TRCP Presents: Jhameel

The last Red Couch Project artist of the quarter was Jhameel, an electronic musician from Berkeley (and the first non-Stanford artist to visit the program). Jhameel is about to blow up the internet, so make sure you know about him before he gets too big and starts doing Accura commercials.

Jhameel did a solo acoustic set for us. His CD (available on iTunes or at www.jhameel.com) sounds a lot different and more full with a backing band, but it was interesting to hear his voice with just the guitar underneath it. His vocals are somewhere between Jónsi and Sufjan Stevens in terms of sheer pixie-tude, but he's a great singer and has a similar interest in glitchy electronica and sound texture. I like his self-released album better, but the sounds of the two are very different.


After the show Emma Sedivy (TRCP co-founder) and I took him and his publicist Ryan on a little nighttime tour of Stanford, including the Gates of Hell and breaking into the football stadium to stargaze, where it was unfortunately too dark to get anything but ghost-y pictures.

Photosynthesizer

I've been talking this piece up for a while, and here it is: the photosynthesizer. The photosynthesizer is both an instrument and a sound installation. Left on its own, the piece is photo-reactive, changing the volumes and tones that it plays depending on where the sun is in the sky, and the shadows that are being cast across its face. Over the course of the day the piece will get louder as high noon approaches and soften as the sun goes down, eventually becoming silent in the absence of light. In this way it reacts to and follows the sun in the same way a flower might. The sheet metal petals also fold up and down in the presence of light, casting shadows of their own and creating a rhythm to the sounds generated. These petals are also photo-reactive, meaning that they only move when there is enough light around to activate them, and stop when the light drops (or when they are switched off).

Video:

The photosynthesizer going on its own as a sound installation:

And then playing it as a musical instrument:

Open Studio

Friday was the first ever end of quarter open studio in the art department. I showed off the working version of my photosynthesizer for the first time (I'll have photos and video later this week), and there was a lot of other great work up, including my favorite piece which I stumbled upon accidentally. Tam King built an "Air Haus" in the air conditioning system of the art building, a little breezy apartment complete with radio, television, kettle and book by Emily Post. I wandered up there when I saw the trapdoor was open and I was curious-- it turned out to be a whole installation. A lot of fun, though I'm pretty sure I'm going to get mesothelioma from being up in the ceiling.

The rest of the pictures are of work by all sorts of people in the department-- Not sure who all the credits go to but some of them are pretty cool.

Bilongo

 

Bilongo: Sculpture created for Barbaro Martinez-Ruiz's "African Visual Arts in the Americas" class. In thinking about how a white American can use African visual forms without it being the same kind of purely visual appropriation that happened at the beginning of the modernist movement in Europe (Picasso, Matisse, etc.), I realized that the problem is not so much that the visual has been stolen but that we've failed to successfully borrow the spiritual. The western art market is saturated with retouched and faked nkisi, but that appetite is purely for a specific coded vision of the exotic, the other, not for the spiritual dimensions the figures would contain in their proper setting. 

The gesture of Bilongo (medicine), however, is not at all one of the exotic-- quite the contrary, it's a gesture I repeat four times a day, every day, in order to keep myself alive and healthy. In a true mpungu figure, a client would go to a priest (nganga) and ask for a specific kind of healing. The client would then have to gather medecines which would be applied to both the object and the body of the person. The nkisi and the human are conceptualized as the same design: the body and the statue are both containers, inside of which is a spirit. The exterior of the statue is pierced with a nail that has the medicine on the tip, and the medicine is applied to the person's body as well. The nail remains permanently in the figure as a note that the contract occurred (nkisi nkondi, nkondi means "notebook").

In my case, I've reversed the gesture. As a type 1 diabetic, I inject myself with insulin before every meal. The syringes which I've inserted into the statue have already been inside my body-- they delivered the medicine which keeps me healthy, and thus they contain on their tips particles of my skin and blood along with traces of that medicine. A mpungu, like a body, must be cared for and maintained or it can die, lose its spirit. I give my medicine and my blood to the statue in order to note and memorialize the fact that every day I make the choice to continue to care for my body and my spirit, a choice most people are never confronted with but which I feel lets me revel in my life and in the world in a way that people who never examine the failing of their bodies perhaps cannot.

Vision Earth Grant

Heard back from SiCa today-- Kendra Peterson and I are receiving a Vision Earth Grant in their "A Memory On Earth" program to build our "A Model Home" installation. Yes, it's only $100, and yes, we already got all the materials we had planned on using for free, but we can always make the project bigger.

Not to sound like I'm complaining-- I'm absolutely thrilled that anyone sees enough promise in my work to want to reward me materially for what I'm doing. The one win really does make up for the ten rejections that come with it.

(We'll also ignore whether I think their logo is a bit... garish. Moving on.)

Photosynthesizer Test

Today I tested the photosynthesizer as a whole for the first time. After a few false starts (there are still some bugs, which hopefully I can fix with a 9V adapter with a higher amperage. The one I have is 800mA, I'm going to buy a 1.5A one tomorrow) the thing started working mysteriously after the LED display went out, so I took some video. Check it out below.