Participants: Sarah Beth Woods, Eden Ünlüata, will sōderberg, Christopher Smith, Mindy Rose Schwartz, George John Larson, Andrea Jablonski + Mike Tsoulos, Betty Heredia, Jeffrey Grauel, Kyle H Davison + Vesna Jovanovic, Meg Duguid, Stephanie Burke, EC Brown

Sean DeSantis, Firemaster

Documentation

Documentation [+]

In preparation for the Opening

I first heard John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano from an old record in my college library. I was a bit disappointed to learn later that Cage was solving a particular problem with this technique in the late 1930's: to achieve percussive music with only a piano available at the music hall where he was commissioned to play, and to expand that instrument's repetoire of sounds. I had thought that the purpose was to embrace anarchy and chaos, and to torment the performer with a disconnection between the sounds professionally anticipated and the sounds produced—a therapy induced by frustration and helplessness. I prefer to rest upon my own misinterpretation.

The GAG installment of ASCII will be an outdoor collection of prepared wind chimes. The chimes may be audible or inaudible—whichever is deemed most appropriate.

In preparation for the Closing

The opening of ASCII 8 on October 26 marked the fatal turn of the weather. The long tail end of a pleasant summer slapped awake by an abrupt winter. Within a week, the natural foliage was buried under ice. The wind chimes as the last remnants of bucolic charm in GAG's sidelot.

I have been tending the garden, as it were. An exaltation to the change in seasons. The green chaos of summer, roaring and pulsing with cicadas, gave way to aesthetics that will be long-dominated by line, shape, and near-monochrome expanses.

The closing of ASCII 8 on November 24 will be an invocation, that the site may attract preternatural winds, haunts and spectres in the coming year.