“Orlando slouches towards Bethlehem to be born again.
An echo is a reprise. It is heard when a sound is reflected off a distant
surface—a wall or a cliff—and returns misshapen. Clarity wanes as the
noise knocks back and forth. Before long it dissipates entirely.
Memories behave like sounds, too. Over lifetimes they gently strike the
walls inside our bodies and lapse into abstraction. Inherited memories,
however, (composite thoughts of past lives that do not belong to us) are
intrinsically abstract. Like unfamiliar sounds they disturb and provoke
intrigue. Memories like these are not generated by sensory experience,
they precede birth and consciousness, insisting on being re-lived by
whomever may come next.”
Orlando has been young for so long.
Ambivalence breeds in his tendency toward inconsummate passions and
entropic forms.
Doom-stricken prophecies of swollen red suns unravel as they ride over
fecund rhythms; cascading scales gather like ruffles around a monastic
ode to the earth and sea. This record moves between the opaque and the
translucent, feigning chaos while framing the condition of living as a
receptacle of disembodied memories as like holding the world within
oneself.
The seven songs bleed into one another; adjunct insect-like sounds
scatter around established melodic lines before succumbing to the ether.
Trying to trace them from end to end is futile, like straining to recall a
memory that never belonged to you.
Orlando is an aural fractal, yielding detail at all scales.
Words by Olamiju Fajemisin
in the nineteenth verse of “public space in a private time” (1990), vito acconci contemplates intangibility and pop music as a new model for public art. what is at stake here are the levels of reading sound as both a commodity and a public object, weaving its historical contexts into to our common perception of it, as an object that “is" space, and that one carries with them across places. the matter of sound has the ability to cross walls, it bleeds into people’s lives as a melody or as a consequence of movement, as an echo of life. though sound (or music), considered in western culture as a production or a re-production of musical or sonic events, only really exists through the act of listening. recording a space, its sound or its image, automatically conjures the presence of absent objects. the object, itself, is always present.
the model for a new public art is pop music. music is time and not space; music has no place, so it doesn't have to keep its place, it fills the air and doesn't take up space. its mode of existence is to be in the middle of things; you can do other things while you're in the middle of it. you're not in front of it, and you don't go around it, or through it; the music goes through you, and stays inside you. it's a song you can't get out of your head. but there are so many voices, too many songs to keep in your head at once. you walk down the street and hear one song from the soundbox you carry with you, another song blaring out of an audio speaker in front of a store, one more through an open bedroom window, yet another coming off the radio in a car that speeds by another car with still one more, and then another, as the driver changes stations. this mix of musics produces a mix of cultures; of course pop music exploits minority cultures, but at the same time it "discovers" and uncovers them so that they become born again to sneak into and under the dominant culture. the music of the seventies was punk; the music of the eighties was rap. each of these types is music that says: you can do it, too. you don't need a professional recording studio; anybody can do it, in the garage and in the house. the message of punk was: do what you can do and do it over and over until everybody else is driven crazy. the message of rap is: if something has been done better by somebody else, who had the means to do it, then steal it, and remix it; tape is cheap and airspace is free. the message of punk and rap together is: actions speak louder only because of words, so speak up and talk fast and keep your hands free and your eyes wide open and your ear to the ground and be quick on your feet and rock a body but don't forget to rock a culture, too.
acconci, vito. "public space in a private time." critical inquiry 16, no. 4 (1990): 900-18.
"i saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me." [1]
“... where at first 'blue' had been good enough, he now wallowed in 'azures,' 'ceruleans,' and 'ultramarines.'” [2]
the official video for orlando , the titular track from geneva-born experimental pop musician nelson beer’s forthcoming ep, premieres today. the full project will be released on ooo audio in spring. [3]
manifesting itself as an audio-visual collage of academic and non-academic writings and research materials, inherited familial memories, and encoded information, orlando revolves around photogrammetry, a process by which three-dimensional information can be extracted from photographs. orlando takes 'past' moment as starting points through which to generate an image of a greater whole, thereby pondering the potential effects of the indexical present - a direct attentional focus on "the concrete, immediate here-and-now," such as the reaction to a moment of sudden death - and the afterlives of this event. [4]
between 2:24 and 2:54, we look unto the crouching artist as the frame pulls outwards in a counter-clockwise motion. an impossible network of jagged floating boulders and hexagonal pillars of grass swirl around him, slowly. orlando suggests that the potential for split seconds to be deciphered according to their future documentary remains is contingent on the acceptance of memory lacunae as evidence. [5] this facet of the work complements, rather than denies another of the artist's interests: that machines, as supplements and symbolic mechanisms, allow us to see and (re) distribute vision. [6]
orlando indulges the artist's desire to return to forensis, or “forensic architecture,” a concept established by eyal weizman and susan schuppli, founding directors of the center for research architecture at goldsmiths, university of london, of which the artist is an alumnus. by inverting the direction of the forensic gaze, weizman and schuppli explain, a field of action can be designated in which individuals and organizations can detect and confront state violations. [7] this practice denotes the possibility for objects to bear witness to human violations. it asks how we can acknowledge the testimonies of non-human objects, whether in presence or absentia.
http://www.fromheretillnow.com/orlando is an ongoing formalist archival project dedicated to exploring the capacity for consecutive sounds, transcripts, images, films, and texts to affect one another according to their literal and thematic proximites.
written and directed by nelson beer & pablo padovani produced by mireille productions producer - léo burgat line producer - emile olagne location manager - charlotte schaeffer director of photography - yoann suberviolle focus puller - zoé mention key grip - pierre frink wardrobe, props & make-up - alice rabot make-up adviser - ruby mazuel editing - gwen ghelid photogrammetry & 3d modeling - valentin gillet coloring - guillaume schmitter
