mp3 (6:36)
field recordings, synthesizers, carpet, harmonica, delay, amplifiers, etc.
Personnel: Andrea Williams, Chris Williams, Jason Das
The Glass Bees will be performing on Saturday and Sunday, June 12-13 as part of the FIGMENT festival of arts on Governors Island, just off the southern tip of Manhattan, and a stone’s throw from Red Hook, Brooklyn. Even if we weren’t participating, you really shouldn’t miss this one-of-a-kind explosion of creativity at one of the most spectacular locations in New York City.
Our interactive, site-specific performance “Reading Governors Island” will combine sound, images, and audience-contributed spoken word. We’ve compiled historical and contemporary texts about Governors Island and invite FIGMENT attendees to be photographed and recorded reading excerpts. Later in the day, we will present a performance mixing the voices and faces we’ve collected with other sounds and images from around the island. This project is an exploration of the location and the context of FIGMENT, bringing past and present, environment and human intervention, and performers and audience into play.
We will begin recording participants’ voices at 10:00 AM and perform our installation at about 3:00 PM each day. Come early, let us record you, enjoy the festival, and then come back later on to hear what we’ve come up with.
We should also add that if you’re a parent, FIGMENT is a great way to experience lots of art in a setting that young children can totally enjoy!
Maps of the festival will be available at the event. We’ll be set up between Building 555 and the harbor, near the intersection of Craig and Clayton. Please note this is a different location from what was originally announced.
You can reach Governors Island via ferry from the Battery Maritime Building (located just east of the Staten Island Ferry in Manhattan) or Fulton Ferry Landing in Brooklyn. Here’s full directions. And check out all the other interesting exhibits and activities on the Island.
We hope to see you there!
mp3 (7:30)
voices, field recordings, WMD Geiger Counter, Loud Objects Noise Toys, delay, amplifiers, etc.
Personnel: Chris Williams, Jason Das
We’ll be performing with Ranjit Bhatnagar on his handmade instruments along with other instruments (mostly made in factories in China or Japan) at the opening of the ScrapCycle show at Devotion Gallery In Williamsburg.
This performance will be more open-ended and expansive than our March performance which was dedicated to demonstrating some of these instruments.
Bora Yoon and Tom Vanderwall will also be performing.
The opening opens at 7:00 p.m. on May 7th at Devotion Gallery, located at 54 Maujer Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11206. The price of admission is a used water bottle, which they may be using for some project or perhaps to serve you the complementary refreshments.
ScrapCycle places an exchange-value on upcycled and reused materials, in order to probe the environmental effects of economic perspective. By presenting concrete implementations of reuse and recombination, ScrapCycle(reUSE/reCOMBINE) serves to liken the small pervasive effects of social sculpture, environmental activism, and economic perspective to a fine-tuning of interdependent parameters with global results. ScrapCycle(reUSE/reCOMBINE) references complexity science as it relates to political economy, ecology, and methods of reuse and recombination (i.e., small-world networks, social systems theory, ecological systems theory, evolutionary computation, genetic algorithms, neural networking).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
© Jason Das
lovely, though I was a little disappointed not to find an imagined meeting between the Queen and the Purple One.
— Sabnis Bear February 17, 2008 #
Sabnis, you’re awesome! I had the same image when I read the heading on my Google reader and I’m from NYC.
Good job, per usual, Jason!
— Olivia Lane February 17, 2008 #
Yeah, I know, sorry. That is part of the magic of that intersection, though, those names! Plus that store Karikter (or however they spell it these days) is there, though they’re not as exciting to me as they used to be.
— Jason Das February 17, 2008 #
This is 2 funny, just like Sabinis and Olivia…I ventured 2 this page with a similar image in mind!
Nice!
— Jill February 17, 2008 #
Maybe I’ll do Crosby and Prince next …
(thanks for liking, all!)
— Jason Das February 17, 2008 #
How do you even approach a subject like this? It’s a wonderful drawing, accurate but fluid … I would have a nervous breakdown concentrating on those details, even in depicting them via artistic shorthand.
— E-J February 17, 2008 #
Well, I live in a pretty much constant state of nervous breakdown.
It’s not nearly as accurate as you may think it is. A lot of things are “wrong” relative to the actual buildings—not on purpose, just cause I screw up a lot. But as long as it all pulls together in the end, who cares! It’s not like architects and engineers will have to work off of my rendering.
But as to your basic question, E-J, I start in one spot and just draw out from there. I try to pick a scale and placement that will result in a good composition, but it’s kind of a crapshoot. As much as I attempt to predict, I never know for sure how much of a scene will fit on the page. Sometimes things I was really looking forward to drawing just don’t make it into the frame.
— Jason Das February 17, 2008 #
Great cityscape!
— Casey February 18, 2008 #
Thanks for that insight, Jason. I have never enjoyed drawing buildings because there is always something utterly misobserved in my drawing, no matter how hard I imagine I’ve been looking – and I think it simply means I’m not looking analytically enough. It’s straight line phobia!
— E-J February 19, 2008 #