95 research outputs found
OSKA (Mini-Oramics)
No full textOSKA
Four films for Mini-Oramics
Composition commissioned by Tom Richards and Camden Arts Centre.
Performances of OSKA took place on 24 February 2018.
(https://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/gg05)
Further Information
Tom Richards, James Bulley, Shiva Feshareki and Sarah Angliss will perform live graphic scores developed over their month long project using Mini Oramics, a drawn-sound synthesiser originally designed circa 1976 by Daphne Oram (1925–2003). Oram was one of the pioneers of electronic music in Britain and one of the founding members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Richards developed this previously unfinished synthesiser through his PhD research into Oram and her Oramics machines. For this project, Richards invited Bulley, Feshareki and Angliss to work with him to create the visual scores developed for this event.
https://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/oramic
PRACTICE RESEARCH Proposition and Form
No full textPRACTICE RESEARCH: Proposition and Form
PRAG Postdoctorate Dr Ozden Sahin & Dr James Bulley
A presentation given at the Jisc open access community event "Capturing practice research: improving visibility and searchability" on 15th March 2019 in London.
https://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/capturing-practice-research-improving-visibility-and-searchability-15-mar-201
Lily Greenham: An Art of Living
No full text'Lily Greenham: an Art of Living' is an ensemble research project led by Dr James Bulley that explores the work and life of the artist Lily Greenham. Beginning with the establishment of the Lily Greenham Archive at Special Collections, Goldsmiths, University of London, the practice research project has thus far resulted in a constellation of happenings.
These include:
2024, 'Lily Greenham: An Art of Living': a large-scale retrospective exhibition co-curated with Andrew Walsh-Lister, Anja Casser and Alex Balgiu (Badischer Kunstverein, Germany, 8 March–26 May 2024).
2024, 'Tune In To Reality!,' a symposium on Lily Greenham, co-curated with Andrew Walsh-Lister, Matthew Stuart, Anja Casser and Alex Balgiu (Badischer Kunstverein, Germany, 3/4 May 2024). Featuring talks, readings & performances by Valentina Traïanova, Alex Balgiu, Andrew Walsh-Lister, Eva Badura-Triska, Ian Stonehouse, Katrina Liberiou, Judith Milz, Anna Barham & Ute Wassermann.
2024, 'Lily Greenham: An Art of Living at https://lilygreenham.org/,' an
ongoing website co-curated with Andrew Walsh-Lister and Alex Balgiu.
2024, 'tendentious | neo-semantics' by Lily Greenham (re-print) by Bricks From The Kiln (https://www.b-f-t-k.info/)
2022, 'tune in to reality!' by Lily Greenham (re-print) by Distance No Object (https://distancenoobject.cargo.site/Lily-Greenham)
Forthcoming:
2024, 'Lily Greenham: An Art of Living,' catalogue / record, Badischer Kunstverein, James Bulley & Bricks from the Kil
In the Realm of the Senses
No full textThis was an object-theatre project, initially commissioned by the Little Angel Theatre’s Incubate programme. It sought to develop Furse’s AOH Laboratory research on touch and proximity between spectators and actors by examining the possibilities of a near-tactile ‘close-up’ with the spectator via the highly controlled manipulation of real objects.
The resulting performance piece, commissioned by LAT, was produced as part of the first adult puppetry festival Suspense (2009). It explored the ethics of audience non-participation or disturbance. The work deployed a text spliced from Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and the Biblical Song of Songs: ancient and modern texts that in different ways relish the anticipation of lovers’ meeting, allowing spectators to hear both philosophical and poetic discourse attuned to the prospect of intimate contact. Objects (clothing, 40 gold wedding rings, oyster shells, shaving tackle) were handled by the performers with meticulous focus and concentration as they slid on and off the huge ‘bed’ around which the audience sat next to them. With the whole body involved, each movement risked contact, coming very close without ever broaching the actual physical space of the spectator. The soundtrack by James Bulley and lighting by Mischa Twitchin sought to enhance the questions of intimacy and touch arising from the touch-sense performance
Open in Action: Music, Computing and Open Data
No full textBy speaking to the theme of this years Open Access Week (24th - 30th Oct.), 'Open in Action', this event highlights the different ways by which making your research data openly accessible can lead to a variety of outcomes. Drawing on topics including jazz studies, music computing, practice based research and the ethics of open source, this panel will explore how we define and (re)use research data. Why should we make our research data Open Access? What route should we take to making it Open Access? And what can we do with openly accessible research and data.
In this session Benjamin Givan and Andrew Hannum will present an interesting example of sharing and using open data sets, bridging jazz studies and music computing. James Bulley will follow this to discuss one of his practice based research outputs, considering the distinction between data, information and documentation, while addressing issues of utility and re-usability
The Talking Drum
No full textThe following paper reflects upon the authors’ experiences of assisting in the realization of the spatial sound work The Talking Drum by Bill Viola. Originally recorded as an exploratory performance between 1979–82, The Talking Drum was realized as an immersive sound installation at the Vinyl Factory Space, Brewer Street, London, from 13 October to 7 November 2015.
The paper is a collaborative endeavor, between Astra Price (California Institute of the Arts and archivist at Bill Viola Studio) and James Bulley (artist and researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London) who worked together with Viola and his partner Kira Perov in Summer 2015 to transform archival recordings of the originally site-specific performance recording into a spatialized sound installation. Here we seek to explore the contextual, theoretical and curatorial discourse that arose in the re-presentation of the work.
“Buildings talk, you can listen to them.”
Bill Viola, 197
Living Symphonies
No full textThis paper explores the Jones/Bulley landscape sound work 'Living Symphonies'.
'Living Symphonies' toured four of England's forests in 2014, co-produced by Forestry Commission England and Sound And Music, supported by Arts Council England
Sound and the City (Natural History Museum)
No full textImagining the future soundscape of the city.
Researchers from across disciplines explore the rapidly changing urban soundscape — how do the sounds around us affect our daily life? What might a futuristic city sound like? An interactive listening experience exploring the impact that the sounds around us can have on our health, wellbeing and sense of place.
Sound and the City installation was exhibited as part of the Universities Week at the Natural History Museum between June 9 — 11, 2014.
Curated by James Bulley
Produced by Özden Şahin
Sound design by Emmanuel Spinelli
Prof. Sean Cubitt
Professor of Film and Television at the Department of Media and Communications
Dr. Georgina Hosang
Lecturer in the Department of Psychology
Dr. Anja Kanngieser
Lecturer in the Department of Sociology
Prof. Atau Tanaka
Professor of Media Computing
Dr. John Drever
Senior Lecturer in Composition and Head of the Unit for Sound Practice Research (SPR) at the Department of Music
Graphic design by Patrick Fry
Table design for the sound installation by Jailmake
Web development by Daniel Jones
With gratitude to Bowers and Wilkins, Mogees, Liz Hutchinson, Joanna Kindeberg, Universities Week, and the Natural History Museum
Still Point
No full textStill Point (1948/9) by Daphne Oram
(Prom 13, 23 July 2018, Royal Albert Hall)
For double orchestra, treated instrumental recordings (3 prerecorded 78rpm discs), 5 microphones, echo, and tone controls.
World premiere of new realisation by Shiva Feshareki and James Bulley.
In 1948, whilst working as a radio programme engineer at the BBC, Daphne Oram began composing a new and highly innovative piece for double orchestra, entitled Still Point. Oram was only 23 years old when she wrote Still Point, and the piece reflects her earlier experiences working under the glass dome of the Royal Albert Hall as bombs rained down over London. As a programme engineer during World War Two, she was tasked with balancing the radio broadcast of live concerts in the hall (including the BBC Proms season), whilst also keeping 78rpm disc recordings cued up ready for broadcast if the hall was evacuated—the music would carry on regardless! These early experiences using turntables and mixing sound in the complex acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall inspired Oram to explore the spatial and acoustic aspects of orchestral composition, harnessing the newfound potential for live manipulation of amplified sound in performance. The final score for Still Point, scored in April 1950, details ‘pre-recordings to be mixed in at varying speeds, backwards & with filterings plus reverberation,’ and was submitted to the BBC as a potential entry for the inaugural Prix Italia in 1950. However, it was turned down on the basis that the work could only be judged as a ‘straight score’ and the adjudicators wouldn’t understand the ‘acoustic variants and pre-recording techniques’ utilised. Brian Hodgson, a colleague at the BBC (and fellow member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop) later commented to Oram that ‘if they had understood one feels they would have been even more ‘anti’!’.
Still Point is thought to be the earliest example of a composition specifying real-time electronic transformation of instrumental sounds, and in retrospect can be seen as decades ahead of its time with its explorations of space and acoustic architecture. In the work the double orchestra is ‘acoustically treated,’ creating one ‘dry’ orchestra (using acoustic baffles) and one ‘wet’ orchestra, which are then manipulated live in performance through turntables, amplification and echo effects. Still Point was to be the last piece that Oram wrote for orchestra before she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1958, laying the roots for the new fields of British electronic music that were to come.
Over a four-year period, composers Shiva Feshareki and James Bulley extensively researched within the Daphne Oram Collection and related archives across Britain in order to realise this world premiere performance of Oram’s final score for Still Point. Previously thought lost for over twenty years, Bulley discovered the score in December 2016 amongst the papers of composer Hugh Davies. The BBC Proms performance follows Oram’s exact specification, using turntable discs that were recorded in Maida Vale’s renowned Studio 1 using a historically-accurate live lathe-cutting technique, engineered by Aleks Kolkowski. The turntable part for the performance has been constructed by Feshareki using Oram’s detailed handwritten instructions found in the archive. Feshareki then develops these ideas incorporating her own techniques and understanding of Oram’s musical aesthetic
Ethics and foreign policy : negotiation and invention
No full textTo what extent can ethics and foreign policy be conceived as possible? Instead of
answering within the implied dichotomy of possibility and impossibility, this thesis
argues for a reconceptualisation of the dichotomy. Ethics and foreign policy are better
understood on the basis of undecidability: neither simply possible nor impossible, but
both at the same time. A deconstructive reading of British (1997-2006) and EU (1999-
2004) foreign policy, both of which make claims to ethics, reveals how the issue is beset
by internal contradictions, paradoxes and aporias. The deconstruction is structured
around the concepts of subjectivity, responsibility and hospitality, each of which
constitutes an important point of undecidability within British and EU representations of
their ethical dimension. The subject of ethics and foreign policy is always haunted and
inhabited by its object, responsibility is necessarily irresponsible, and hospitality
contains an irrepressible hostility. Thus, ethics and foreign policy is best conceived as
undecidably im-possible. However, such undecidability cannot be used to justify
abandoning the goal of an ethical foreign policy. Rather, a Derridean 'negotiation' is
proposed. Negotiation seeks to remain loyal to the dual injunction of deconstruction, an
undecidability which is the condition of ethics and politics, and a decision which
decides, and closes to certain figures of otherness. It requires a permanent questioning,
testing and invention of the promise of ethics and foreign policy. This produces a range
of illustrative suggestions for the possible enactment of an ethico-political foreign
policy, which would refer to and strive for an ultimately unrealisable ethical foreign
policy. This research contributes a fundamental critique and questioning of the
possibility of ethics and foreign policy. It provides a revealing exploration of British and
EU foreign policy from the period, based around responsibility and hospitality. Finally,
the thesis introduces the Derridean notion of negotiation to the discipline, seen as a way
of moving through the potential paralysis brought by the undecidability arising from
foundational questioning
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