a city frozen in the past by the technologies of the future? What hymns to sing in the graveyards we’ll build for our virtual PA’s? What bitcrushed cries will echo through these temporal interstices with musical regularity?

Cf. alltheworldsmusicever.com

Epizoda ?

My Parents Are Animals

Thus A Noise Speaks

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear in Bourges

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear at Bandits-Mages Gatherings 2013, Bourges

EVENT: Découvertes des rencontres: Programme 1
WHERE: Théâtre Jacques Cœur, 16 rue Jacques Cœur, Bourges
WHEN: 14th November 2013, 14.30
COST: Enquire at venue