Reel to Real

'Reel to Real' is a sound curating project, funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Collections Fund, designed to catalogue, digitise and  make available online, in gallery spaces and beyond, the Pitt Rivers Museum's unique archival field recordings. The content of the recordings ranges from spirits singing in the rainforests of the Central African Republic to children's songs and games in playgrounds throughout Europe.

The project website includes information about and playlists from all of the Museum's original ethnographic recordings, video and interview resources, ethnomusicology seminars, their SoundCloud account and much more. 

Reel to Real Project Website here.

Visualiser combining Bayaka sound waves and images

The related  SoundCloud account can be found here, and customised playlists and sets can be found here.

Let's dance

It's the festive season where we may well find ourselves at  parties dancing.

To get dance-move ideas you could always watch Ai Wei Wei do the Gangnam style.

But to see something more old-style go here where you can also listen to the entertaining NPR radio program that talks about Muybridge and his life and work.

Stephen Herbert has collected many more of these animations made from Muybridge's photographs and  very much more (perhaps everything!!) on Muybridge and his work here

 

UBUWEB

UBUWEB started out in 1996 as a website devoted to concrete poetry, but it has grown to incorporate the functions of a virtual publishing house, record company and, film distributor. Poet, university professor and amateur archivist, Kenneth Goldsmith is the founder and main editor of Ubuweb. An underground project that has no institutional backing or budget of any kind, Ubuweb is an influential repository of avant garde material

Here you can find conceptual writing, dance, electronic music resources, ethnopoetics, film and video art, visual poetry and many special features. Examples include all ten albums from Obscure Records , Brian Eno’s record label from 1975 to 1978 and Six Films by and about Pina Bausch(1975 - 2006)  in UbuWeb's new Dance section (Christopher Walken dancing to Fatboy Slim anyone?) There we can review works from the career of Pina Bausch (1940-2009) including the beautiful  Orpheus und Eurydike (1975) and a documentary by Anne Linsel, Pina Bausch (2006). Other delights include: Maya Deren's complete oeuvre, a montage of Banksy doctoring Paris Hilton CDs for last year's guerrilla art stunt, interviews with Allen Ginsberg, poetry readings by Bukowski and a selection of rare art films and performance videos by artists from Carolee Schneeman and Tracey Emin to Samuel Beckett and ChrisBurden, video of BillieWhitelaw doing Beckett and  excerpts from Peter Greenaway's series of documentaries on modern UScomposers

A full list of resources is here

http://www.ubu.com/resources/index.html

Twitter is @ubuweb

The Lively Morgue launched on Tumblr

The Lively Morgue For many decades, most of the photographs housed in the newsroom archive of The New York Times — known affectionately as “the morgue” — have been hidden away from the public eye in filing cabinets and manila folders.

The newspaper actually does publish  archival photographs every day and features photos in Lens the NYT photography blog in the 'Lively Morgue feature, an occasional series introduced in September 2010. So far, they have published 17 collections including a fabulous collection of 19 dance shots.

The morgue has at least 10 million frames in all. There are five million to six million prints and contact sheets, each sheet representing many discrete images. There are also  300,000 sacks of negatives, ranging in format size from 35 millimeter to 5 by 7 inches. The picture archive also includes about 4.7 gigabytes worth of imagery on each of 13,500 DVDs.

The NYT has now started to publish the images in greater quantities, again as “The Lively Morgue,” on Tumblr  the social blogging site. On the Tumblr, each photograph can be flipped over so that viewers can see notations on the reverse side, which explain the photos’ path at The Times over the years and there are notes about how to interpret them.

visit Tumblr to see the first images in an ongoing series.

The Arts Desk

Anish Kapoor’s Leviathan, a commission for the Monumenta series at the Paris Grand Palais

Here's a great newletter to keep you up with a wide range of items on what's new and good in the media and the arts . Here you will find theatre and film reviews, features on matters of interest such as  'Is Classical music relevant?'or a list of this year's Festivals , and CD, DVD and book reviews and interviews with people from the arts and a comprehensive listing of whats on in cinemas, theatres, galleries and concert halls. Sign up and get a weekly round up of all this in your inbox. As well as seeing  the very latest in the arts you can also view the archives of the newsletter. To subscribe look for the box on the right hand side of this page halfway down

Transformation and Revelation: UK Design for Performance 2007 – 2011

 Transformation and Revelation opens in Cardiff at the Welsh College of Music and Drama on March 18th. The exhibition is the work of The Society of British Theatre Designers and is a preview before it travels in part to represent the UK at the 2011 Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition this summer. A selection of designs will be on display at the V&A from 17th March – 30th September 2012.
Designs on display will range from Antony Gormley’s Sutra with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and the Shaolin Warrior Monks for Sadlers Wells to Es Devlin’s designs and projections for the Lady Gaga Monsterball Tour. The exhibition will include drawings, paintings and photographs, 3D artefacts, scale models, specialist props, costumes and puppets, and there will be interactive exhibits from Lighting, Video and Sound designers, Theatre Consultants and Theatre Architects.
The exhibition also offers  the first chance to see inside the new RWCMD building currently under construction which is due to open later this year. The exhibition will take place in a number of spaces including the newly built Richard Burton Theatre.
Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, The Castle Grounds, North Rd, Cardiff, CF10 3ER

Monday – Friday 9.30am to 8pm
Saturday and Sunday10am to 5pm
Entrance to this exhibition is free to the general public.

Les Sylphides by the actual Ballets Russes!

Sometimes film can seem as magical today as it must have seemed when film was a new and astounding medium. This is certainly the case when a film clip shows you something you never thought it would be possible for you to see. The Ballet Russes formed by Diaghelev was never filmed (at his insistence) but here a clip which was recently found to great excitement in the British Pathe News archive has been identified as such. It shows a male lead doing some mean Grand Jetes in a blond wig once worn by Nijinsky, in front of  the froth of the Corps de Ballet in an open air performance during the annual Swiss La Fête des Narcisses at Montreux.

More wondrous peeps into the past from British Pathe include Hitler ranting and a Picasso show in 1966 with paintings being hung and Paloma Picasso , and Picasso himself in his studio-wondrous! At British Pathe you can view and buy films and still photographs from the archive of 90,000 videos covering newsreel, sports footage, social history documentaries, entertainment and music stories from 1896 to 1976.

Siobhan Davies-Dance -'Rotor' at the Whitworth Art Gallery

This spring Siobhan Davies Dance presents ROTOR, an inter-disciplinary ensemble of installations and live works by award-winning artists based on ideas generated by dance, at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on from 28th January to 6th February-entrance is free.

There will be live performances including  A Series of Appointments by Siobhan Davies plus Installations including  Stuck by Angela de la Cruz and I’m Going to Show You by E V Crowe .ROTOR has also prompted a selection from the Whitworth’s own art collection, including works by artists such as Barbara Hepworth and Albrecht Dürer, which will be presented in dialogue with live, dynamic performance.