Thursday 30th March on Blackbird at SuperRare
Grant Foster with in a skull : Karl Bielik and Lark : James Scott Brooks interpreting the archive of Giacomo S Ruscelli : Duncan McAfee.
The experimentation engaged in over the last few years by those traditional contemporary artists who have explored the new media and new audience of crypto art, bears parallels with the work of those early pioneers of contemporary music who were searching for new tools and new sounds at the birth of the three-minute pop song. For traditional artists, often not being digital natives, the limitations and possibilities of crypto art have been fascinating - and adding a musical element has only seemed to accentuate this.
Burt Bacharach used to call his three minute compositions ‘miniature movies’ and with this inspiration, Blackbird asks artists who also make music alongside their visual art practice, to produce one track for a compilation album of crypto art music videos - an album of contemporary artists and musicians negotiating the crypto art world - each artist as a blackbird, singing in the dead of night, throwing their creativity out into the digital void.
Grant Foster with in a skulL
Blackbird is the 4th track from in a skulls’ second album Waves. This NFT is an exploration of physical transcendence through a train window, as the viewer travels through Port Talbot, steel works, Wales, and then off, out into The Cosmos, via a dancing protagonist mediated through a toad.
Karl Bielik and Lark
Blackbird’s ‘Singing in the dead of night’ asks visual artists who also engage with music to produce one track for a compilation album of crypto art music videos. This piece was created using adverts torn from art magazines, then placed underneath my studio paintings to randomly accumulate paint as I work. These accidental paint splattered pages are normally just left to gather dust, this time they were photographed, filmed, edited and set to music by my band Lark.
James Scott Brooks interpreting the archive of Giacomo S Ruscelli
From The Modernist Archive Of Giacomo S Ruscelli: 'Found Words In A City' 2023
Video, text, spoken word, bass, drums, piano & electric organ 1 minute 40 seconds
Developing the persona of the artist, writer, composer, musician, Giacomo S Ruscelli, as a means to develop a series of artworks concerning pertinent moments in early modernism. ‘The Modernist Archive of Giacomo S Ruscelli’ is an ongoing collection of specific artistic interventions and musical compositions via a fictitious Italian Swiss artist.
"Walking through a city finding words of the streets, buildings, glass and concrete. Considering the Futurists celebration of the city's energy, and the Situationist's desire to walk without a destination, following instead what catches your interest. And to speak the words of a city aloud during the rhythm and pulse of repetitive music. "
Duncan McAfee.
‘Papers’ is one of a few a songs I wrote a few years ago reflecting on memory and regret. The ‘papers’ of the title are ambiguous. The song is short and direct, a bit like a newspaper byline suggesting perhaps we learn from history, the mistakes of others. Or perhaps they allude to legal papers such as a marriage contract evoking looking back over an ended relationship. As an artist who’s long worked primarily on paper, in drawing and painting, there’s a sense of looking back over old work too, that feeling that it was someone else who made these things, of trying to reconnect with a past self.
The video for the song is built around a clip of my young son blowing out the candles of his 5th birthday cake, some 10 years ago as I write. I’ve made very rudimentary animations of the candles and the cake using very basic, open source software, echoing the early computer design programs I first tried out in the 1990s. I like the idea of this unrefined, clunky video being released into the HD, AI driven world of Avatars and NFTs, offering a reflective, if somewhat ironic, moment of pause for reflection and nostalgia. And of course the song, birthday cards, the photographs of the birthday party, none of these exist on paper as they would have in previous generations. So perhaps ultimately this is a love-song to the real, physical world:
Please don’t throw out the papers
Remember yesterday
It’s not that far away
It’s not that for away
You can’t forget
All those mistakes