INTHECONVERSATION

Undervattenskonsert by Alison Gerber

I invited eleven artists working with sound to make pieces for an underwater broadcast for bathers in the sea between Sweden and Denmark. For two days bathers at Västra Hamnen in Malmö were able to listen to works made especially for the event.

I wanted to create a situation for listening, one in which the act of listening would be necessarily new and arduous. Listening to anything through underwater speakers requires some adjustment. Most people have never listened to anything in such a manner; their experience of sound underwater is that of quiet, muffled sounds from above – the way it sounds when your mother calls to you while you’re under the bathwater. Sound broadcast through the water, however, sounds nothing like that; sound travels much faster through water than through air and while your eardrums don’t work underwater the bones in your head work more than adequately.

Burning Questions by Abinadi Meza

Abinadi Meza's installation, "The Burning Question" (Katherine Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 11 - June 4, 2004) explored Intellectual Property, Copyright, and the impact of property on culture. Visitors were provided with computers, blank CD's, and over 24 hours of copyleft audio works contributed by composers, musicians, and sound artists from around the world. As visitors generated playlists to burn themselves CD's, they also generated an Internet radio broadcast streamed from the gallery. The gallery becomes a studio/radio station and users become DJ's. The following text is Meza's essay for the show's catalog (download catalog pdf).

BURNING QUESTIONS

You do not really leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, then you are taking it with you. – Elie Wiesel

How is culture linked to property? Every day we face the growing problem of exclusive control over art, music, computer technology, agriculture, medicine, and numerous other creative works. For artists, this question is quickly complicated by the need to protect one’s own work from exploitation and the desire to reach or affect a wide audience. As cultural participants our daily activities and creative gestures prove to be socio-political acts with global significance. As Joseph Beuys said, we make Social Sculpture as our ideas shape the world in which we live.

It is clear that those who profit the most from private control over creativity are deeply threatened by recent changes in our technological abilities. If we are able to communicate with others over vast geographic distances, we might also share artifacts and information freely, thereby undermining the primary motivation for commercial creativity—profit. Sadly, these profits are often paid by those without a voice in the dominant system of ownership and access.