frey

I’ve been thinking a lot about slow life. Having moved from England, where the pace of life is hectic, to Amsterdam, where the pace of life is slower but still fairly fast, I am presently on a residency in a place in Portugal called O Espaço do Tempo (The Space of Time). Here time moves much, much slower.

I’ve taken a job as an interactive installation programmer, four days a week. I’m wanting to keep the extra day for my own projects. At the same time I don’t want to fill every second of my life up. I want to leave time for contemplation in the middle of everything.

I stumbled upon this today: Is Google Making Us Stupid? (via OneGoodMove). I’m finding this idea of contemplation to be extremely important in the artworks that I’m making and planning. Over the last few days I’ve planned and executed a project that takes a video image of a moving scene and turns it into sound. I made it with moving grass in mind, but it should work with any kind of movement. In any case the point of it is to provide a space for contemplation of visual stimuli by augmenting them with sound. In other words, it takes what you are seeing and sonifies it, in a way that makes you more aware of the movement and thus better able to slip into a state of contemplation, where time seems to stop.

Couple of things in the pipeline.. I’m currently living in Amsterdam, will be here for the next year, so we’ll see how things work out.

I’m currently working on 7 channel sound for a project called Tokyokyoto, by Rietveld Academy graduation year student Hrund Atladottir, who is friendly, talented, and awesome.

Next performances will be at the UM festival in Lisbon, 19-22 June 2008, solo as part of the N.I.P. collective, and with Chris Sugrue performing A Cable Plays.