What I’m doing in Norway right now
I’ve been in Stavanger in Norway most of this week, working on a project that, when you say it out loud, might seem a little odd.
There’s this 10-piece avant-garde improvisational jazz band called the Kitchen Orchestra. They use a lot of electronics alongside traditional instrumentation. They’re putting on a performance of a five-movement composition with two Japanese visual artists – one who draws in response to the music, the other who does live collage and video projection. It’s part of a big, local jazz festival. They’ve been rehearsing this week in a disused brewery, which has been turned into a venue and cultural space.
My job is to put the whole thing on the internet. Not just make them a website, but also actually think about and implement a way of communicating what they do online. I’ve given all of the musicians, the producer and the visual artists hand-held digital video cameras (with instructions to just film whatever they find personally interesting), and have also been filming and interviewing them myself as well.
The videos they make from their own perspective, as well as my own ones, have been posted as blog posts on a blog.
Visitors to the blog are also invited to create content and ask questions, and we’ve been answering those questions as we go along. For the performance, several members of the audience will be given some cameras, and the whole performance will be filmed from multiple perspectives.
