Fragments from my visit to Xi'an, China, 28 June - 5 July 2010
http://www.digitalartweeks.ethz.ch/web/DAW10/Symposium
Writer and Professor of New Media at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK
http://www.suethomas.net
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from Art Clay: Below you will find a link to the press reports for the
DAW10 within China. There are literally thousands of blogs and links to
blogs for it. So we have only listed the most important ones. Updates
will follow as news agencies respond.
At midnight it was time to go. The vineyard manager kindly gave a few of us a lift back down the hill to the waiting coach but rather worried us by deciding to show us around the winery on the way. He drove us around the compound, showing us each building and describing the processes, but was dissuaded from getting the key to actually go inside. At that time of night, we were rather keen to make sure we didn’t miss the coach.
He dropped us off back in the village where we had waited earlier and where we now waited again to get back on the bus. It was very late but the village was still busy. Just down the road a huge white cloud was billowing in the humid dark and at first we thought it was a fire, but it turned out to be dust. A JCB was demolishing a house in the night-time cool and the concert-going village crowd squatted in a line along the pavement to enjoy the second performance of the evening.
And that is the end of the story about the night we went to a posh concert in the middle of the Chinese countryside and got lots more than we bargained for. An unforgettable experience.
The invited guests went inside for more wine and to dance to Steve Gibson and Tom Kuo’s VJ set around the swimming pool. Some people changed and swam in the pool but I missed this as I was too busy sitting on a stone outside and musing about the changes China is undergoing. As I pondered, the baby grand was wrapped in quilts and heaved onto a truck ready for the trip back to the city. The Chinese audience continued to chat in the dark, and I took a photo of two boys sitting on the wall. I showed the picture to them and to their granddad (behind them and out of shot.)
I sat and typed a blog entry into my iPhone then jumped onto data roaming to send it right away. I guess I felt I needed that connect to cyberspace to make the moment complete. I wrote:
An evening in the Chinese countryside
It's 10pm and I'm sitting on a hill in the dark Chinese countryside, an hour’s drive from Xi'an. I am at a newly opened vineyard where Andrew Hugill has just performed an outdoor concert attended by we privileged guests plus around 50 or more local villagers and their kids who followed our buses up the hill. It was a long and fraught trip tonight and I'll write more plus pics tomorrow but right now I want to register the wine, the crickets, the distant freight trains, and the new elevated freeway being built across the valley below us. I have seen 2 shooting stars and The Plough is just above my head. I can hear Steve Gibson playing techno music indoors . The grand piano has been folded and heaved onto a truck. A few villagers still chat around me in the darkness. Soon we'll climb into the bus and drive back through astoundingly poor villages and into the city smog.
Local people, drawn by the lights and the unusual traffic, were making their way through the fields and up the hill from the villages below. For many, this must have been their first encounter with western music, not to mention ‘pataphysical music! We, the privileged invited audience, sat primly on our chairs whilst behind us in the dark the local people chatted quietly, hushed their kids, and sometimes cleared their throats to spit noisily. They were having a good time. They (and we) especially enjoyed the final piece, Andrew Hugill’s Catalogue de Grenouilles, in which a trombonist walked amongst the audience playing frog-like sounds. If they may not have appreciated the Satie, they certainly understood the frogs. (I was also reminded that some of us (not me) had eaten crispy frog the day before). And in the dark, the crickets rubbed their legs together and joined in too.
I kept taking pictures although it was really too dark. We were late starting and so the programme was somewhat reduced, but here is the original plan:
Works:
Prélude d’Eginhard, Erik Satie (3 mins)
Avebury, Peter Hansen (8 mins)
interiorities III, Simon Atkinson (10 mins)
Erratum Musical, Marcel Duchamp (4 mins approx)
Interior/Interior, Neil Salley (5.5 mins)
Pianolith, Andrew Hugill (10 mins)
INTERVAL
Prélude de la Porte Héroïque du Ciel, Erik Satie (4.5 mins)
Suite for Piano and Electronics, John Richards (12 mins)
Vexation for a Burger, Peter Hansen (8 mins)
Catalogue de Grenouilles, Andrew Hugill (15 mins approx)
Andy Hugill sat at the baby grand piano which had earlier been lugged up the hill from the Academy of Music in Xi’an, and discussed the score with the musicians. While they worked, we went inside for wine and pancake rolls.
Beyond it, the beginnings of the new Beijing-Xi’an expressway lay strung across the valley like yarrow stalks cast into an i-ching hexagram and spelling out a prediction of the future which lies ahead.
and told to walk the rest of the way. By now, I confess, I was getting grumpy, and nervous for my arthritic knees. I pulled out my folding walking stick and set off, but help arrived as one student took my rucksack and another was assigned to stay by my side as I huffed and puffed my way up the stony road, stopping every five minutes to ‘admire the view’ (which was spectacular) and get my breath. All around us the sun was going down on a phenomenally beautiful countryside panorama. I hope you can make it out from these dark photos.
and we were told to get in. Scott and I, the silver haired members of the group, were first to receive the instruction. It seems that being older has its benefits in China! Then off we went again.
and the driver signed that we had to get off right away. We had no idea why. We stood around, taking photos of the village and of each other, whilst the locals stared at us from their doorways. There were rumours that the bridge ahead was too fragile for the coach, or that the road was becoming too narrow for it to pass, but nobody actually knew. And of course the driver spoke no English.
