FRIDAY 13th : Le Grand Cirque :: On friday march 13th, at La Comète 347 in Paris, we will present the first ever SIMULTANEOUS EAI concert , curated by Jean Bordé. That evening in three different corners of La Comète three different EAI-groups (La Brocante Sonore [Belgium/France], DIKTAT [Paris/Berlin], and Nozal Cube [France]) will perform at the same time ... Be there at 20h30 ...

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Insular Arithmetic (ookoi toont)

february 21, 2009.

[ podcast :: sbpc 27 ... ]

The following picture is a visual condensation - made by £PcM - of '2525' (click to enlarge), the (exactly) 50 second HD-clip that the ookoi produced on the wonderful beach that one finds north of Hollum, at the end of the Jan Roepespad, on the dutch island of Ameland. We made it the last time we went up there, to work in the Archipel Medialab. That was the end of may last year, almost nine months ago.

You can now view '2525' on YouTube/ookoi (clicking the link brings you to the - recommended - HD version, but this can be a bit rough on slower connections; you may want to let the clip load completely before you hit 'play' ...)

[ the making of '2525' ]

We shot precisely fifty scenes for '2525' ( * ). If you have a close look at the images, next to an M-Audio digital dictaphone, lying in the sand between the two of us you will see a hotel bell. Also, there are all these little pieces of paper that seem to be twirling around; the little papers contained the numbers 1 to 50; we tore off one as a numerical reminder for each next scene, and one of us would hit the bell, in order to provide an audio cue for each of the fifty scenes.

For the first scene, each of us hit one chord, randomly. In the second one, we hit two. For the third scene, we did three ... and so further, until the fiftieth scene, where both £PcM and me hit 50 random guitar-chords, one after the other.

Each of the fifty scenes then was time-compressed, in order to make it last precisely one second; making for a total playing time of 50 seconds ... [ Observe that from a certain point onwards the number of 'hits per second' become audible bass frequencies: 50 hits in a second corresponds to a 50 Hz tone .... ]

Now let's make a little calculation:
in '2525' £pCM and myself each hit 1 + 2 + 3 + ... + 50 = 1275 guitar chords. Which makes for a total of 2 x 1275 = 2550 hits ...

and more and other and more hits ...

As you probably will realize: though the result was well worth the effort, performing and editing '2525' has been a lot of hard work ...

Fortunately we then could spend the rest of our residency - part of Archipel's Razende Bol project - the way popsters of our advanced middle age are supposed to: we hosted an evening-long retrospective of our own work on Archipel webTV, and the remaining of our time on the island we spent at the Ameland golf course ...

There we recorded our 50 Great Hits. The corresponding soundfile we offer you as this SB-edition's podcast, which you can download and/or listen to, by clicking on three of the above four "ookoi golft" pictures.
[ Attention: one of the four pictures will not lead to the podcast, but will just enlarge when you click it ... ]

ookoi toont ...

On the evening of saturday may 31st, 2008, not long before the bells of the Hervormde Kerk across the road of gallery/hotel Dit Eiland tolled eight, we installed camera's, microphones, Archipel's brand new Apple TV and a picnic table in the large garden at the back of the medialab.

The ArchipelTV video webcast "ookoi toont" began at nine sharp. While zipping whisky and beers, eating peanuts, smoking cigars and playing chess with Jan Spoelstra, our favorite Ameland photographer/journalist, we commented three full hours live on a retrospective of audio-visuals that meanwhile were showing on the Apple TV. Many of these works had originated in this very Archipel Medialab, during our yearly residencies, that began in 2004.

We listened to tracks from our "Muziektafel/Tafelmuziek 2004" CD and witnessed another short première of our "1024". We webcasted several of our vodcasts, extracts of some of which you'll find on YouTube/ookoi, like Lighthouse (from 2006, the year we did a 10 hour long webstream from inside the Ameland Lighthouse).

When the church bells tolled ten, we began watching the full and unabridged version of Infinite [∞], shot by £PcM four years earlier, from the very spot where we were sitting watching it that evening ...
Then, at eleven, there was l'Ecoute - in its full and unabridged one hour version - and we sat in silence for a long while. We listened to the nightly sounds of the island and looked up at the skies above and around us, meanwhile casting stealthy glances at the church tower, where - notwithstanding its stand-still in Infinite [∞] - the clock hands kept pushing time, on and on and on ...

Just before the bell tolled midnight we opened another bottle, to drink to the four years' work that we just had been reviewing. It had been good times, that 'went by like hurricanes and much faster things' ... Over the hours that we had spent preparing and doing "ookoi toont" in the garden the church bells had rung 8, 9, 10, 11 and finally another 12 times, which gave rise to a last bit of insular arithmetic: 8 + 9 + 10 + 11 + 12 ... once again that made ... 50 ...

It was the 1st of june, 2008, a little over 0h00.
We webcasted '2525' on Archipel WebTV.

It was a premiere.

notes __ ::
(*) We made '2525' as a present for friend and colleague Rob Scholte, on the occasion of his 50th birthday ... [ ^ ]

tags: Ameland, Archipel medialab, ookoi, hits

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