William Basinski
William Basinski
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
Arika have been creating events since 2001. The Archive is space to share the documentation of our work, over 600 events from the past 20 years. Browse the archive by event, artists and collections, explore using theme pairs, or use the index for a comprehensive overview.
Improvising using nothing so much as the passage of time as his instrument, Basinski creates works of great melancholic depth and fragile beauty.
The pieces in the programme switch between silent film/ imageless sound, but we wanted to have a think about how ideas can take up residency on either side of the sound/ image border, without having to inhabit both at the same time.
Performances at St Giles in the Fields, London by Jandek, Rhodri Davies & Angharad Davies, Rauhan Orkesteri.
A chat, with examples (Zola, H. P. Lovecraft, Hammer Horror), about blackness and the sheer stupid thickness of what has no profundity whatsoever.
A performed self-cancelling discussion, with artists from the festival, invited speakers and local artists talking at once, over each other, or straining to be heard over the din.
Munehiro Narita’s Kyoaku No Intention (Worst Intentions) fired out some of the most compelling no-wave improvised rock of the 80s.
A parody of a (Manhattan) road movie and meditation on bifurcation, in paths traveled between the seen and the heard; a road trip played over and over from different perspectives.
A concrete walkway ending in mid air, a ridiculously tight squeeze between three office buildings and various other sites of Labour politician and council leader T. Dan Smith’s modernist regeneration projects and ‘slum clearances’ of the 1950’s and 60’s.
A performance for dry ice and four specially constructed steel tables, each one heated by a single candle until searingly hot.
A panel exploring the radical potential of technologies through fugitivity and opacity: their ability to obscure, to make it impossible for us to be known, to render us untraceable by every arm of the state even under the all-consuming spectre of surveillance capital.
Has neoliberal capitalism locked down social experience? Are our seemingly subjective desires, our identities, pre-packaged by dominating social structures?
Each organ is unique. The project is to find out what makes it unique.