The X-Ray Audio Project

We are telling a story of forbidden music, cold war culture and bootleg technology  with a documentary, book, live events and travelling exhibition.

Many older people in Russia remember seeing and hearing strange vinyl type discs when they were young. The discs had partial images of skeletons on them and were called 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

In an era when the recording industry was ruthlessly controlled by the State, an alternative source of raw materials was found to make illegal recordings - used X Ray plates obtained from local hospitals.

"The Age of the Bones" was a period lasting about fifteen years during which the sound of forbidden Russian and Western music was associated with images of the human skeleton. It was a period of what might be called "roentgenizdat" - the audio equivalent of  "samidzat" private publication of banned written works.  

In the Soviet states during the cold-war era, most modern Western bands and music was banned for all sorts of reasons including 'neo-fascism', 'mysticism' and even 'obscurantism'. Much Russian music was also forbidden for a variety of other reasons. Even certain rhythms were regarded unfavourably. But a vibrant, secret and risky trade grew up in what became known as 'Bones' or 'Ribs'.

These Bones were medical X-Ray fluorography sheets unofficially obtained from hospitals, cut into discs and embossed with the grooves of bootlegged gramophone records - a kind of medical version of a DJ dub plate. The quality was poor and the discs wore out quickly but the cost was low, just a couple of roubles compared with the fabulous cost of an actual Western LP.

To listen to Bones records go here.

There are many stories to be told about the people who made these recordings and how or why they did it. Some of them not only bootlegged the discs themselves but also copied the machines that made them in order that the process spread and persisted. They were often people who were fired up with a passion to share music, who risked and sometimes lost their liberty at a time when listening to certain songs was an offence and the private copying of music could result in a gaol sentence.

Despite the inevitable imprisonments and clamp downs, the culture of the Bones persisted right up to the early sixties when reel-to-reel tape recorders became common enough for this laborious real-time process involved to no longer be necessary.

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Archaeologies of Media and Film, University of Bradford and National Media Museum

September 3, 2014 – September 5, 2014

Keynote Speakers: Jussi Parikka, Thomas Elsaesser, Peter Buse

An international conference on media archaeology organised and hosted by the University of Bradford and the National Media Museum in association with the Royal Television Society and Bradford City of Film.

The aim of this conference is to bring together researchers, archivists, curators and artists working in the field that has become known as "media archaeology": an approach that examines or reconsiders historical media in order to illuminate, disrupt and challenge our understanding of the present and future.

The conference is organised and supported by the University of Bradford, the National Media Museum and Bradford City of Film.

More info here

The program for this conference is available via the following link.

Final Programme

Controlling Sound: Musical Torture from the Shoah to Guantánamo, by Melissa Kagen

“Purely physical torture is losing importance,” observed the psychologist Gustav Keller in 1981. “Psychological and psychiatric findings and methods are taking its place, planned and sometimes administered by white-collar torturers.” This statement, though prescient, is debatable: plenty of purely physical torture has been reported by former prisoners of Guantánamo and Bagram. The implication, however, is one of progress: that torture has been civilized, professionalized, in some way stripped of its teeth.

After the news broke that American soldiers were torturing detainees in secret prisons like Guantánamo, the idea spread that so-called “no touch” torture is more humane than more conventional methods involving violence to the body. No-touch torture utilizes methods like sleep deprivation, temperature regulation, violation of cultural and religious taboos, the playing of loud music, and psychological manipulation while interrogating prisoners. These methods, though often brutal, frequently don’t leave physical marks, thus nebulizing the concept of torture and leaving the act more open to interpretation.

Music torture at Guantánamo is a prime example of this mindset. Endless news cycles discussed whether waterboarding, hooding, and playing loud music could even be considered torture. Musicians, when asked for comment about “music torture”, sometimes responded dismissively: Metallica’s James Hetfield replied to the news with the comment, “We’ve been punishing our parents, our wives, our loved ones with this music for ever. Why should the Iraqis be any different?” Bob Singleton, who composed the often-used Barney the Purple Dinosaur theme song, wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Would it annoy them? Perhaps … But could it ‘break’ the mental state of an adult? If so, that would say more about their mental state than about the music.”

The implication that these torture methods are somehow softer or easier to withstand than traditional methods is an interesting but dangerous fallacy. In no-touch torture, the torture weapon is the prisoner’s own body, which aches in stress positions, shivers, sweats, and demands sleep. The body itself becomes the enemy, psychologically destroying the prisoner from the inside out.

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Supernatural Sound: Science and Shamanism in the Arctic, by Tim Fulford

Toolemak’s voice

Scanning the horizon off the coast of Greenland in 1822, William Scoresby witnessed the impossible: floating in the sky was an upside down ship. “It was,” the whaling captain wrote, “so well defined, that I could distinguish by a telescope every sail, the general rig of the ship, and its particular character; insomuch that I confidently pronounced it to be my father’s ship, the Fame.” And this despite the fact that no ship was visible upon the water itself.

“I was so struck with the peculiarity of the circumstance,” Scoresby noted, “that I mentioned it to the officer of the watch, stating my full conviction that the Fame was then cruising in the neighbouring inlet.” Scoresby was correct: the airy phantoms not only resembled his father’s ship but, like the supernatural images seen by those with second sight, were premonitions of it. Scoresby senior’s ship subsequently appeared over the horizon, floating the right way up on the sea.

In the same year, the captain of a Northwest Passage expedition found his ears playing even stranger tricks than had Scoresby’s eyes. Meeting “a few male wizards,” among the Igloolik, George Lyon invited their “principal,” named Toolemak, to demonstrate his magical skills:

[He] began turning himself rapidly round, and in a loud powerful voice vociferated for Tornga with great impatience, at the same time blowing and snorting like a walrus. […] Suddenly the voice seemed smothered, and was so managed as to sound as if retreating beneath the deck, each moment becoming more distant, and ultimately giving the idea of being many feet below the cabin, when it ceased entirely. His wife now, in answer to my queries, informed me very seriously, that he had lived, and that he would send up Tornga. Accordingly, in about half a minute, a distant blowing was heard very slowly approaching, and a voice, which differed from that at first heard, was at times mingled with the blowing, until at length both sounds became distinct, and the old woman informed me that Tornga was come to answer my questions. I accordingly asked several questions of the sagacious spirit, to each of which inquiries I received an answer by two loud claps on the deck, which I was given to understand were favourable.

At length, the “voice gradually sank from our hearing,” Lyon related, only to be replaced by an “indistinct hissing” that reminded him of the tone produced by the wind on the bass chord of an Aeolian harp. This was soon changed to a rapid hiss like that of a rocket, and Toolemak with a yell announced his return. I had held my breath at the first distant hissing, and twice exhausted myself; yet our conjurer did not once respire, and even his returning and powerful yell was uttered without a previous stop or inspiration of air.

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Witches and Wicked Bodies at The British Museum

This exhibition will examine the portrayal of witches and witchcraft in art from the Renaissance to the end of the 19th century. It will feature prints and drawings by artists including Dürer, Goya, Delacroix, Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, alongside classical Greek vessels and Renaissance maiolica.

Efforts to understand and interpret seemingly malevolent deeds – as well apportion blame for them and elicit confessions through hideous acts of torture – have had a place in society since classical antiquity and Biblical times. Men, women and children have all been accused of sorcery. The magus, or wise practitioner of ‘natural magic’ or occult ‘sciences’, has traditionally been male, but the majority of those accused and punished for witchcraft, especially since the Reformation, have been women. They are shown as monstrous hags with devil-worshipping followers. They represent an inversion of a well-ordered society and the natural world.

The focus of the exhibition is on prints and drawings from the British Museum’s collection, alongside a few loans from the V&A, the Ashmolean, Tate Britain and the British Library. Witches fly on broomsticks or backwards on dragons or beasts, as in Albrecht Dürer’s Witch Riding backwards on a Goat of 1501, or Hans Baldung’s Witches’ Sabbath from 1510. They are often depicted within cave-like kitchens surrounded by demons, performing evil spells, or raising the dead within magic circles, as in the powerful work of Salvator Rosa, Jacques de Gheyn and Jan van der Velde.

Francisco de Goya turned the subject of witches into an art form all of its own, whereby grotesque women conducting hideous activities on animals and children were represented in strikingly beautiful aquatint etchings. Goya used them as a way of satirising divisive social, political and religious issues of his day. Witches were also shown as bewitching seductresses intent on ensnaring their male victims, seen in the wonderful etching by Giovanni Battista Castiglione of Circe, who turned Odysseus’ companions into beasts.

During the Romantic period, Henry Fuseli’s Weird Sisters from Macbeth influenced generations of theatre-goers, and illustrations of Goethe’s Faust were popularised by Eugène Delacroix. By the end of the 19th century, hideous old hags with distended breasts and snakes for hair were mostly replaced by sexualised and mysteriously exotic sirens of feminine evil, seen in the exhibition in the work of Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Odilon Redon.

The exhibition will also include several classical Greek vessels and examples of Renaissance maiolica to emphasise the importance of the subject in the decorative arts.

25 September 2014 – 11 January 2015

Free 

Room 90

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Sound Mirrors Echo Obsolete Military Technology as Art Installation

Before the invention of radar, the British military experimented with acoustic mirrors as a means of detecting approaching enemy aircrafts. Rather than displaying blips on a screen, these strategically placed parabolic monoliths simply reflected ambient noise from their concave surfaces, making it easier to discern far-off sounds, like the drone of an airplane’s engine.

After learning about the existence of these curiously primitive and imposing pieces of outdated surveillance equipment, which are still standing along stretches of England’s coast, artist Tim Bruniges recreated these interactive objects in a gallery setting. Earlier this year, in an exhibition called MIRRORS at Brooklyn’s Signal gallery, Bruniges installed a pair of 9 by 9 foot sound mirrors that he constructed from wood and concrete with microphones embedded in their center. The sculptures faced each other to create an interactive sound experience for visitors to the cavernous gallery space.

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Mediumship & Folk Models of Mind and Matter

The following is excerpted from Talking with the Spirits: Ethnographies from between the Worlds, edited by Jack Hunter and David Luke, published by Daily Grail Publishing.

Introduction

This chapter explores the role of experiences with trance and physical mediumship in the development of folk models of mind and matter, at a non-denominational spiritualist home-circle called the Bristol Spirit Lodge. Mediums and sitters often claim that mediumship has led them to understand the world differently, and to appreciate that the standard materialistic view of science is inadequate as an all encompassing model of reality. Certain key themes and concepts have emerged from my informants’ experiences with mediumship that hint at alternative models of understanding the relationship between mind and matter, including the idea that bodies are permeable, that matter is essentially non-physical, that consciousness is far more expansive than our normal waking state would lead us to believe, and that persons are multiple, can survive death, and may be influenced by external spiritual entities.

 To begin, we will briefly examine the anthropological debate over spirit possession,  taking a quick tour through the various theoretical models developed to account for the existence of this human phenomenon. This will be followed by an introduction to the history of Spiritualism, and in particular to physical mediumship, in order to give an idea of the kind of spirit mediumship that forms the basis for discussion in this chapter. The chapter will conclude with an analysis of extracts from ethnographic interviews with members of the Bristol Spirit Lodge.

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Psychic Science, by Sir Oliver Lodge (1922)

In the long evolution of humanity, we trace, first, the gradual emergence of the organic from the inorganic, the utilisation of highly complex chemical compounds for the formation and purposes of life, and then the gradual rise of living things in the scale of existence, until at a certain stage the rudiments of mind and consciousness begin to make their appearance. At some unknown time after this, must have arisen the power of choice and knowledge of good and evil, which may be regarded as the most definitely human characteristic. Then humanity, too, went on rising in the scale, until it blossomed and bore fruit in the creations of Art, the discoveries of Science, and in works of genius.

Nor is development likely to stop there. Hitherto we have known life and mind as utilising the properties of matter, but some of us are beginning to suspect that these psychical entities are able to utilise the properties of the Ether too - that intangible and elusive medium which fills all space; and if that turn out to be so, we know that this vehicle or medium is much more perfect, less obstructive, and more likely to be permanent, than any form of ordinary matter can be. For in such a medium as ether, there is no wearing out, no decay, no waste or dissipation of energy, such as are inevitable when work is done by ponderable and molecularly constituted matter - that matter about which chemists and natural philosophers have ascertained so many and such fascinating qualities. Physicists, chemists, and biologists have arrived at a point in the analysis of matter that opens up a vista of apparently illimitable scope. Our existing scientific knowledge places no ban on supernormal phenomena; rather it suggests the probability of discoveries in quite novel directions. Any possible utilisation of the ether, however, by discarnate intelligences must be left as a problem for the future. What appears to be certain is that life and mind require for their manifestation and terrestrial development some form of "material" in the broadest sense, and that there is certainly an interaction between mind and earthly matter.

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Spiritual Materiality: Contemporary Sculpture and the Responsibility of Forms, by Klaus Ottman

There is a history of forms, structures, writings, which has its own particular time—or rather, times:it’s precisely this plurality which seems threatening to some people.” —Roland Barthes

With the introduction of the notion of artistic will or urge, the Kunstwollen, which he believed to be an expression of the spiritual conditions of the time, the 19th-century Austrian art historian Alois Riegl opened the prevailing mechanical-materialistic formalism, the Kunstmaterialismus of Gottfried Semper and his followers, to concept and ideology. American critic Clement Greenberg, whose essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” has dominated American formalism since its publication in 1939, can be considered a modern descendant of Semper’s materialism. Just as Semper defined art exclusively by the parameters of material and technique, so Greenberg speaks of the “pure preoccupation” of the modern avant-garde “with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in those factors."

While Greenberg’s formalism denies form meaning, a European version, independently proposed by Russian film director and theorist Sergei Eisenstein and French structuralist Roland Barthes, following Riegl’s model, recognizes form as ideology and engages in an intimate investigation into the materiality of an object and its “functioning.”

In a conversation with Guy Scarpetta, Barthes hinted at a possible alternative to Greenberg’s formalism: “We should not be too quick to jettison the word ‘formalism’…attacks against formalism are always made in the name of content…The formalism I have in mind does not consist in ‘forgetting’…content…content is precisely what interests formalism, because its endless task is each time to push content back…It is not matter that is materialistic, but the refraction, the lifting of the safety catches; what is formalistic is not ‘form’ but the relative, dilatory time of contents, the precariousness of references.”

Instead of a mechanical-materialistic formalism, Barthes suggests a scrupulous examination of an object’s materiality as theoretical act. It is this structuralist activity that defines the object. Materiality becomes structure, an “interested simulacrum.” It “makes something appear which remained invisible, or if one prefers, unintelligible, in the natural object.”

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Gérard Courant - Michel Nedjar's portrait (1978 - silent)

quote

"I am inclined to believe that our personality hereafter will be able to affect matter.  If this reasoning be correct, then if we can evolve an instrument so delicate as to be affected, or moved, or manipulated...by our personality as it survives in the next life, such an instrument, when made available, ought to record something."

Thomas Edison, "Edison's Views on Life After Death", Scientific American (1920)

The Museum of Jurassic Technology

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, California is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.

Like a coat of two colors, the Museum serves dual functions. On the one hand the Museum provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities. On the other hand the Museum serves the general public by providing the visitor a hands-on experience of "life in the Jurassic"

The public museum as understood today, is a collection of specimens and other objects of interest to the scholar, the man of science as well as the more casual visitor, arranged and displayed in accordance with the scientific method. In its original sense, the term "museum" meant a spot dedicated to the muses - "a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." By far the most important museum of antiquity was the great institution at Alexandria founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus in the third century before Christ, (an endeavor supported by a grant from the treasury). And no treatment of the museum would be complete without mention of Noah's Ark in which we find the most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen.

The museum fell into dark oblivion, as did all institutions of learning, with the coming of the Middle Ages. However, during these dark times, the churches and monasteries, through collections of curiosities, allowed the spirit of the museum to burn through the ages as the famed Hetruscan sepulchral lamps burned through the ages without benefit of air or fuel in the dark of the tomb.

Relics and curiosities could be found in nearly every parish church no matter how small. In the ninth century, a hair from the beard of Noah was shown at the Abbey of Corbie. In the choir of the church of Ensisheim in upper Alsace, there is a portion of a meteorite which fell to earth in 1492; and there were antediluvian bones in the church of St Kilian at Heilbronn, in Wurtenberg. "In some churches, two eggs of ostriches and other things of the like kind, which cause admiration and which are rarely seen, are accustomed to be suspended, that by their means the people may be drawn and have their minds the more affected."

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The Acoustics of War, by Daria Vaisman

By the early 1990s, the United States was reassessing its self-image. The major conflicts of the last century—the two World Wars and Vietnam—had, for the most part, already been consigned to history (for a younger generation, they were only more media kitsch). But a protracted Cold War had kept the United States in a defensive posture for decades; now that the USSR had dissolved, the US no longer worried about the threat of a nucle­ar attack. The military wanted weapons that reflected the US’s new international role. What to do? In 1991, the Pentagon issued a directive to test an emerging class of arms: Called "non-lethals," these weapons were meant to disable their targets "in such a way that death or severe permanent disability was unlikely."

Most international policy was, at that point, riot control. The US had become a peripatetic interventionist, dabbling in United Nations sanctions and adjudicating regional skirmishes as if they were protests at a college rally. For an optimistic military administration, non-lethals were the humanitarian antidote to atom bombs. By 1996, the US had invested nearly $37 million in research for non-lethal weapons.

The ideology behind "non-lethal" weapons was not new. Police had used chemical sprays and rubber bullets, to name just two, to quell domestic riots in the US throughout the 1960s. A second-wave of non-lethals were introduced in the Gulf War and then, later, in Somalia in 1994: sticky foams to adhere a person to an object or another person; caustics to dissolve tires and roadways; lasers to disorient and temporarily blind; acoustic weapons that used high-decibel noise to cause pain, or infrasound to cause unbearable nausea. The US had already discovered, while dropping bombs over Vietnam, that sudden, high-decibel noise would deafen people, though this was not what non-lethal researchers had intended. (The 1907 Hague Convention clearly prohibits the use of "arms, projectiles, or materials calculated to cause unnecessary suffering.") But it presented an interesting question: Was it possible to project sound at a precise decibel level that caused pain without permanent ear damage? Furthermore, there was anecdotal evidence suggesting that at the right frequency, infrasound would "liquefy [people's] bowels and reduce them to quivering diarrheic masses."

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The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland

The Kingdom of Elgaland-Vargaland was founded by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Leif Elggren. A Kingdom which extends across the entire world, the only global nation. We have annexed and taken over all borders on Earth, all no-man’s-lands, the space that exists between all states, and declared this our physical territory. We did this in 1992, and since then we have established diplomatic relations with many different countries around the world by opening embassies and consulates. We have a constitution, we have a currency, we have stamps and we have passports for our citizens. We are a new and expansive country. We have applied for membership in the UN. We see two different routes to a new world order: one involves the gradual expansion of our physical territory through the breakdown of existing states into ever smaller units (possibly all the way down to the individual person). This would give us more and more land area as new borders are added. The other route involves states merging and abolishing their borders and thereby eventually eliminating us. Here again we would be moving down towards the level of the individual person. Both routes lead, in their own ways, to the same point…

The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland has its own life now, continuing by itself. People are taking their own initiatives, doing what they want and need to do. And that is good, of course. We only started the whole thing. It must develop and change and go further on its own.

I believe that the borders around nations, especially the wealthier ones, are getting tighter and more important these days. So much to lose, so much to protect. A lot of bullshit is spoken about the global village and togetherness and all that, but the past couple of months clearly indicate where we are going and have been going for a long time now. We do not need to cross a certain border, because we are the border. The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland is the border. I am the border. We have suggested to the UN that they can collaborate with Elgaland-Vargaland for to send personnel and intervene in conflicts between nations wherever they appear.

More here

Official site here 

Cabinet Magazine article here 

Sacred Bones, by Mark C. Taylor

Throughout much of human history, bones have been associated not with death but with life. In many cultures, people actually believe bones are the seat of the vital principle or even the soul. As the locus of life, bones have mystic powers ranging from cure and divination to birth and rebirth. In the Hebrew Bible, Eve is born from Adam’s rib: "bone from my bones" (Genesis 2:21—22). In other biblical texts, bones appear to be conscious and even able to speak. The Psalmist declares:

My very bones cry out,
‘Lord, who is like thee?—
thou savior of the poor from those too strong for them,
the poor and wretched from those who prey on them.’
(Psalm 35:10—11)

The most important and widely held belief is that bones can be reanimated and therefore are essential to rebirth. This conviction is especially common among people in northern Eurasia as well in parts of Asia and can also be found in the myths of Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, South America, Oceania, and Australia. Ancient civilizations in Iran, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Ugarit also believed in the reanimation of bones.¹ One of the most remarkable accounts of the resurrection of bones appears in the book of Ezekiel.

The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he carried me out by his spirit and put me down in a plain full of bones. He made me go to and fro across them until I had been round them all; they covered the plain, countless numbers of them, and they were very dry. He said to me, ‘Man, can these bones live again?’ I answered, ‘Only thou knowest that, Lord God.’ He said to me, ‘Prophesy over these bones and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord God to these bones: I will put breath into you, and you shall live. I will fasten sinews on you, bring flesh upon you, overlay you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me, and as I prophesied, there was a rustling sound and the bones fitted themselves together. As I looked, sinews appeared upon them, flesh covered them, and they were overlaid with skin, but there was no breath in them. Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the wind, prophesy, man, and say to it, These are the words of the Lord God: Come, O wind, come from every quarter and breathe into these slain that they may come to life.’ I began to prophesy as he had bidden me: breath came into them; they came to life and rose to their feet. (Ezekiel 37:1-10)

Where there is belief in reanimation, bones are often preserved after the flesh has decayed and are treated with special care. In some cases, they are given a separate burial or are preserved as objects of worship.

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Book: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult, by Luciano Chessa

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) - painter, composer, builder of musical instruments, and first-hour member of the Italian Futurist movement - was a crucial figure in the evolution of twentieth-century aesthetics. As creator of the first systematic poetics of noise and inventor of what has been considered the first mechanical sound synthesizer, Russolo looms large in the development of twentieth-century music. In the first English language study of Russolo, Luciano Chessa emphasizes the futurist's interest in the occult, showing it to be a leitmotif for his life and a foundation for his art of noises. Chessa shows that Russolo's aesthetics of noise, and the machines he called the intonarumori, were intended to boost practitioners into higher states of spiritual consciousness. His analysis reveals a multifaceted man in whom the drive to keep up with the latest scientific trends coexisted with an embrace of the irrational, and a critique of materialism and positivism.

Media Archaeology Lab: Opening the Archive, Disrupting the Museum, by Lori Emerson

Founded in 2009 and currently part of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Department of English, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) gives students, scholars, and members of the general public access to obsolete, functional media from the early twentieth century to the twenty-first century for hands-on research, teaching, and research creation. In this regard, the MAL is unique. Perhaps most importantly and broadly, the MAL turns the concepts of “archive” and “museum” inside out in the interests of disrupting two interrelated, cultural tendencies: a) the tendency to create neat teleological arcs of technological progress that extend from the past to the present and b) the tendency to represent such arcs through static exhibits that display the outside and surfaces of these artifacts rather than their unique, material, operational insides.

In my own research, I have used the MAL to describe a non-linear and non-teleological series of media phenomena – or ruptures – as a way to avoid reinstating a model of media history that tends toward narratives of progress and generally ignores neglected, failed, or dead media. However, I have come to recognize this sort of research is only one of the practices the MAL affords its interlocutors. I have come to understand it as a sort of “variontological” space in its own right, a place where, depending on your approach, you will find opportunities for research and teaching in myriad configurations as well as a host of other, less clearly defined activities made possible by a collection that is both object and tool. The MAL is an archive for original works of digital art/literature along with their original platforms. It is an archive for media objects. It a site for artistic interventions, experiments, and projects via MALpractices (residencies for artists and writers to first work and experiment directly with our materials and second, exhibit or perform their work either in the MAL or at a Colorado-based museum or gallery), MALware (our on-demand publication that documents events, MALpractices, and interdisciplinary thought taking place in and through the lab), and MALfunctions (monthly events for entrepreneurs, hackers, activists, academics, artists and designers that act equally as a hackerspace, makerspace, or straightforward venue space as a way to express the MAL’s extraordinary configurability). From the perspective of the university, it is a flexible, fluid space for practice-based research from a range of disciplines including literature, art, media studies, history of technology, computer science, library science, and archives and it is an apparatus through which we come to understand a complex history and the consequences of that history. From the perspective of the private sector and local tech/startup companies, the MAL offers a range of past solutions for present problems and it also offers these companies a compelling argument against planned obsolescence as many of the machines in the lab (such as the Altair 8800b) are over thirty five years old and not only function perfectly, but also make possible certain modes of interaction and creation that are not possible with contemporary digital computers.

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Inside the Paris Home of a Founding Father of Electronic Music, by Joseph Nechvatal

PARIS — Pierre Henry, aged father of electronic music, lives in a small house that also serves as his studio, in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris. I recently went there with a small group of people to hear one of his magnificent musique concrète

concerts that he performs live from his studio mixing board. It was an incredible and rare experience, similar in audio effect to his Intérieur/extérieur CD that contains the concert series Pierre Henry chez lui (“Pierre Henry at his place”) organized by the Festival d’Automne in Paris in 1996.

Speakers had been intricately placed throughout the different floors of the small house, and we took up seated positions among them so as to better get immersive satisfaction from this master’s mind-blowing art music. Comfortably seated, my eyes could not but help but wander over the walls, many of which were covered in Henry’s artworks, rather complex assemblages of existing objects and images. The art on the walls matched the structural conditions of his music perfectly, as it too is an art that is assembled from recorded sounds and noises, woven together into a (somewhat) coherent flowing whole. This is an art of sound montage and mixing. A lot of mixing: take for example Henry’s “La dixième symphonie de Beethoven” (1979–1988), where he mixes together some extracts from nine symphonies of the German composer.

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