wikiGong.com
Performance On-site June 4th:
Sovereign State of Mind: Anthem of New Abalonia
wikiGong presents an audiovisual portrait of an unknown maritime nation.
New Abalonia is that sovereign Nation comprising all objects afloat beyond internationally recognized territorial limits and not formally recorded as autonomous vessels by a globally recognized seagoing power. These are immediately and irrevocably claimed by the Nation, in perpetuity:
— all commercial shipping containers lost overboard along with their contents
— any unregistered ships, boats, submarines
— the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre
— icebergs and all objects thereon, regardless of origin or state of matter
— space launch vehicles and marine growths attached
— flotsam and jetsam
The New Abalonian National Anthem is a work in progress.
Audio content is a live mix of:
— field recordings arranged using our Pour Your Own (musique) Concrète platform
— live sound captured using contact microphones and hydrophones (see file)
— live text readings and interpretation layered with prerecorded takes
Video projection includes:
— prerecorded text readings, recaptured using various filter distortions
— live footage of sound generation, such as table-top noise making
Performance On-site June 4th
The Bottled Now
A live staging and re-presentation of some of wikiGong's recent video projects, "The Bottled Now" seeks to exorcise two years of pandemic navel gazing by using our visual oeuvre as it is nearly always inspired: to enhance performance.
While the trope of messages in bottles endures, wikiGong.com has pointed out some serious problems. It is fraught with difficulties, from finding the required media, to understanding and interpretation by the recipient. Any pandemic survivor knows it.
Our first effort to manage expectations re: messages in bottles as a communications medium, "Message in a Bottle,” was part of our Cosmology series, and included in soundpedro 2021 VBODOBV | "dEvolution: Personnel.” It’s a meditation on the nature and fate of intelligence in the universe.
That flirtation with messages in bottles may not have been explicit enough, so as a public service, in "On the Efficacy of Seaborne Bottles in Solicitation of Rescue” (originally part of the soundpedro artist-curated event, “Dark Waters”) we review it: Relying on these to bring rescuers to your desert island is Not a Good Idea.
We propose to revisit these themes by layering live text readings and interpretation with the prerecorded dramatic and scenic audiovisual content, recapturing and re-projecting the results throughout the evening.
More information on June 4th on-site event.
About the Artist:
wikiGong.com catalogs the sounds of large public structures for creative purposes, including the creation of new virtual instruments.
Dave Ayer built his first virtual instruments at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, IL, where he earned an MFA in Sculpture in 1987. He launched the wikiGong.com web site in July 2009 and currently resides in San Jose, CA.
Jacob Dickinson’s photography and printmaking inform his contributions to wikiGong.com and ccMixter.org. He is a Long Beach beekeeper and an officer of an environmental start-up.
Artist Location: Long Beach, CA
Social Media: Artist Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
