Friday, May 28th 2010 at 7:00pm
Location: Gray Area Foundation For the Arts, 55 Taylor St. San Francisco
Recommended $5-10 donation, however no-one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Seating is limited, and on a first come first serve basis.
“A Natural History of Media”
Media technologies have become the last best hope for a dated modernist
march into the future only because they are imagined to have no nature. In
fact, nature has gone in and out of circuit with modern communications
technologies since their inception; natural radio was heard two decades
before radio was invented; and communications technologies have never
merely been about communications. This talk reintroduces nature into media
now that the environmental crisis means that nature no longer exists.
Douglas Kahn, historical theoretician of experimental arts and music;
author of Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts with three new
books fortcoming on experimental music, the arts and early computing, and
electromagnetism and the arts. He was Guggenheim Fellow on the historical
discovery of natural radio and is Professor of Science and Technology
Studies at University of California at Davis.
“Electric” explores raw sonic edges and subtle mythologies of the basic
source material underlying electric/electronic music: electricity itself.
Chris Kubick, artist, composer and sound designer tracing the limn of sense
from non-sense, signal from noise, representation from formlessness, as
seen and heard in venues such as Whitney Museum and The New Museum (New
York), MOCA and the Getty Center (L.A.), and many others.