Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Newcastle University
Felt Beak
Felt Beak is a process composition in the form of an online music archive published as a tumblr blog (http://feltbeak.tumblr.com) and a vimeo page (http://vimeo.com/feltbeak). It reflects my endeavours both as creative practitioner (as Gwilly Edmondez) and as solo curator of a microculture, generated through an ongoing series of collaborative events and album productions, and disseminated through the internet.
Through Felt Beak I curate new contexts for creative agency within the digital environment. This practice-led research strives for a proliferation of original content and draws on cultural precedents whose importance may have been previously underestimated. For example, Anthony Braxton's tendency to produce abstract, apparently independent textual narratives to supplement new recordings is here emulated through the insertion to every zip file a 'sleeve', ca. 300 words of poetic prose whose relation to the album's music is abstract, though prompted by something in the music's character. Felt Beak extends this principle to a co-option of various visual media.
Felt Beak argues that the absorption of new technologies into culture has always been tempered by a tendency to affirm already established paradigms (for example, the invention of recording spawned an industry that reproduced concert performance rather than pursuing new forms). The project homes in on a core principle that social creative agency could be a universal mode of resistance to market governance. It plays on a suspicion that post-Enlightenment culture has exacted a suppression of individual agency in order to subjugate intelligence to the machinations of power, and that that power itself has become more densely concentrated among ruling minority groups we call oligarchies.
Felt Beak actively pursues interdisciplinarity by integrating music, visual arts, writing, video and live performance in trying to develop ways of responding to the new parameters, materials and contexts of digital networking and dissemination.
