Wednesday saw me missing the penguin on the roof for a trip to the Ikon Gallery to listen to artists Ben Sadler and Philip Duckworth, aka Juneau Projects, talk about their favourite things. I’d kept bumping into the name over the last year and it always intrigued me yet their public face, like so many contemporary artists, was annoyingly vague. I wanted to “get” them, to understand what they were doing and why, but couldn’t get a handle on it. I don’t know if this is just a failing I have, coming from the online world, specifically blogging, where a personal resonance is an important part of someone’s work (not to mention my long time love of autobiographical self published comics where, when done well, the personal is turned to the universal), but the way that artists hide behind their work really irritates me.
So a chance to hear a couple of intriguing chaps talk informally about stuff seemed like a good way to spend a couple of hours. And it was. They were unpretentious, self-depreciating and thoughtful as they went through some of the stuff that interests and fascinates them. A lot of it could be classes as subcultural, coming from the sidelines of culture and not traditionally recognised as such but having a value. This interested me a lot, especially when they talked about YouTube videos of people doing cover versions to the camera, for reasons I probably don’t have to explain here.
But the highlight was their final favourite thing – a software app, the name of which I’ve annoyingly forgotten (in the comments if you know please!), which they played using the home made instruments, two of which you can see in the photo above, one of which is being played by me. Thanks to Ana for the photo. I’m going to sound like a real geek when I say this, and bear in mind I’ve only played the game once, but it was very similar to Guitar Hero in that the computer had a sequence it ran through which was triggered by the plucking of a small microphone buried into the wooden guitar. So I played the rhythm which triggered effects, both audio and visual, through the computer. Or something. It was immense fun.
The thing that struck me throughout the talk was that these guys are magnets for cool stuff which they then turn into more cool stuff and that they’re obviously intrigued by the sort of internet culture that has it’s roots in DIY zine culture (in other words, the best bits of internet culture!) so, and cue the broken record, they really should be fucking blogging. I wouldn’t say this to them myself as I’m becoming a cliche but, hell, this stuff should be shared.
Anyway, they’re launching an album at Walsall Art Gallery on August 28th – details here – and have some tunes on their MySpace. Next week sees David Lodge talking about his favourite things at Ikon but I somehow doubt he’ll be letting the audience play with his typewriter.
I think it was called Audiomulch or something like that!
‘The thing that struck me throughout the talk was that these guys are magnets for cool stuff which they then turn into more cool stuff and that they’re obviously intrigued by the sort of internet culture that has it’s roots in DIY zine culture (in other words, the best bits of internet culture!) so, and cue the broken record, they really should be fucking blogging.’
I’m not sure this is true, but I’d be very interested to hear why I’m wrong.
I should have been a bit more clear there:
‘…they really should be fucking blogging.’
This is the bit that I’m not sure is true.