Up until yesterday, it has not been a very aesthetic week � I have been away in Durham doing World Class Productivity. It was time well spent with lots of new avenues opening up, but I didn�t manage to cover much outside that apart from developing one specific link.

I mentioned an experimental musician who moved from Texas to Ann Arbor to join the ONCE community. He now goes by the name of Blue Gene Tyranny.and I have just discovered that in the mid 60s he was in a blues band where Iggy Pop played drums � the Prime Movers. I think they preceded and overlapped with early MC5.

The PMs had been to Chicago and heard the great electric blues players in person and committed themselves to working within that genre. The only �follower� bluesband they took seriously were the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. They occasionally went further afield within the USA and in 1967 opened for Cream at the Fillimore.

Iggy got his name in the Prime Movers because he had come from a local band called the Iguanas before he joined the Prime Movers.

There may be an equivalent on the UK scene but if so I have yet to find out about it. Graham Bond moved from leading edge avant garde jazz on saxophone to creating a blues oriented band that accelerated the formation of Cream but I cant think of any migration between experimental music and blues in the UK context except perhaps Ron Geeson.

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Detroit�s is mid-way between Chicago and New York � one the epicentre of electric blues and the other the main centre for experimental music. The ONCE philosophy was a deliberate approach to plug into the New York avant garde and transplant some of that innovation to Michigan. The ONCE approach covered radical ideas of performance which makes a pathway to Iggy� subsequent antics with the Stooges.

The other UK musician who might exemplify such linkages is Cornelius Cardew who suddenly burst into things yesterday evening. I decided to go to the Ikon film programme yesterday evening even though I was feeling pretty tired. I drove into Birmingham via the M6 and twiddling the dial I was lucky enough to drop into an interview with Steve Reich who is promoting his new CD/DVD Three Tales. I had already decided that this was on my list but hearing more extracts just confirmed the point.

I parked and found the Electric Cinema and then went into the Greek Restaurant next door for a bite. To keep myself company, I opened my collected Morton Feldman on an article he wrote in 1967 about a visit to England where he met up with CC. MF sees England as still bound by tradition and patronage and CC as a Cage-like figure whose example can release creativity in others. The coincidence is that the second film that David Cunningham (ex Flying Lizards and John Greaves accomplice) had chosen had CC playing cello.

It was a 30 minute version of the Gavin Bryars track �Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet� made in 1971. It is s single shot in grainy brown/orange colour of a man walking towards the camera. The track comprises a homeless man repeatedly singing the hymn tune. About halfway through strings enter playing a semi-tangential accompaniment. The textures and the aural context point towards Rothko but an embodied rather than a disembodied spirituality. It is like a Rothko experience in that a limited number of powerful elements attempt to overwhelm the viewer. One could also develop a comparison with Bill Viola�s use of slow motion video.

Cunningham explained that he had selected the films around certain themes, one of which was the expressivity comes from the individual viewer rather than from the artist. The artist tends to contribute something structural or formal. One of the films had a Cunningham track. This film only last a minute and involved a camera doing a bungie jump from a crane over a harbour. The up and down dynamics are the film structure. This proposition reminded me of one of Reich�s most abstract works � where he lets a mike swing from side to side over a speaker which creates periodic feedback. The film � which is called Confessions � was made in 1997 whereas the Reich piece was created nearly 30 years before Reich began to scale up his compositions. There is an inherent drama in the bungie jump of course � in the visual context which predisposes an emotional interpretation.

.My interest in all of this had been heavily stoked by going to see Video Acts at the ICA and slightly by the discovery that John Cale shot a film in London just before he collaborated on Bryter Later.

While these works are in some ways highly abstract, their history gives them content. Their meaning partly rests in �art world� context. When I saw Video Acts then certain works eg by Nauman, Graham and Serra manifested the art-world which provided their initial meaning and rationale. One can�t help but position oneself relative to that world. I mentioned that my second visit to Video Acts felt very Proustian.

The final film which is 52 minutes long was shot on a campus in New Jersey in 1968 on a sunny day in a lecture room � title <-> (Back and Forth). The camera pans from side to side and the cycle time gradually increases until the movement is frantic and the shots very blurred and abstract. There is no track but there is the sound that these movements make. The increasing tension that watching this film generates is very marked � and so in one sense the film is about the release which comes in ending. The world which the film portrayed reminded me a lot of the early Bill Viola world shown in The Reflecting Pool � although that video is much more meditative.

There were two other films, one of which was in black and white in an urban environment which was made to look geometrically abstract. It is called Non-Places and was made about four years ago. It started the show and in one sense was less extreme. People walk at random into the stationery shots and sometimes react to the camera. There is also some text-narrative and given the relative richness of the mix this was the easiest film to approach � it also started the programme.

Obviously one has to work at these films � and after two of them, I didn�t have enough energy to engage with the one before the interval. Many people wont want to engage at all with this stuff. On the other hand the opportunity to see these bits of artistic history are very rare. One might just let conventional channels offer you the more salient bits of the genre � like the current Reich or Viola material � which is finely finished and resource intensive to create. But the world from which these items arise has its own history stretching back through ONCE experiments in Michigan, perhaps even to Czech abstract film before the 2nd World War. To be honest I have just started to play with image and sound using low level resources directly available.

I was in two minds whether to go to the Electric Cinema last night because I am feeling rather worn out � but I decided that it was a single chance that shouldn�t be missed. This morning I have at least managed to get my car serviced!