April 13, 2009
UGA: Building the New Learning Environment
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Art and research intersect
By Joelle Walls

Visual and performing arts have been a part of the CURO symposium since 2000. But this year new directions in arts research were emphasized. The art presentations and exhibition were coordinated with the assistance of Mark Callahan, who serves as artistic director for Ideas for Creative Exploration, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts at the University of Georgia.

“The symposium featured students engaged with a variety of approaches to research in the arts, ranging from cutting-edge digital technology to new ways of applying traditional methods,” said Callahan, a faculty member in UGA’s Lamar Dodd School of Art.

For his research project, Jordan Dalton combined improvisation, digital images and video, sculpture, poetry and experimental theater to develop a multi-media performance of a hybrid poem-play by Lara Glenum, who recently earned a Ph.D. in creative writing from UGA. Dalton, a senior Honors Interdisciplinary Studies major in digital literature and dynamic media, received a grant from ICE for the project that also involved Cal Clements, a part-time comparative literature instructor at UGA.

“Much of my work and research deals with transforming and translating language, whether text into sound or printed text into digital media,” said Dalton. “Although this project deals with similar literary themes as some of my previous work, this piece is decidedly more ‘analog’ than digital, featuring hand-built instruments and other low-tech elements. This type of collaboration is my ideal mode of art-making because it combines the talents of multiple people in order to create something larger.”

Laura Leidner discussed her experiences as a first-time creative writing instructor for a group of low-income middle-school students who are dialect speakers of English. In an after school program setting, she incorporated poetry and narrative to engage the students and show them how their vernacular could be used in creative expression. She also kept a poetic and narrative journal to document her teaching experiences.

“I have been able to create little spells with these students, showing them the beauty and rhythm inherent in their speech and sharing the magic of poetry,” said Leidner, a sophomore double major in English and Russian. “The experience also has opened my eyes to the need for building alternative literacy environments based on the students’ individual needs. This project allows me to ask questions about how and why poetry can further education and enhance teachers’ approaches to reading and writing in the classroom.”

Marilyn Zapf critiqued the role of commercial trend-based jewelry, such as the gold and silver nameplate necklaces that first gained popularity in the 1980s, through a postmodern lens. She created some hand-made pieces by fusing colored glass to copper, known as enameling, spelling out “Signifier” or “Image,” for example, to show how the necklaces have been used to symbolize societal status.

“Doing research in the arts provided me with the time necessary to develop a deeper understanding of my topic as well as the methods other artists have used to investigate similar subject matter,” said Zapf, a senior double major in fine arts (jewelry and metalworking) and English. “The format of the symposium allowed the artists/presenters the ability to communicate the research behind the work-something that can be overlooked by visitors in a gallery.”

Brittany Norman’s interests and current Honors Interdisciplinary Studies major in visual art, computer science and engineering were illustrated in several projects she presented at the CURO symposium. These included fractal-patterned paintings, sculptures using robotic technology, and an interactive video projector that can respond to the location of a person’s footsteps.

“I think that the work I am doing helps facilitate more interaction between people from different academic departments,” said Norman, who is a junior. “The interdisciplinary, collaborative approach to research can often lead to original insight because it allows people to look at a problem from different perspectives.”

April 15, 2009
Flagpole Magazine
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Indonesian Abstractions: Local Musician and Scholar Brings Javanese Music to Athens

By Chris Hassiotis

For Kai Riedl, music is more than something to listen to; it’s something to experience fully through listening, creating, recording, manipulating and sharing. With JavaSounds and Our New Silence, two new tandem projects focusing on creating bridges between melodic, hypnotic Indonesian music and the Western world, the local musician gets to do all of that.

JavaSounds is an ongoing field-recording project that has, so far, borne the fruit of three trips to Indonesia. While Our New Silence is a way for Riedl to recontextualize those sounds, it’s both a remix project involving local musicians and the name of a live presentation of that music this weekend. “Two distinct sides of the same coin,” says Riedl, who is eager to draw attention to musical traditions as well as to find new ways to approach them.

Southeast Asian Origins

“I’ve been listening to this kind of music since I was in my mid-teens,” when a friend gave him a CD with Indonesian music, says Riedl, formerly a member of the now-defunct Athens band Macha, a group that got moderate millennial attention for its fusion of traditional Indonesian gamelan – an instrumental ensemble characterized by percussive metal gongs, drums and strings – with spacey indie rock. “I think my interests pretty much lie in travel, and I have to have a relationship with music. Combining them on that first trip [to Indonesia] 10 years ago was pretty fantastic, a guerrilla style if you will. And so my interest pretty much grew from there.”

Riedl took three trips to the Southeast Asian country over the past five years, each time recording more and delving into the traditional musical culture. Local sound engineer Suny Lyons, formerly of the bands Tin Cup Prophette and The Low Lows, accompanied Riedl to provide technical know-how. “I decided to bring someone like Suny, who has such a great command of the tools, to help,” says Riedl. “I’d tried recording before, but you don’t really realize how hard it is to capture sounds, keep things in tune, keep people focused, keep at times even chickens quiet! Basically doing things that would be virtually impossible for one person to do on their own.”

JavaSounds Recordings

Riedl says his current goal with the JavaSounds project is “to provide a reliable introduction to Javanese music,” and he plans to do so by offering numerous albums for sale online at one dollar a piece, with one album released per week for 10 weeks. “So, I guess I also want to create a new model for music,” he says, “because obviously the one that’s been in place is not working. Our relationship with music has changed. Our gratitude for it has changed. So, I’m trying to find a different model for how to present these, both more economically and more formatively.”

Riedl says, though, that the JavaSounds project never started with a definite goal, but that each step has evolved out of the prior. “I have to say that to a large degree there was an element of choicelessness to the whole thing… I feel compelled to do these things; I love to travel. I have to have a relationship with music. I feel, actually, largely that I’m doing what I’m meant to do when I’m doing that kind of work. There was never any kind of end goal to the work, to be honest with you. When I look back on it, I’ve always been politically aware but not very politically active, and trying to expose some of these cultural elements of the Islamic world was my form of political activism, in a sense. And I love the music. Really, once we got back and realized what we had, the goal to release it came to mind, and then to develop some more music out of these parts is now what we’re working on.”

JavaSounds recordings – traditional field recordings of renowned Javanese musicians – will be up for sample and for sale online at www.JavaSounds.org and at www.myspace.com/javasounds, and listeners will find the basis there for what Riedl and a bevy of other local musicians have put together under the Our New Silence banner.

Our New Silence

Featuring numerous local musicians who often flirt with the grey area between mainstream and experimental music – artists like Kyle Dawkins (Georgia Guitar Quartet), Heather McIntosh (The Instruments, Gnarls Barkley), Page Campbell (Hope for Agoldensummer, Creepy), Killick and Isaac McCalla – Our New Silence takes the raw material from the JavaSounds recording sessions and reworks it, lacing pop, rock and electronic textures into the music.

“We’re going to present some of the pieces we’ve composed, and it’s a giant experiment, really, the first iteration of this project,” says Riedl. “It should be a good chance to hear some different sounds, learn a little bit about the Islamic world, Indonesia, and hear some of our favorite musicians from there.”

This weekend’s free performance at the University of Georgia’s Ramsey Concert Hall will incorporate presentations of the JavaSounds recordings alongside live performances by the Our New Silence musicians.

“First of all, we’re going to play small parts of these traditional recordings so [the audience] has some context for what they’re going to hear,” says Riedl. “And then we’ll play some of the fusion-based remixes, or abstractions, or recontextualizations, or reinterpretations, whatever you call ’em. And we’ll also play some ambient field recordings.”

The Our New Silence project/event is supported by UGA’s Ideas for Creative Exploration, an interdisciplinary initiative for advanced research in the arts. “My goal really is to create some kind of abstracted Indonesian soundscape for people where they can learn about this music and simultaneously enjoy some music or genres that they may be familiar with,” says Riedl, who also teaches classes in religious studies at UGA. “I’d say if you want to hear something you normally don’t get to, it’d be a good opportunity… the fortunate thing is we’re going to be doing it at Ramsey Hall, where some of the delicacies of the sound can come out more.”

For more information on Our New Silence, including samples of the remixes and a preview of this weekend’s event, visit www.ournewsilence.com or www.myspace.com/ournewsilence.

April 15, 2009
Flagpole Magazine
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Kenosha Kid Presents Fahrenheit
By  Ryan Monahan

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality… This book has pores… The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper…”

Ask jazz entrepreneur Dan Nettles to unravel the complex ideas behind his multimedia-noir project, “Fahrenheit,” and you may be reminded of this passage from Ray Bradbury’s classic critique on censorship, Fahrenheit 451, the inspiration behind this production. It’s a statement that is true not just of literature, but also of great works of music and film. Such “pores” provide us with the context from which we reflect upon the world around us and which, in turn, we use to understand ourselves.

“Think of ‘Fahrenheit’ as ‘Kenosha Kid A meets Blade Runner,'” Nettles half-jokes, examining the pores of the project as he pays homage to two defining works of science fiction in popular culture. As an added tangential pore, the sci-fi creators of said album Kid A, Radiohead, earned themselves a Grammy for the special edition release of their follow-up, Amnesiac, which was packaged as a “rescued” book (complete with overdue library card) from the libraries of Bradbury’s fictitious world, where books are routinely burned by firemen for the “threat” they pose to society.

Along similar lines, the ideas fueling “Fahrenheit” aim to blur the distinction between synthetic and organic; the lifeless and animate – to mirror a hypothetical society in which demonized forces of technology aided by totalitarian authority threaten to undermine the last vestiges of the natural order. A joint effort between Nettles and filmmaker Eddie Whelan under a grant from UGA’s Ideas for Creative Exploration, the event was conceived as a “a darkly illuminating multi-media exploration,” and will feature all nine members of indie-jazz ensemble Kenosha Kid, the film work of Eddie Whelan, and actors Dan Bollinger and Laylage Courie. While the production also uses elements of spoken word, “Fahrenheit” is not a narrative of the original text; rather, it elucidates themes of the book in three dimensions, uniting the talents of artists from various backgrounds in order to bring Bradbury’s dystopian visions to life.

Among “Fahrenheit”‘s many themes, one particular act explores “all the things that children know before they grow into forgetfulness,” says Nettles. Only through the examination of society’s pores can we avoid the perils of such forgetfulness, and “Fahrenheit” serves as just one pore in a great fabric of ideas to remind us of the freedoms that we share in a democratic society and of the importance of how events like these came to be in the first place.