The Radiophonic Laboratory of Antimatter (London)

RLAM

The Radiophonic Laboratory of Anti-matter

Concepts of eternity and immortality will disintegrate, and the woes of eternalization of matter will be reduced ever more to nothing …the stripteases of the constellations, the rhythmic dances of asteroids and ultrasonic music of thousands of fragmented sounds will supply us with moments worthy of demigods.

In the late 50s and early 60s, early Situationist Giuseppe “Pinot” Gallizio, an engineer, botanist, chemist and artist, developed Industrial Painting. In a collaborative effort – a critical perversion of the assembly line – artists, scientists and locals used primitive machines to fill long rolls of canvas with abstract-gestural paintings. These mass-produced – yet unique – objects were intended to be sold en mass, cut up by-the-metre, to usurp the art market.

In this Apiary Sunday Salon you’re invited to become part of an audio-homage to Gallizio’s process. Join forces to create a chaotic, unpredictable, abstract-music-making-machine. Lee “Scratch” Perry described Dub as “the ghost in me coming out.” Together, we will perform a live Dub on the sprawling contraption: to summon and liberate the “Ghost in the Machine”. All hands simultaneously on the controls: mixing desk as ouija board.

Today man is a part of the machine he has created and which negates him and by which he is dominated. We must invert this non-sense or there will be no more creation; we must dominate the machine, force it to make the unique gesture — useless, anti-economic, artistic — in order to create a new anti-economic society, one that is poetic, magical, artistic.

Bring instruments, contraptions, noise-making objects, broken drum machines, found tapes, bits of wood, air horns, tape loops, cat gut, dental floss and traffic cones… kitchen sinks. We will plug everything together to make our machine.

Each person will feel the joy of color, of music; architectonic airs of colored gasses, hot walls of infrareds that provide eternal springtime – we will make it so that man plays from the cradle to the grave, and even death will be nothing but a game.

Experience is a burden – no musical technique is required. No “playing” of instruments; just play itself. Total, egalitarian production. If you can make a noise you’re doing it right.

So great will be the artistic productions that machines will produce, compliantly bending to our wills, that we will not even be able to fix it in memory; machines will remember for us.

On Wednesday 23rd July, Dutch radio station Concertzender will broadcast a documentary programme I’m making about the process, featuring recordings from the workshops. The programme was curated by SoundFjord as part of Martijn Comes’ “Inventions for Radio.”

Not even the habit of establishing time will be preserved.

From now on, time will be merely an emotive value, a newly minted coin of shock, and will be based on the sudden changes arising in moments of creative life, and upon rare instants of boredom.

Event starts at 4pm and finishes some time after that.

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All quotes in italics from:
Discourse on Industrial Painting and a Unitary Applicable Art
Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Internationale Situationniste #3 (December 1959)