Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence @ Radio Shack, Part XII

Springtime at the JI sect headquarters, Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Our group of famous and secret esotericists is deep in their springtime orgy of philosophical discussions on media. What follows is a documentation of three presentations. The first speaker is actually a team of Quantus and Parson, speaking on undocumentable art.

Presentation One: Undocumentable Art

It is impossible to document an installation; let's assume this is a given, and begin a thought experiment, a sort of workshop assignment for those present. First let's raise some hands and tell us an example of successfully undocumented installations. If someone wants to at this point bring in an example of a well-documented installation, we need that too. Then moving on, we can think constructively about what this gives us, both in the creative initial phase and in the creative receptive phase. How to savor photographs that don't explain anything. How to leverage undocumentability to make an even more invisible installation. sometimes all you get from a really good installation is a really dim grainy picture out of focus of a small ceramic cup.

I mean bald trombonist (and by that i mean a metaphor for you, my audience, when you are performing for another audience), do you really care about pictures of you on the stage, your forehead shining, i mean bald trombonist, your forehead shining in the red and blue.

That's the joy of playing experimental jazz is that you, the bald trombonist with square glasses,  can show up on any day of the week, get up on the stage, and then next week show up with a huge mustache. it's just that the audience can sense a certain vibration about your persona itself. that's what art is without media, it's simply about vibrations.

You are not present, bald trombonist, but Quantus has summoned your vibrating image. the elves are random colors.

I have a neighbor Heinmann, you may remember him because i talked about him a lot already. he has a big metal barn by the road that leads to radio shack, with a pink light lit intermittently at night. Higher up on his manicured hill sits his low ranch home, a huge picture window behind which the Ohio lace hangs illuminated by his blue TV.

I have a thought experiment wherein I imagine his silhouette, a portly pork-eating figure, transformed into the terrible shadow of the monkey god Hanuman, breathing patent smoke as he rears up against the evil media portal there in the living room, across the walnut coffee table.

The presidential media artist employs data waste as a contrast to sloganeering simple and powerful messages of art pieces. Going off-script at the state of the union, muttering half-words. making sounds, these are all un-transcribable in the traditionally scripted governement proceedings. They are a breakage, a multimediafication, branching into video.

A tweet is a thought experiments, an art piece for life and death. The president is completely paranoid about losing the internet because her best art pieces are there on twitter. Take your partners preferred kitchen layout and inscribe the tools outlines in sharpie, then move them to your own preferred kitchen layout.

Later on the lake, at the end of the presentation, Parson bowed his head and offered others of prayer, however they may receive it. Then he began the typical dialogue with Blanc, how one person may become a media artist simply out of spite.

Thank you Quantus and Parson. The second presentation, by Monkletto, is on stepping into the couch.

Presentation Two: Stepping into the Couch

It's a form of wilding-out, but imagine doing it at home on a snowy night. You can think of it as wilding-in. Quantus thought of his own aversion to playing-out: a masochistic tradition of rock bands playing in puke bars, extended to synthesizers. He broke his music up into playing-out and playing-in, and try to minimize the former, that's how his residency at the radio shack was so brilliant because transmitting is solely playing-in, playing on the airwaves.

Here is a slide of my castle of couches in the basement, it's actually a stack of three. I knid of "sit" in the couch, but I do it by walking, face forward, into it. It's a metaphor of life as waiting for deathfacing the couch. You might think I'm going to sleep, but I'm actually going through the couches, to a wilder place beyond. That's why I have three couches, to make the inner space as wild as possible. There's paint splashes all over in there, and some analog synths too.

The JI sect headquarters couch was like burlap, an outdated fashion. Monkletto pushed it to the middle of the room, displacing the council table and folding chairs. We managed to not pinch our fingers. Now, Monkletto disappeared into vibrations of the couch, like Heinmann blurring and blending with Hanuman: he does actually "step into the couch."

Next he invited someone to critique his art, and approach the couch.  Blanc was first. The two parried as they circulated around the couch. Monkletto has too much going on, we can't see what's in there, in the dusty cavity behind the couch and within the scratchy fabric cover. But it is intriguing to hear synth sounds coming from within the couch. I like how it's wrapped up into a single couch, and that is your art catalog, simply a set of couches penetrated.

Quantus snorted, typically, at Blanc's need for monomania. He then approached the couch and offered an analogy: what a dog thinks of a car. It is a sleek turd that runs really fast. The joy of derangement: instant transportal in a turd to a random land of strange anus smells. I too, can get off on petroleum.
the two parried as they circulated around the couch.

And the next presentation is titled "Blanc's lagoon." The society buckled themselves in...

Presentation Three: Blanc's Lagoon

On location at my house near the shores of Lake Erie, the dammed creek there has crystal blue waters. On closer inspection, it is a blue pollution stain, cloudy blue waters. I pour copper sulfate in, sourced from ground up circuit boards. It also contains glass and epoxy dust. We send our aluminum and steel to China on barges, and the empty barges ship back this turquoise technology waste. Just joking, they actually send stuff to sell. But I have an inside connection to get the waste, and I am partially simulating some of the industrial-metallic bogs in mainland China.

You are all jealous because I get to do non-internet art, he grunted proudly, then picked up a tumbled river cobblestone and threw it in the lagoon.

I call this experiment "Blanc's Lagoon: toward a metastasis between halogenated aromatics and animal tissue." My symphony includes biphenyls and chlorine too. Cloudy forms erupted from below in the murk. This is a sort of beach programming, my chemical symphony. I have these instruments which are rings of benzene, my violins synthetic, and I add imaginary flavors with the chlorine, things that have never been done before.

It's like playing violins with tape music, it's completely new! I multiply them, there's a difference between add and multiply. In add they are sitting together side by side, like a concert hall situation with a tape recorder and a violin player.  In multiply, they form cell walls or structures or even bind to each other with electricity.

Blanc poured some bleach on the oil, with crawfish crawling beneath it. They put their claws up and then down and trembled a little in the sand. "There is the idea of the albuminous, two types: one that can pass through animal tissue and one that cannot. Both are interesting, and correspond roughly to add and multiply.  I can create forms and cell walls out of the pure substances of industry: chlorinox. But those that can penetrate animal tissue are interesting for I can create a being that is like an overlay of the oil forms and the organic forms."

Albuminous is a substance that shows a ghostly white pseudo-form in the water. "We are active environmentalists, seeking to find an ecosystem that thrives in the modern electronics industry eflluent. I have different areas in the lagoon that I can focus on different metallic activities or halogenic aromatics. The ducks seem to like being around mercury, and the crawfish seem to like bleach."

To perform the experiment, Blanc scoops up some of the murk, the most formed clouds in the soup, and extracts them into a flask or dish. To prepare the funnel, he bands an animal membrane, such as inside peritoneum of steelhead, or intestine of duck, as a filter at the base of the funnel. Half or more stays on top of that which is transversive.

Why is he doing this, having been doing computer music by the side of the lagoon, why did he walk out into the lagoon? Because he noticed that it was already changed and in a moment of hallucination, believed the industry chemicals were also put there for experimental sound forms. A fountain of green oil burbled in the center of the lake.

"I got interested in the idea of the environment, our ecosystems. My medium is painting shells, however, I am steward of actor-networks both virtual and in this lagoon. My computer is a swamp, which is swampier than a lagoon because of the chemicals I put in it. I wanted to put down my computer music ecosystem and take up something more direct, while I transformed my artistic practice into an time-old, materials-based approach."

"Instruments are the materials of computer music, and chemical albumin is the instrument of industrial metastasis."

"Action," Quantus snorted.

"Beach programming, like we are now eating flounder stuffed with crab. I'm interested in putting a body inside another body: an ecosystem of nesting flavors. The experiment began with a question of how do crawfish handle acid rain, which I simulated with bleach."

Quantus snorted louder. "Because bleach is the opposite of acid, that's why they like it."

"In any case the experiment grew to include all alkaloids and acids, which were accessible in Cleveland at various stores. By various stores I mean the burning river, the steel pits, the old electronics factory. Capacitors for electronic elevators had a resevoir of chemicals, as did transformers for escalators. These contain the oils that I have distilled into proto-organic forms, in my lagoon."

"Beach programming is nothing more than creating an ecosystem on your computer, be it a game or the most distilled forensics in computer music, the sound world. It is world-making. I got more interested in direct world-making. Not interested in saving the environment, more like salvaging the alchemical components of Lake Erie, like at the surplus store where I got these transformers, and creating something new with it. There are natural components, and industrial components."

Cells that have iron in them become blood, storing oxygen for the fires of zinc chloride. Cells that have zinc in them react with my bleach, in the lagoon, to create zinc chloride, a corrisive of metals liberating many free radicals including mercury and cadmium that mix and are stored within the modules of polychlorinated biphenyls. these become the plurality of modules in the central ooze. They exchange electronic signals through the capacitance of the PCB globs, and the modulated electron wells of the metastasized cells. Blanc is the reason the lake is clean; his lagoon holds all the vile electronic waste. He goes out to feed it bleach.

"I noticed that people use bleach to clean their clothing, remove dirt. Why not use bleach to clean up the duck pond?"

"bleach is pollution, water is supposed to be dirty! The duck pond is a poop processing pond, no? leave it alone." Bingzi was offended; he did not share American values for changing the landscape with chemicals.

"Jesus, Blanc, do you want to generate more halogenated aromatics, more than we already have?"

"Yes, that is my conspiracy. Cells that have iron in them become blood, storing oxygen for the fires that fuels metabolism. Now, there is oil in the pond, no?"

"Yes, there is much oil because it is connected to lake Erie."

"I want to create a new form of life that can use this oil, by sequestering it with chlorine exchange. Its blood is made out of PCBs! Its electrolyte is zinc chloride, not alien to our own, and a byproduct is that this solution also dissolves and can purify heavy metals such as mercury and cadmium, that it stores in the PCBs. Since there are hundreds of different PCBs, this is like its enzyme DNA, a catalog of PCBs, like a 50s Dow Chemical brochure: Aroclor, Fenclor, Plastivar, Nepolin, Noflamol."

"You want to save the world by bleaching the duck pond?!" Quantus was ready to clean up the headquarters, broom the floor, and leave. "All those dollar store bleach bottles, can't you just do computer music instead, at the duck pond?"

"Yes, cleaning the pond, creating life, I also use computer music for this. I have purchased an underwater microphone on ebay, so I can hear how the life reacts when I send different alternating currents through the water. I'm trying to get it to sizzle, that's when it's creating new synthetic molecules."

"What?"

"The molecules in my oilganism..." Bingzi pushed his chair loudly, interrupting Blanc. "Yes, let me spell it: o-i-l-g-a-n-i-sm, its molecules are more like modules, and they exchange electronic signals through the capacitance of their PCBs. In computer music, we have the concept of the digital delay, which is basically a tape machine."

Bingzi nodded.

"The digital delay is modeled after the concept of the analog delay, which is easiest as a tape machine, but can be made with PCB oil and a rotating head. The head records an electronic sound directly into the oil, and then plays it back. The swirling of the oil can be controlled to change the pattern of the sound, like dipping paper into a tide-pool with iridescent oil floating on its surface. The living PCB modules in my lagoon are a computer music software. Thank you for auditioning my presentation."

At the conclusion of presentations, we resume our informal repor.

 "DONE, enough!" Quantus snorted and began striding out the door.

Quantus please stay a moment.

"What?"

You may be in trouble again for the use of webcams in the Ji temple.

"But none of the information was ever broadcast, it wasn't even stored, just piped to my teahouse as research materials for trombone improvisor."

Yet, there is still a natural law against taking the image of others' bodies, and the Ji sect has spiritual rules about them too. Social monking time should not be wasted taking selfies.

"That's not a rule, just a sermon! The Ji sect is primarily an arts institution that relies on deep spirituality. Each monk has a different outlook on media art."

Blanc went to the bathroom, and emerged in a paper ghillie suit with a miniature crossbow. He tackled Parson to the floor and pointed the bow up his ear. "How about I pour Hebanon in the kings skull right now, while he's sleeping? Do you dream when you are editing videos or perusing media platforms? No? Then why are you wasting that time sleeping, soaking up blue light from your monitor? The two parried as they circulated around the couch.

"Quantus Barney: Secluded Residence at Radio Shack" is an attempt to explain how some people become sound artists out of malice, or other perverted reasons. Malice towards other types of artists or degrees of sociability. Sound artists become radicalized, experimental electronic musicians by lines of flight from the norm, disgust and a hope to eventually blow it all u.