Iain Cameron's Diary
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2003-10-31 - 2:45 p.m.

Yesterday was a day off. I woke up and soon found myself absorbed in shaping sound � something that hasn�t happened for about six months. I managed to realise an ambition which I have had for several years � to create the high frequency resonances and reinforcements which give Lamont Young�s pieces their distinctive timbre.

Looking back on this experience later in the day, I concluded that a number of different conditions are needed to push me into making something new. The first is something like peer provocation, the second involves a set of tools that contain new possibilities which invite me in, the third is time and place to let that mixture come to the boil and the fourth is a frame of mind which allows creative engagement unconcerned with goals. There is plenty of scope to debate whether that last condition is a good or bad thing.

I strolled briefly round Leamington deciding that I could probably get Reich�s Three Tales slightly cheaper than the price in the local shop but I did buy a collection of Cage songs by Paull Hillier and the Theatre of Voices which I listened as I got fairly lost trying to find my way from the M40 to the A40 across the Cotswolds. The weather was grey but the trees were all colours. Between Banbury, Swindon and Oxford there�s a lot of open country.

The aim was to visit Laurence at Witney. We both had things we wanted to do in Oxford and we had decided to do them together. This involved the Nobel prize winner, Sir Paul Nurse, who was giving the Romanes Lecture in the Sheldonian on four big biological ideas plus a fifth possible one.

I have never heard a Nobel Prizewinner in the flesh before but Sir Paul was pretty hot stuff � very very clear and succinct. Biology isn�t a subject that I know much about but he managed to interest me and keep me with him. Besides natural section, the big ideas were about the cell as the unit of life, the gene as the mechanism of transmission of hereditable material and chemistry as the detailed vehicle of information and coding. At the end he said a bit about the problems of explaining form and the need for more abstract ideas to achieve this.

I especially like the stuff about cells. How the cells are the basic unit of structure and function with the ability to reproduce themselves with some measure of variation. I couldn�t help pulling these ideas across into compositional issues. I know that some composers, eg Stravinsky, are said to have relied heavily on musical cells. One of the issues that emerges from this perspective is the mechanism for reproduction � for example within a sequencer of WAV editor then copying any musical unit is the easiest thing in the world. However one needs to find ways of reproduction which allow for variation. Variation is obviously a musical term too � sometimes used critically with some methodogies which are said to be �only� capable of producing variations. Jazz might fall foul of this critique � the constant cycle and reproduction of the harmonic DNA allows the soloist to create variations but doesn�t guarantee satisfactory formal development. Of course the DNA doesn�t have to be in the harmony.

Biology has learned a lot about all the ways that DNA can influence chemical processes � especially spatially and temporally � also about ways promoting and inhibiting the processes and feedback loops. But the big issues are in the areas of form and development. One of the hardest ideas to swallow is that some mechanism of �blind� selection can produce more advanced forms.

It used to be thought that this was always the case. The Victorian biologist T H Huxley, grandfather of Aldous, used the Romanes lecture some time in the 1890s to point out that improvement wasn�t the inevitable outcome of natural selection. In fact before yesterday that was the only Romanes Lecture that I had heard of. But on the basis of yesterday�s I�d certainly go to another one.

Laurence is talking about moving back into Oxford so that its easier just to drop into events of this kind.. I can see the attraction.

The thing on my list was the Candice Breitz, Re-Animations. As promised it contained Double Karen (Close To You). This includes two video screens facing each other across a stairwell. In a single Carpenters� performance from 1970 a set of instances of her singing �Me� have been looped together on one screen and a set of �You�s have been looped on the other. They are in sync. Although the reviews don�t seem to have been all that positive I really liked this work � better than Double Olivia (Hopelessly Devoted To You). The ONJ loops are from film and involve her acting a part whereas the KC material gets closer to the personality of the performer and plays off the fragments that we know about her life.

The catalogue suggests that Candice is marrying hard core minimalism like Sol le Witt (or one might say Steve Reich) with the celebrity fascination of Andy Warhol and I think this is fair comment. Its is also a good example of looping/sampling within a rigid structural frame. She has another installation, Diorama, with many clips from Dallas all looping away. I mainly heard this one in terms of looping rhythms but I think that was just my narrow perspective.

Becoming is more ambitious and involves fourteen channels, longer clips from recent films involving speeches by currently famous actresses like Cameron Diaz in a screen on one side of a plinth. On the reverse is the artist lip-synching to the same track filmed in black and white. This was Laurence�s favourite.

With this overall approach a lot depends on what you think of the original material- I don�t think much about Dallas � and whether you want to be drawn into possible new levels of meaning or experience by it. As far as I am concerned, no question about it with KC. Of course I share the basic premise that treating small clips from various media as cells and processing them by repetition and some variational elements is likely to lead to an aesthetic result.

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