Invisible Parallel

PERFORMANCE-INSTALLATION (TWO PERFORMERS, TWO PHONES, TWO TABLETS, TWO SPEAKERS)

2016.01.30 Duration & Dialogue Performance Art Festival/Symposium, Katzman Contemporary, Toronto, Canada

2016.09.02 – 2016.11.06 Banyan Travel Agency (Banyan Commune Project), Times Museum, Guangzhou, China

a collaboration with Jason Doell

Invisible Parallel is a performance-installation for two remote performers who track their paths to the destination (exhibition space/venue) by live streaming field recording of their separate trajectories. At the same time, two speakers installed in the destination are streaming the sounds that each performer records respectively – each speaker reporting a separate aural journey. From the perspective of the audience, both sources of transient urban soundscapes combine into one sound piece in the absence of the performers who are unaware of the other’s contribution to the collaboration. The emergent result is two disparate field recordings heard as one integrated sonic phenomenon on which the audience overlay their own notions of space, and landscape. Invisible Parallel explores how digital technology as the prosthesis of body represents the absent body, as well as the effect of adjacency and duration on the spatial and temporal consciousness through auditory sense.

Amusia

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将把短裙拉长

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深圳香蕉派

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家比世界大

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爱不需要理由,爱需要理由

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至于聂鲁达的墓地,就在他故居旁边不远的地方,一处高起的小海角上。如同他的卧床一样,聂鲁达和夫人的墓地也朝向大海的方向。

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港独在英建港,要大干一场

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大成一隅,你我比邻,这是人与人之间最温暖的关系。可以是一声问候,也可以是临危

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作战

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日本防卫大臣:外星人从未入侵日本

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一个包间配一个服务员,现在已经不可能了

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广州政务网治理僵尸,有几多

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陈赫不见了,出了狱的张子萱老公该怎么办?

身为中国人的你,受到启发了没有?有没有建一个最好中文名网站的

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牙痛与乡愁

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three performances that examine voice as an instrument and vibration source

AMUSIA
  • 1. Dada Wu, Sound Poetry, Untitled

  • 2. Xuan Ye & Dada Wu, Voice Improvisation

  • 3. Xuan Ye & Dada Wu, Sound Performance, Embed Great Sound of Poetry *plastic bags, newspaper (Southern Metropolis Daily issued on April 3, 2015)
Dada Wu

1. I can’t sing because I can’t sing in tune. I am officially tone-deaf. Amusia. I am a person who has lost the ability to sing. If you define singing as producing melodies, I think of it as a collision of words and phrases.
2. I listen to music, all kinds of music and sounds. I need to throw up. I learn languages – all kinds of phonetics/all kinds of frictions between lips and teeth/all kinds of articulations. I need to puke.
3. I needed an exit from my present life or to just chisel a hole through it. It’s like when you get hit by shit out without any reason and you gotta ask “why?”.
4. The audience is the flesh. I need flesh.
5. Sound poetry, sound poetry, sound poetry.
6. Emotional reasonless; Meaningless sentimental.

Xuan Ye

Voice is pre-language. Voice existed before all semiotic systems. Voice inherits the history of human civilization. Voice is representative of power. “Voice or not” and the materialities of voices signify cultural and political meanings. As Roland Barthes concludes in the Grain of Voice (1981), “voice is in a dual posture, a dual production of language and of music”. From a relatively micro point of view, voice is the most original instrument that functions as a direct source of vibration and meanwhile reacts to the Body (oral/nasal/head/thoracic/abdominal cavity) namely the Subject to form into resonance within, furthermore, as oneself. In accordance with this knowledge, I try to free the natural voice from habitual patterns that are generated from our restrained mechanism of vocal production – from traditional vocal music, extended techniques, phonetic texts to any sonic output; in the form of mimicry to the nature and the modern soundscapes, and the medium to channel consciousness to presence. Let sound waves laden with the breathe circulate within the Body, to induce physical commotion and be in harmony inside and out with the environment.

Der Stromausfall / Cloudbursting

During the Everything Without a “Real” is False: APA (aka Xuan Ye) Artists-in-Residence @ Being Generation & JØ (aka Johann Diedrick johanndiedrick.com) @ Friends-at-Home Mirco-Residency (2015.5.30), the two impromptu music performances Der Stromausfall / Cloudbursting happened as a result of unexpected electrical outage and fortuitous power-back on Dundas West, Toronto. Der Stromausfall was improvised completely without wall power. In Cloudbursting, the instrument (eventually the performance) allows the performer to use a one second vocal recording as a sound source for a tactile interface. When touching two contacts, thereby closing a circuit, the vocal sample is played back in a fluttering staccato of pitches based around a pentatonic scale. This allows for a wildly expressive sonic palette that is driven through touch between oneself and others. When the circuit is used in reverse, a group can form a connection together that results in silence. As they start to let go of each other, melodic voices shower down.

Limited Editions of 100.

A Side – Der Stromausfall – 53’59”

APA (Xuan Ye) = Voice / Mic Feedback / Objects (saxophone, melodica, bicycle, etc.)

JØ (Johann Diedrick) = Drum / Mic / Objects (branches, plastic bag, etc.)

B Side – Cloudbursting – 38’44”

APA (Xuan Ye) = Voice / Electric Guitar

JØ (Johann Diedrick) = Cloudbursting (Instrument)

Mastered by Alex Santilli at WSDG Philadelphia Recording Studio

Visual Design by Xuan Ye


“There’s a cathartic tension in the two artists’ shrill dialogues and abstract percussion on Der Stromausfall, the A side of the cassette…the visual experience isn’t necessary to appreciate the rich fervour of Diedrick and Ye’s collaboration—it’s gripping and challenging enough on tape…Cloudbursting rarely rests in ambient territories, as harsh and chaotic layers of melody and noise dominate.”

– Kristel Jax, Musicworks ISSUE 124

“The best part about dislocation from time is that sounds seem to have a new quality. They are more breakable somehow. A second can be burst and the pieces repositioned. Each piece sounds different yet contains all the information of the whole thing.”

– James Beardmore, Weird Canada

10’43”

10'43''

Endless Cassette, 10’43”

10’43” (The 10’43” Before Meeting With Zhao Ziming For The First Time)

It was in the morning on April 5th, 2015, at 9 sometime. I’d ridden the night train from Guangzhou arriving at Xiamen. My friend, Zhao Ziming was supposed to meet me at the train station. We hadn’t scheduled a time but knowing that he’d just waken up and needed a while. Never before had I met Zhao Ziming in person. We’d only talked online once through 3 emails. I remember a poem he wrote. It is titled “The Temple of Enlightenment”, which Zhang Wenxin had it send to me. I had no idea what Zhao Ziming looked like, nor did I know when he would get there. I just sit on the low stool that I found in front of a KFC. It had been nearly 10 years that I hadn’t been at the same spot. It was in front of the KFC on the ground floor on the North Square of Xiamen Train Station on April 5th, 2015 where and when I was waiting for my friend Zhao Ziming. I had no idea when he would show up, nor did I know when I turned on the sound recorder. The construction machines on the square were generating loops of two pitches and their partials; the soundscape in the mall was layered with rhythmical noises. Not until a voice called my name did I remove the earphones and press pause.

Once I subconsciously pressed the record button, “I am waiting to meet a person I’ve never met” became a fabricated script, namely “The 10’43” Before Meeting Zhao Ziming For the First Time”. The performance started as a result of the act of recording. The length of the performance was unknown until I met this person. The 10’43”-long recording documents the sound field where and when I was sitting and listening to, which also proves the presence of me recording/performing.

— 2015.4.5

fromanothertotheother.com

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fromanothertotheother.com (from an other to the other) is a web application that cumulates a personal history through the instant lens of photography and writing. It consists of fabled theories, far-fetched fallacies, and waves of the primitive impulses behind which I intellectualize as the Performance of Sensational Experience.

The webpage built on the structure of a blog displays one random blog entry every time the browser is refreshed. The concept was conceived in 2011. Stretching the timeline to a lifespan, the webpage documents a non-linear visualization of Punctum and is essentially how I perceive, experience and contemplate on life as an idea of temporality.