The Taming Of The Stream

The Taming Of The Stream

Over Summer 2021, KRA was invited by Vasulka Kitchen Brno to participate in a small project, supported by The Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF): The Taming of the Stream. Since we were working anyway online on The Marching Arts project (IVF supported), we welcomed this extension and set up some workshops on P2P audio streaming, and played some concerts together with South-Korean artists.

For more information check the full description at Vasulka Kitchen Brno
There is also a pdf (poetic document file) you can download for free

On collaboration. There exist vast libraries with books about collaboration, from the point of view of management, from industry to culture, and probably art. Still it is a mysterious phenomenon, how do animals and species like us collaborate? And when we try to collaborate, sometimes it works out, but at other times it fails terribly, though all the formal prescribed ingredients are being respected and all guidelines followed. Probably it is a too complex thing to grasp intuitively, because it could be described on quite different levels, interactively and communicative wise, from personal/subjective (not individual) to social and environmental. Perhaps it is a simple mechanism that guides us on the biological level, like the notion of “metastability”, which stands for the simultaneous realization of two competing tendencies: the tendency of the components to couple together and the tendency of the components to express their intrinsic independent behavior, which can be seen on the organism’s cell level but is also responsible for the coupling of organs, whole bodies, and relationships of the body to others. The latter is intriguing, looking at our own and other’s creativity in the light of the commons, or the result of expressivity and ideas that create an art which eventually ends as a commons: defleshed from individual claims and appropriations, and in public domain, or not owned anymore privately. The fate of all art. Isn’t the Mona Lisa part of all of us, though the real owner has it standing in Le Louvre? And as artists, aren’t we all belonging to these commons, like the art places we share, the habits we expose, sorts or sounds and constructions we make, or the technology we are using? Though at the same time we ‘perform’ this individual bio/c.v. driven exceptional status of having an unique show-off and presence. Maybe collaboration stems from a dynamic play between this apparently contradictory behaviour?

Additional notes to update a new Poetika
no virtuosity (since creativity is in all of us)
no competition (like the futurists already wrote 100 years ago)
no curators only facilitators and technicians (to cross galleries, museums and art spekulants/collectors)
the fanfare metaphore: first learn to play together, then forget to show off in solos, because together it simply always sounds better
no repetition, unless inspired by natural observations, but never persevere dogmatically
no harmony, just just intonation and tunings to a world of free floating dissonance
no randomness, no control (are light, sound, windspeed, earthshakes, butterfly wings flapping, or others not enough?)
no strict divisions digital-analog-nano-makro
make your own instruments (or buy them and destroy them creatively before playing)

Fiber Optik Konsiderations
open a port on the physical network
for every action create an input (for others to share with you)
and an output (for others to share from you)
think of a way to deal with the inputs, go along or contradict, sometimes play something new
wait a little, repeat – but every repetition should be different

“All humans seem to like music. Hilarious. Some animals do as well. Weird.” (August Todds, 1892)