Hello again

I’ve uploaded some old video work to Vimeo today and thought I should add it in here. Quite a lot has happened since these were made. The footage from the Floor It at the ABSOLUT Fringe Festival was taken thanks to Tom Burke, he didn’t have that much to work with given the venue was in almost complete darkness for much of the performance, really the video is just a description of each of the pieces and can be zipped through to give an indication of what each of the 10 new pieces involved. The last piece Ish Tisi was a grand experiment devised by Jenn Kirby and myself in order to get the audience to make music.

I haven’t updated this blog since we started the Dublin Laptop Orchestra, which is a bit of a shame given all the great gigs and things we’ve done so far. Dan Trueman who started the first laptop orchestra with Perry Cook in Princeton was spending a year in Dublin and as a result decided to open up the prospect of a Dublin cell. We took the torch and ran with it. Our take on the laptop orchestra is very inclusive and has a particular inclination for collaborating with  traditional/folk musicians. We played Sligo Live with fiddle player Seamie O’Dowd, we played in the Kevin Barry room in the National Concert Hall, The Joinery in Stoneybatter, Dublin Contemporary as part of a Sonic Pop-up. We gave a demo and talk at D.A.T.A 50 and also played alongside musicians from Ensemble Avalon at the launch of the Composition Centre in Trinity College Dublin. There are lots more gigs on the cards so hopefully I’ll manage to keep on top of it from now on. We’ve been playing with Gametrak controllers that we hack and use to control all sorts of musical parameters. In December, I premiered my piece Millipede, which used these controllers to generate rhythms and challenge the feet of hardshoe dancer Nic Gareiss and the rest of the musicians from This Is How We Fly at the Smock Alley Theatre. Myles O’Reilly of Arbutus Yarns made a gorgeous video to document the whole exchange. Watch it here.

Coming up we’ll be playing as part of the St Patrick’s Day Festival and at the first LiveStock of the year. We’ll also be performing a piece written by Alex Dowling alongside the Crash Ensemble as part of Free State VII. We hope to return to the National Concert Hall soon as well and I will endeavour to keep this blog updated with the news.

Time and Tide

The exact title will be a surprise to me but RTÉ Radio 1 will be airing a 10min piece I put together on the inter-tidal zone Monday 25th Oct sometime during the documentary hour 6-7pm Irish time. Listen in if you are within earshot of a radio.

Shortest post ever!

Listen to the podcast here.

Between you and me

I’ll be taking up a place on the Masters in Music and Media Technologies in Trinity at the end of September and moving to Dublin probably mid-September to watch some Fringe shows and seeing as I already have a ticket for Joanna Newsom in the Grand Canal theatre on the 14th, I may as well sort myself out with somewhere to live.

It has been a while since I last updated this blog and Paul has been telling me to pull up my socks, so I should mention myself and Paul Staunton worked on two tiny radio pieces in June/July which we submitted to the Third Coast Audio Short Docs challenge; Book Odds.

Lately, I’m working on putting together a 10min piece for radio based around the intertidal zone. The piece will explore (with words and sounds) how life adapts to adaptation and can in some cases start to depend on it – a liquid that takes its form from the vessel that contains it. A love poem to all those creatures that exist in the in between. Here is a taster. There will be voice over this, so it really is just a flavour of what the piece will be.

For culture night this September 24th I’ll be installing a short audio piece for the Pearse Centre at the Ireland Institute in Dublin. I’m really tempted to use some examples from Roger Casement’s life along with sounds from the intertidal zone for this piece. Casement is a fascinating character who managed to be both coloniser and colonised, British and Irish, hero and anti-hero. I came across some valuable insights into Casement’s life in this book here:

Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland by Rebecca Solnit

It’s always interesting to learn something new about national history from someone from a different country. I was recently turned on to Rebecca Solnit after minding a copy of the Field Guide to Getting Lost for a friend. The Field Guide is definitely the best but there are lots of interesting ideas in Wanderlust and the above book too, both of which I’ve been able to get in my local library. Hoorah for libraries.

TransColonia

I’ll be taking part in TransColonia which opens on Thursday 20th May with a piece called Ash Cloud made in response to Adrian Duncan’s Epiphenomena which showed at The Joinery recently.

Ash Cloud – An unbuilt building that generates clouds. Eyjafjallajökull. A volcano stops travel across Europe. It generates grey clouds of ash, that I crochet and hang in an abandoned Polish travel agency.

TransColonia presents:

recharge: responses to an unbuilt archive
Artists’ responses to unbuilt architectural projects to be displayed in a vacant retail unit in Dublin 1.
recharge is an active investigation into the potential of unrealised, postponed and utopian architectural projects. With sites located in Poland, England and Ireland, the recently assembled unbuilt archive includes an international competition entry, a fictional cloud room and an alternative proposal for a commercial urban site. recharge challenges the normally static nature of an archive by opening it up as a set of instructions and inviting artists’ responses in a workshop context.

The recharge space will be open to the public on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays
from 4.30-7pm, May 20th – June 12th inclusive.

Address: Transcolonia, No.41 Amiens Street, Dublin 1

For information please visit: www.transcolonia.org
Unbuilt Archive by:
MHP Collective, Adrian Duncan, Box Urban, Elaine Hanna, David Shannon

Participating Artists:
Blaithin Quinn, Tunde Toth, Rachel Ní Chuinn, Paul Quinn, Louise Marlborough, Adrian Duncan

Project director: Blaithin Quinn

Email: blaithin_quinn@ireland.com

Wind Song

Using Tuna Pitch to figure out what notes the wind is making

I paid a visit to one of my favourite beaches on the Sligo coast; Trá Bhuí just off the townland of Dunmadden and using the Tuna Pitch app for iPhone, I wrote down the different notes registered by the phone as the wind blew over the microphone. I took these notes and played them back with four different keyboard effects and came up with the following. This is the first version and I’m looking forward to playing around and developing the concept some more.

Wind Song

Supermarket at Kulturhuset, Stockholm

Articule took Beached to Supermarket art fair in Stockholm and I thought since I couldn’t make it to Montreal to see it there I could take a trip to Stockholm. They were having an unusually cold late February so walking around was chilly especially when staying up all night to get an early flight on Sunday morning but the city is stunning so well worth it. This will mostly be a visual entry, I like this photograph a lot, something about the flat diffused light makes the birds look like a pattern.

Kulturhuset is in the centre of the city at Sergels Torg. It has five levels of theatres, dance studios, galleries, cafés and on the ground floor an initiative called Lava where young people are welcome to drop by to do anything from screen-printing to badge-making paying only for the materials used. Supermarket took place on the third and fifth floor. Tack Articule!

Articule Member’s Exhibition

I’m going to be taking part in Articule’s annual member’s show. The exhibition will be happening in the context of a Special Projects (SP) initiated event  À la Dérive/Drift Lines. The SP event is composed of three consecutive segments: Private beach, Member’s beach and Public beach. The three week programming will include a spatial intervention by SP which will turn the gallery into a beach.The Member’s Beach segment will be the member’s exhibition and in the third week during The Public Beach segment the public are invited to respond to the theme with work, performances or whatever other way they see fit.

I have been working on a piece inspired by this youtube clip which makes me think of the aftermath of a relationship. Seeing as I’m not in Montreal at the moment there will be a print out (see below) hanging in the gallery with a url link to a sound piece that people can tear off and listen to elsewhere.  Here is a link to the sound clip: beached

Installation image by Andrew Frosst