Flanders, Winter 1993
In December 1993, Young Farmers Claim Future were asked to participate in the Onscherpte festival in Ghent, Belgium. In this private art project by photographer Thomas Mistiaen, several Belgian artists and philosophers were asked for a contribution, either for the exhibition or for the catalog. Young Farmers Claim Future contributed with a performance.
Claem It ( here's a 2.080 K QuickTime movie) is actually the recycling and decomposing of the The Neckhair Chronicles project. The dissatisfaction with the local cultural infrastructure, and with a narrow and unproductive vision on collaboration by the external artists prompted the decision to skip most of the wetware actions and transfer everything to the computer.
Texts and voices were simulated by speech synthesis programs and reprocessed. The necessary adjustments were made and the character of the software performers was altered to be consistent with the music and images.
The overall timing of the piece was condensed into shorter intervals and a stricter time schedule. While in The Neckhair Chronicles the actors' sequences provided cues for the musicians, in Claim It the evolution and confrontation of the different musical objects (sounds, speeches, sequences, arrangements) provided hints for change within themselves.
The video material was rearranged by sliding the tapes in appropriate parallel positions. Instead of one projection, there were three monitors showing the basic videos from The Neckhair Chronicles simultaneously. This changed the structure fundamentally, because this operation united 3 distinct units into one major show, with overlapping and independent threads.
According to the catalog, the meaning of Onscherpte refers to 2 different ideas: vagueness and disturbance. The assemblage technique used by Young Farmers Claim Future enacts this to a certain extent. On the one hand, the origin of the found material has been masked by the use of rough newsreel from satellite transmissions and scratches from 5 CD-ROM players charged with contemporary music classics. On the other hand, the music generated by the composition environment is a hard-to-define mixture of rhythmic and melodic sequences (just and other intonation) and bruitage. Moreover, the audiences' perception is disturbed in two ways. First of all, the replacement of human sound sources by real-time computer speech generates uncertainty about physical presence. Secondly, the use of the Doppler-effect module continuously moves the sound in space and frequency. It generates uncertainty about the physical origin of the musical data.
To the Farmers Onscherpte also reflects the position of new art forms, as well as the position of the people involved in the creation and exhibition of these forms. The role of technology, persistently used for creative purposes, is a very important factor in the evaluation by the audience in general and the traditional media representatives specifically. The response gets blurred by social and emotional values all the time, to the point that it may block the perception of the beauty of a digital piece of art on the grounds of the chosen media. This obscures most of the discussion and critique nowadays.
Digital Art Is A Life Form, Not A Quality. (YFCF, 1993)
Note: The performance name Claem It has a story to it. Due to a spelling error by the organizers of the event, the posters mentioned Young Farmers Claem Future (sic). Since the Farmers always had to claim their position as artists themselves, they abused the misspelling as a form of self-critique. ClaemIt looked like a good name for a folk band. (Mail us for the history of Skiffle)
All this material is property of Young Farmers Claim Future and may only be abused with permission:
Young Farmers Claim Future
Herbert Van de Sompel & Guy c. Jules Van Belle
Herbert.VandeSompel@rug.ac.be
