I’m showing an installation in the East River, at that little brick-littered beach right under the Brooklyn end of the Manhattan Bridge this Saturday and Sunday (Sept. 27 and 28). It’s named Ignatz and it’s all about bricks.
Plenty of art and performances at the DUMBO Art Festival all weekend. You really should go!
p.s. consider subscribing to the moonmilk mailing list for announcements of stuff like this.
“Most of the people I’ve talked to, I’ve asked who had inspired them,” he said. “Who were you reading when you decided to start blogging? To a certain point that becomes a harder and harder thing the further back you go. For instance, Justin Hall started his site in January 1994, before most of us had heard of the web. I asked him, ‘Well, you’re one of the first bloggers, was there anyone out there who you were getting inspiration from?’ And he pointed me to this other guy named Ranjit Bhatnagar who was keeping a site at moonmilk.com in 1993. And, sure enough, it was a reverse chronological list of stuff he found on the web.”
— Simon Owens interviews Scott Rosenberg for PBS. Rosenberg is working on a book-length history of blogging.
15 years, wow. And I’ve been photoblogging since ’94. No wonder I’m tired. Check out a retrospective of moonmilk over the years here.
Electric Junk Guitar Workshop from ranjit on Vimeo.
My photo “ong island ail road” accompanied a story in The Morning News today.
The Long Island Railroad is New York’s lifeline in the summer—a fleet of rescue vehicles destined for the beach. For some, though, it’s also a means to find freedom. EMILY MEG WEINSTEIN reports from every station down the line.
On July 30th I’ll be teaching a class at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn, making electric guitars out of junk. Check out the etsy class listing to register for the class, or look at this post on Make.
“The electric guitar is a sophisticated and highly evolved instrument. But you can make your own out of a few bucks worth of junk and parts. Learn to wind your own guitar pickups and build them into a simple one- or two-string junk guitar with a surprisingly nice sound. Depending on your ambition and experience, you can make your junk guitar as simple or as sophisticated as you want, but everybody is guaranteed to go home with at least a fun twangy noisemaker.”
I made a little sound sculpture – a sort of wind-powered banjo – for this weekend’s Figment Festival on Governors Island. Here it is installed on the island’s waterfront by Castle Williams, with a spectacular view of downtown Manhattan. (If you’re in the New York area, come to the festival this weekend – it’s free, and there’s eight million things to see.)
If the wind really picks up, the flowers will spin.
And here’s a video from when I was testing it on my deck.
Update: here’s video from the festival itself.
Sent: 2008-06-24 19:37:50 (PST)
Subject: Figment Festival this weekend – and more!
Hello! This coming weekend is the Figment Festival on Governors Island in NYC. It’ll be three days of art, performance, and installations, including some wind powered sound sculptures that I’m working on right now. The island is beautiful, one of Olafur Eliasson’s waterfalls will be right there, and my piece will be on the waterfront near Castle Williams, the round fort at the northwest corner of the island (take a right from the ferry landing). Please join me if you can for a potluck picnic on the castle lawn, Saturday at 1:00 (Sunday if Sat. is rainy). I’ll be at the festival for the whole weekend– please let me know if you plan to attend!
The ferry [schedule and directions] is fast and free– catch it right around the corner from the Staten Island Ferry, near Whitehall and South Ferry stations. While you’re there, go right next door to David Byrne’s fun installation, Playing the Building.
Here’s some other news and upcoming events:
It’s time for Handmade Music Night again on Sunday, July 8 at 7pm at Etsy Labs, 325 Gold St, 3rd Floor, Brooklyn. Share your homemade musical instruments and synthesizers, and see what other people have made. It’s free and fun! I’ll be bringing my Figment sound sculptures if they survive the island. Here’s some coverage of previous events. Oh yeah, and here’s a video piece about it from Current TV where you can see me making a fool of myself on camera!
In late July I’ll be teaching a workshop at Etsy Labs about making simple electric guitars out of junk. It’s an expansion of a workshop I did at The Tank a few months ago. (Here’s a photo.)
I’ll be teaching a studio class on sound sculpture at Parsons School of Design this fall. The goal of the class is to put together an orchestra of networked sound machines that play in concert with each other. I’m looking for a gallery or performance space that would be willing to host the final installation for a weekend or up to a week or two in early to mid-December, so please let me know if you have any leads!
Earlier this month I had the opportunity to do a short residency at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, messing around with handmade musical instruments with the people of the Playful Invention and Exploration Institute. It was a lot of fun and a dream come true for me, since I developed my love of science-with-art attending this strangest and most interesting of science museums as a child. I hope to do more work there soon!
As always, you can see more of what I’m up to at my web site moonmilk.com (a bit neglected right now, but I’ll try to update it soon) and my flickr page.
–ranjit
Links:
Figment Festival- http://figmentnyc.org/2008/event2008.html
Ferry information – http://www.govisland.com/Visit_the_Island/directions.asp
Handmade Music Night – http://www.moonmilk.com/2007/09/20/handmade-music-night/
…and video – http://current.com/items/88937639_handmade_music_makers
Photo from junk guitar workshop – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjit/2398027966/
My department at Parsons – http://cdt.parsons.edu/
The Exploratorium – http://www.exploratorium.edu/
My website – http://www.moonmilk.com/
…and flickr page – http://www.flickr.com/photos/ranjit/
p.s. I put this links section here in case any of you are reading this in plain text instead of HTML. Was this useful? Let me know!
p.p.s. I apologize if you get two copies of this. I blame Dreamhost!
installation proposal for artbots 2008 from ranjit on Vimeo.
Proposal for Artbots 2008
Simple automatic instruments are constructed from local materials and objects on site. The system learns the sounds it can make by trying out its instruments, and then uses its range of sounds to try to reproduce the rhythmic and melodic qualities of sounds such as the voices of visitors. It then loops and alters these imitative sequences into improvised compositions. (That last part’s not done yet, so you won’t see it in the video.)
In this example, the source audio is a bit of the soundtrack from the movie Citizen Kane, and the noisemakers are a set of found object percussion machines and an electromagnetically fretted electric guitar.
I’ve got three noisy things happening or starting soon:
Thanks to everyone who came to the 29 Noisy Noises party on March 1 and helped me celebrate finishing 29 instruments in 29 days! Lots of great people came over and made a lot of great noise on the 29 instruments — you can hear some of it below.
– more party photos from Andrew – more from me
electric jam
“set up a groove”