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Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds

Music for Sleeping & Waking Minds (2011-2012) is a new, overnight work in which four performers fall asleep while wearing custom designed EEG sensors which monitor their brainwave activity. The data gathered from the EEG sensors is applied in real time to different audio and image signal processing functions, resulting in continuously evolving multi-channel sound environment and visual projection. This material serves as an audiovisual description of the individual and collective neurophysiological state of the ensemble. Audiences are invited to experience the work in different states of attention: while alert and asleep, resting and awakening.

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Under The Couch

This CD album also includes a booklet with an essay by Lucia Farinati This recording was made under the famous couch of Dr. Sigmund Freud at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of the Psychoanalysis, lived here 1938-1939. The house is now the Freud Museum [www.freud.org.uk]. From the museum’s website: Freud’s couch, upon which his patients would comfortably recline during psychoanalytic sessions, was normally covered by an Oriental rug throw. Underneath the throw, it is a plain and simple structure, raised by a scroll and pad at one end, though fully upholstered with springs and horsehair stuffing. The couch is rather short, so that the patient would not lie horizontally, but with the head quite high, supported by several cushions and pillows. According to Freud’s wife Martha, in an interview with Princess Marie Bonaparte in 1938, the couch was given to Freud by a grateful patient, a Madame Benvenisti, in about 1890.

The most important thing with this project is the method, the attitude and the process of doing it, doing the recording UNDER the famous couch, As a sort of parallel to the psychoanalytic method. And presenting it as a report from this «underworld». Using the recording devices as tools for to detect, for to extract what might be hidden there through more than 100 years of Psychoanalytic practice.

You can see this audio CD as a report from this investigation of the sounding «unconsciousness», the couch’s unconsciousness if I may say so. I have been working with the recorded material, trying to extract some «information» out of it. I am happy with the result.

The delicate and subtle information are there of course, but maybe difficult to hear. That’s how it should be. It is more about that this is done, and the «method» than anything else. The interpretation is up to the listener. Recorded on the 14th of September 2011.

Recording devices: ZOOM H4n, Voice Recorder Diasonic DDR-5000, Mini Cassette Recorder Olympus S701. Cover and label photographs by LE taken during the recording session. Many thanks to the Freud Museum for so generously having me under the couch. Special thanks to Lucia Farinati and Dr. Sigmund Freud.

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Artist at Sleep

”Artist at Sleep“ is a sound intervention exploring articulation of bare human presence through medium of sound and addresses the state of sleep as a creative moment in contrast to the idea that the creativity can only result from conscious activity. The title of the work ”Artist at Sleep“, pays direct tribute to Mladen Stilinović’s conceptual piece ”Artist at Work“ (1978), and Andy Warhol’s film ”Sleep“ (1963).

Installed closely to the artist’s sleeping body at night, several microphones were used to record the breathing and minute body movements in a silent bedroom, occasionally registering distant sounds of the city outside.

The resulting sound is being played through a large-scale speaker installation ”KLANGHIMMEL“ in Vienna’s MuseumsQuartier at night. The sonic presence of an amplified and enlarged sleeping body is created, lying quietly on the square.

The projection of the intimate sounds of the sleeping artist via an array of loudspeakers onto a vast public square transforms what was initially unintentional into a performative act.

The ambiguous tensions brought out through this displacement create a paradoxical space, where the sonic presence of the sleeping body becomes ubiquitous yet foreign, performative yet not, public and intimate, all in the same moment.

2011. Multichannel sound intervention. 300min.
To be played late at night (2am-7am)

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Stream of Unconscious

The Stream of Unconscious is a single work composed of 24 albums on 12 cassette tapes. Each album forms a single chapter of the novella written by Bryan Lewis Saunders using the stream of unconscious method of writing, whereby he transcribes his unconscious dream descriptions and somniloquy. The vocals on each album are the source material for the writings and at times are manipulated by the artists/musicians involved.

Instructions: Play on repeat with headphones on while falling asleep and the bobcat will enter your dream. Adjust volume for comfort. It may take a couple of tries on consecutive nights and a slight familiarity with the text.

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EDEN EDEN EDEN

EDEN EDEN EDEN (2009) is an overnight audiovisual performance and memory processing ritual that takes place between midnight and 7 am. It is composed of continuous live sound and film projections. An ensemble of musicians gradually assemble and disassemble a 26-voice chord; the chord is built as a 13-part natural harmonic series that continuously beats in near-unison with itself. A projector shows three superimposed films of original Super-8 film materials by Chloe Griffin. The films are prepared as continuously extending loops, and recorded onto a single video. Aural and visual acts become chaotically resonant through their continual repetition. Members of the audience, who are invited to sleep during the performance, shift between waking and dreaming states. Afterwards, their memories coincide.

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Autohagiography

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James Webb, “Autohagiography,” 2007, voice recordings of the artist under hypnosis broadcast from speakers sewn into the headrest of a black, leather chaise longue.

The artwork is in the collection of the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Art Museum, Gqeberha, South Africa.

Above image from MMXII, James Webb’s survey exhibition at the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 2012. Photograph by Anthea Pokroy.

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45 minutes from underneath the beds

Recorded, mixed, and adapted at Firework Edition, Stockholm, December 1999. This is the second recording/track in a series called From Underneath The Beds, adventures and researches under different beds wherever or whenever they appear. Reissue of Absurd # 6 with bonus tracks (tracks 2 to 7).

This particular piece opens with a brief, distorted (can’t tell if the manipulation was electronic or organic) somewhat stream-of-consciousness monologue (a letter to someone?) about the advantages of the bathroom over other rooms in an abode, which then segues into what I’d gather is a suicide note. As the narration continues, a slow rumbling percussion fades in and then eventually out. This lasts for about five minutes. The last 40 minutes is abstract drone, etc.

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The Maybe

For seven days, eight hours a day, Tilda Swinton performed The Maybe – an enigmatic and evocative work exploring a series of unanswerable questions from within the confines of a glass case. Glass display cases around the gallery contained objects relating to the passing of time – relics of famous fascination, traces of lives lived, objects of historical resonance and of prurient curiosity. Swinton, enclosed in her own glass cabinet – a living, breathing, silent being – invited questions of mortality and of time.​

Conceived and performed by Swinton and first performed at the Serpentine Gallery in London in an installation created with Cornelia Parker in September 1995, thereafter in the Museo Baracco in Rome in a collaboration with Pierre et Gilles in 1996 and, in 2013, at MoMA in New York.

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My Bed

My Bed is a sculpture by the English artist Tracey Emin. The work consists of her bed with bedroom objects in a disheveled state. First created in 1998, it was exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize.

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