Dance

Last night I went to 1000 Lovers, a contemporary dance performance by MAP (Movement Architecture Productions) that uses the public space of the waterfront. Amazing, and they also ran the performance twice during White Night (an Art in the Dark event).

Performing at the Gantry at Silo Park.

The audience downloads a music file and listens to the track as they are guided through the site. All the while the dancers perform the entire 50 minute piece counting in their heads and arrive in sync with each other. 

Using the Viaducts Event Centre as a 3D stage.

The barrier at Karanga Square becomes a platform displaying the 'widow' and 'bride'.

Having worked with MAP before, it's fascinating seeing this production come together. I was even lucky enough to go on the first site visit for this rendition (previous performances Tongues of Stone and Blood of Trees). The conversations we had about each of the key locations have come through boldly and with traits of the previous performances.

I'll keep you all updated about MAP's future performances, well worth going. It'll open your mind about places that you probably already use. For more photos from the performance, see the Google+ album.

Trust

With the advent of 'internet piracy', the music industry is changing and there are some who are embracing new ways to make a living with making music (as well as those who resist of course). A great example is Amanda Palmer, whose style is a mix between punk and cabaret. Personally not my flavour of music but wow, the way she goes about sharing her music is powerful stuff.

Her main game is trust: trusting fans, couch surfing & crowd surfing (which she talks a bit about in her TED talk - showed above, well worth viewing) and allowing those fleeting moments of interaction with people to form that trust. An extremist devotee of trust (compared to most of us anyway), it has served her well. She keeps coming back to one of her jobs standing on the street as an 8-foot bride, kind of like busking for money. Short moments of bonding, the experience of being acknowledged (good and bad), and an apparently steady income taught her this new path of music making.

If she comes to Auckland for a free gig or something, would love to see her work her magic. She also has a very well populated Twitter account which has helped with real time crowd/fan engagement.

Medicine

Often creativity is stereotyped as a fluffy practice where one paints or draws or designs something but creativity also encompasses a great deal of innovation. In fact, it's more of a culture for being able to think beyond the box. A blog post on Not Another Quarter-Life Crisis brings up this idea as the blogger (a medical doctor herself), commented on the role of creativity in the field of medicine and why it isn't an integrated part of medical work culture.

One of my fellow house officers paints in his spare time, another writes poetry. I can think of a couple who play musical instruments to a professional standard, and another few that composes on their nights off. I think overall we’re a pretty creative bunch, and handpicked for medical school because of our interests outside of academia.

And yet one of the biggest problems I have with the medical system is the lack of creativity.

Medical school is regimental, it rewards conformity, and rarely provides the opportunity for critical and creative thinking. Being a junior doctor is worse. Before becoming house officers we were told the most important skill to have in order to survive the next few years is time management. Not an ability to analyse or problem-solve, nor an ability to make decisions, but rather efficiency, an ability to keep your head down and finish the jobs.

Being new to the medical system we have different perspectives and fresh ideas, and yet we often lack the opportunity to express them. Who do we tell for it to be taken seriously? And who wants to listen to us naive idealists anyway?

I believe the formality of medical school and the ensuing hierarchy within the medical system is crushing our creative spirits, and the healthcare industry is losing out. Imagine if we can turn all those creative energies into innovations! How? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe a FedEx Day as this author recommends may help, maybe not. But let’s start brainstorming, and start nurturing those creative juices right from day one of medical school.

In a way medicine is built on a foundation of formality, procedure and (at times) bureaucracy, but none of our largest medical advances were ever made from conforming to procedure. Is scientific research creative? It might not be the kind of organic expression that you might expect from the word 'creativity', but it does create advances in medical practice.

Understandably, in today's world, conformity has become the norm - accountability and rigid systems efficiency doesn't allow much leeway for ideas, let alone change. Medicine might have a completely different feel if the 'creative juices' were a part of practicing medicine and this can be said for many other fields where followed processes is encouraged, even in 'creative' fields such as architecture (where planning permission can stifle even the most humble of designs).

Along the lines of creative problem solving, an article by New Scientist cites a journal which found that people who feel anger brainstorm in a more unstructured way, consistent with creative problem-solving. Anger is often seen as a negative emotion, but examples of how controlled anger can be used for great effect are people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Of course, how you express or use your anger is up to you. To quote the former: "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

Thanks Alice for her blog (shown above) - you can see more from her on Not Another Quarter-Life Crisis. You can also see more about creativity and science here on Creative Collision.

Silo

Silo Park by night

I actually can't believe I haven't blogged about this before because I'm a real ranting fanboy of Silo Park and Wynyard Quarter. Right now 'Summer of Sculpture' is on, turning the urban waterfront park into an interesting sculpture walk. In the period before this, Askew One, a renown NZ street artist that I've featured before, did a series of pieces on the decommissioned silo tanks (see above). They act as a backdrop to all of the activity and signals the increasing move towards making Silo Park as a space a creative one. The sculpture in the foreground is one of the many great pieces out there at the moment (the pose kind of reminds me of Assassins Creed).

In fact, the park holds many creative disciplines - music (there's even an old piano sits in one of the silos, for anyone to play on), films with the summer outdoor movie nights, dance, art, fine cuisine in the night market stalls/restaurants architecture and award winning urban design. 

Imagine that just a few years ago, this space was a broken down industrial waterfront. I hope that the spirit in the place is what Auckland as a whole can move toward - an accepting space open to rejuvenation and creativity.

Record

A tweet from Mt Eden Dubstep recently caught my attention:

@MtEdenOfficial: We never had anything except the bare minimum equipment since we started... finally getting up to industry standards feels good

Despite not having a huge amount of equipment for a genre of music that requires quite a bit of specialised equipment to make, Mt Eden has done so well in the local and now global dubstep scene. As they move into their first studio in NYC (from their humble 'bedroom studio'), we'll see how their style of music develops.

Many big name bands started out of garage studios with limited equipment but it should never be the limitation on creativity. Big bands such as Linkin Park started with grungy garage demo tapes before eventually expanding the empire. Now they have a fantastic studio which I believe has also changed their style of music as they experiment to their heart's content. For one, audio editing has removed the grit of a lot of today's music.

How much does a studio environment affect the creative process and outputs? Is it fair for a creative practitioner to blame a lack of tools and resources? However we go about it, it's the creative thinking and approach to one's art that really counts.

Mentawai

Time to end this blogging drought! Having been to China, it was a great cultural overload even for me. And without a way to access Blogger, Facebook or Twitter due to the Great Firewall, I've felt pretty oppressed. I am still taking my time processing the many photos I took of my China trip + ancestral village, so those will come in due course.

On a side step, I saw this fascinating video of Joey Lawrence trekking through the Mentawai with waaaay too much equipment to photograph the remnants of this rare and rich way of life (ignore how this is a huge advertisement - I swear I could have done just as well with my cranky old Sony DSLR).

"Hello people from the entire world! Come to the islands of Mentawai quickly. Right now, the Mentawai are still alive. I am still alive. But when I die, you will not see my culture any more."

Cultures like the Mentawai are dying out. A series of photographs show the old grandfather (I presume) with their grandchild, the elder in the traditional garb and the younger donning common western clothes. There must be a handful of cultures that still keep so true to how they have existed for centuries. It is this same handful of cultures that slips out of one's grasp like sand from the palm of one's hand.

One can only hope that the hauntingly moving chants and traditions are carried onto those with the Donald Duck T-shirt and muscle tees. Maybe.

Throughout China I've seen an enormous disregard for historic artefacts - there's just so much of it and the pressures of the current age quite easily stamp them out. Often is the sight where an old stone abode crumbles to the weather to be replaced by a really ugly new and much taller building. But that is for another blog.

Us

After a gruelling semester of architecture studies, I'm back on the blog (and Twitter) after my usual crit hiatus. Something that's been lingering on my bookmarks bar for a while is the Us cover of Rihanna's hit 'Where have you been'.

Very rarely do you find a cover as innovative as this. The husband wife duo, Carissa Rae and Michael Alvarado, created a fusion of genres for this very familiar pop song, with hints of classical influence, rock, jazz and a unique interpretation. Do enjoy and I'm looking forward to blogging over the summer, especially with an upcoming trip to China's villages!

Check out more from Us on their website HaveYouHeardOfUs.com. If you like their work, make sure you support them by purchasing their song or album.

Score

Deadline looms and projects are firing up (not to mention a backlash from NZFW) so there hasn't been much time to blog lately. Here is a tweet I saw of Imogen Heap, showing the beginnings of a score she is working on for the documentary film The Happiest Place. I love how it is more of a doodle of ideas and impressions rather than formalistic notation at this stage.

@imogenheap: Beginnings of score writing process for @HappiestFilm :) http://instagr.am/p/PweI8VFEL0/ 

Plastic

Recently the fashion publication Lucire did a feature on plastic surgery from a plastic surgeon's point of view. An article written by Dr Luciano Lanfranchi himself, he outlines the guidelines and concerns he has with his own field and practice. Many of the points mentioned are directly related to the creative disciplines in general.

Harmony, proportion and safety are in different ways applicable to other creative practitioners. In architecture, for example, harmony of the 'architectural intervention' with the existing fabric of the city must be maintained. Proportion of the spaces and how the building sits on the site a huge factor in urban design and safety for those who use the creative product is guarded by a tome of building standards.

The tricky thing about Dr Lanfranchi's form of art is that he is modifying the human body itself. Whereas a field such as fashion works with the body, plastic surgeons work on the body. We know the human body intimately - the human figure has been studied intensely from every angle, from medical anatomy to Da Vinci's detailed studies. The difficulty is in the involvement of a unique individual:

Even if these three fundamental concepts represent the meeting point between a plastic surgeon, an architect, a designer, and a musician, we rarely strike 1 + 1 = 2 in medicine, since there are a lot of possible variables that change from patient to patient.

That’s why we are all like single snowflakes: unique and unrepeatable.

So does medicine carry the ultimate burden of the creative? It works with the most fundamental building block of humanity - the body and in doing so, the mind. Nor is it sheer creation but working with the framework that already exists. I was surprised at how similar the issues that a plastic surgeon has to deal with are to the other creative arts - so vastly different but with the same undercurrents that we can all learn from.

Read the original article at Lucire's website.

Harmony

In Bb 2.0 is a music collaboration that was prepared over the interwebs. It takes the form of a bunch of Youtube clips with their creators making a sound. Follow the instructions, turn them on and you get a symphony that somehow works. I'm afraid my musical knowledge only goes that far - perhaps they all use the key B flat? It's a key that I often enjoy when playing music, for its melancholic yet strong qualities.

Make sure you take a look and listen at http://wwww.inbflat.net/

Before

Chairlift's 'choose your own adventure' music video is kind of fun. It also forces you to listen to the same dreaded song over and over in pursuit of less boring experiences. It captures the 'what if' scenarios that go on in real life - what if I did this or that, or went to that event would I have...? 

By clicking the arrows, guide the protagonist through a series of events ranging from yawnable to buzzy as (in a psychedelic sense). Funny to note, the hip fashion of nowadays fits really well in the retro days, even with the hair styles that you see around today. 

Imagine how much filming this would have taken. Have fun!

Robot

Flying robots playing the James Bond theme music. Sounds interesting right?

The last time I watched a robot play music was at the Shanghai World Expo in the Japanese Pavilion that literally took hours to snake into. A humanoid robot played the violin and that was the highlight of the show. Various other augmented reality and android demonstrations fitted around that and the future of Japan was made to seem like a really advanced and different place.

But still, it's not the music that is in any way impressive. It's the feat of programming these mechatronic dream children to coordinate that is amazing and, I think, still a developing art. The Japanese robot goes as far as trying to replicate the subtle humanesque features of musicality but it is still lacking qualities of human made music.

Bounds

What exactly is the connection between performer and audience? How distant is that gulf between them and how close can that boundary get? Not only with performance; how close can a consumer get to one's design, house even and is there always a distance to that relationship?

Sculpture by Chiharu Shiota.

Whitney

Remake

This rehash of Rihanna is possibly the best thing that's happened to the song and the dancing is just extraordinary. Seems inspired by the Roaring Twenties.

Choreography and dancing by Keone Madrid and Mari Martin. Song performed by James Cullum.

Distanceless

There's no such thing as distance in our globalised society, only the distance we put between ourselves.

Livestream

Right now I'm at a fundraising event for Architecture for Humanity. Only it's no regular event because I'm watching the charity concert with nearly a thousand people all over New Zealand and possibly the world. Imogen Heap has spontaneously come over to Christchurch to help with raising funds.

700 people have packed the live venue in Christchurch. A great turnout watches the livestream event at the University of Auckland several hundred kilometres away. In various other places, nearly 200 feed into the livestream, capturing the efforts of the event, enjoying the music and supporting the cause of rebuilding Christchurch. And there are snacks (at least in Auckland which I helped organise).

What an amazing thing it is to have this made into a grassroots national movement.

For the livestream, go to http://songsforchristchurch.org/archives/164

For updates via Twitter, follow me @BobbShen or @AfhAuckland

Bounce

'Sound sculptures' seems like a bit a dramatic tag for this project, but it is kind of great. It reminds me of some twisted experiment with 3D modelling and, at first, I was about to cast it aside. But, it's not digital! Yay!

So through this analogue but rather high tech process, little droplets of cyan, yellow, magenta were placed on top of a membrane on top of a small speaker. Then, filmed with a fancy rig in macro, these little droplets of paint get to bounce! The difference between this project and the numerous digital projects playing with these parameters is the level of analysis in the process. There is no 'data'. It is of the real world, with physics that we understand in our environment and the sounds that we can hear with our own ears. Over-analysis tends to stifle creative potential, or at least the natural, compatible feeling of it.

Not to endorse Canon (and the snob complex that appears to consume its fans) but check out the process and resulting ad of this creative playfulness. Painting with sound, made possible with cutting edge film technology.

Canon Pixma: Bringing colour to life from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

Flight

A Flight to Blackout was one of the first bands I got into who played in the instrumental rock genre. This is from their MySpace page:

It is true, the world is full of underground posers, sharpening their sticks for the coming revolution against an opposition that doesn't exist, artistes who haven't done a lick of real artistic work , who use their supposed underground artistic cred to get them in bed with whomever they can scam, would-be rock stars that think they are evolving music by turning it into a vapid fashion show, and supposed followers of old school DIY punks who haven't yet realized that their ideological stance, though noble in its way, simply limits them. But there are also daring innovators and experimenters, willing to risk all to contribute their perspective to the ongoing narrative that is our collective heritage. So how can I say "there is no counterculture?" I can say it, and mean it, because these people would ask you what you're smoking, if you asked what it's like, being a part of "The Counterculture." There is no Grand Unified Scene. These innovators I'm speaking of are the people who push their own boundaries, and the boundaries of the culture around them enough that they are simply classified as "counterculture" or "revolutionary" because the culture, and the media, doesn't really know what to make of them. (My hope is, you could very well be one yourself.)

Metastasis

Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis

An architect who led a double life as a composer. His music is based on math. It is about structure and the laws of the bigger picture (whatever those may be). The diagram is interesting, and presented on a video, the music has a direct link to the image that created the music. Interpretation is naked on the table. Sounds like something NZ Trio would play!