Jem at the Cheltenham Science Festival

[Shaz]

I've just booked a ticket to see Jem at the Cheltenham Science Festival on Wednesday June 6. His event is from 9pm - 10pm and is part of the After Hours music strand. The programme says:

"Jem Finer works as an artist and musician. He performs an improvised soundtrack and film using footage gleaned from diverse areas of science. Reversing the dominance of visual information over the sonic, he creates unique pieces of art from science."

[Shaz]

I've just got back from this event -- and it was absolutely fascinating. It's a shame there was only a handful of people there. Jem introduced his work and then took questions at the end.

The 'performance' was hypnotic. The premise was presenting sound over image and started with a wheezing fridge in a Spanish holiday apartment and then took in a range of sounds, many of them gleaned from scientific settings (labs, buildings and the like).

The sounds were presented over a triptych of images on the screen. Some felt straight out of David Lynch, or reminded me of the kind of things Portishead used to play around with.

I liked Jem's story about the squeaking gates. He'd gone to Turkey with some physicists to see the eclipse, and they stayed in a weird little estate where there were seven gates all in a row. He wanted people coming out of the gates at the same time, but apparently the physicists wouldn't play ball. Very mean.

He said it was the second time he'd done the presentation -- the first was at Dartington in Devon -- and he consciously chose more science-based sounds and images because of the science festival setting. With the arts festival one he'd gone for more 'natural' nature elements.

The presentation is done via an Apple Mac computer using a program he wrote himself. I loved it and it got me thinking all over again about what constitutes art. I'm fairly open-minded on this matter, as a chunk of my career has been spent working in art colleges. I'd been to a talk a week or so back by Richard Billingham, an artist and photographer, and left feeling absolutely livid and muttering about emperor's new clothes . . .

Billingham has done lots of work on zoos, but one of the central bits of his talk was showing a film he'd made in a German zoo. He'd set up a camera dead centre focussed on the lions' cage and then buggered off to have a fag. There was no editing or anything -- it was simply a fixed camera. I don't have an artistic bone in my body, but I could have done that. It said nothing to me.

Jem's work was far more questioning and innovative, and I loved the way it married his musical background with art.

[DzM]

I really enjoy Jem's work.

I enjoy how Longplayer manipulates very mechanical and cyclical ideas to create an always changing, non-repeating (well ... for 1000 years) composition. Really creative. I love that.

I love the use of natural elements and weather in Composition for a Hole in the Ground. I really want to visit it one day.

I've also really enjoyed the very experimental electronica work he's done solo and with Andrew Kotling.

The man is fantastically creative.

[Shaz]

I really enjoy Jem's work.

I enjoy how Longplayer manipulates very mechanical and cyclical ideas to create an always changing, non-repeating (well ... for 1000 years) composition. Really creative. I love that.

I love the use of natural elements and weather in Composition for a Hole in the Ground. I really want to visit it one day.

I've also really enjoyed the very experimental electronica work he's done solo and with Andrew Kotling.

The man is fantastically creative.

Yes, and I've decided I want to be Jem! I can be a very talented musician and artist and have such eclectic projects to work on . . .

The guy who introduced Jem said they'd been talking about what happens if the computers powering Longplayer break down, and whether the music would re-start in the correct place. Sadly we never got the answer to that!

I definitely want to see the hole in the ground -- that fascinates me the most.

[usualdog]

I really enjoy Jem's work.

I love the use of natural elements and weather in Composition for a Hole in the Ground. I really want to visit it one day.

I went to see the Hole in the Ground, it's beautiful. Allow a couple of hours as it's quite a long walk. When you get there trickle some water through the base, listen hard and you'll hear church bells in the distance. Marvelous.