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General Information |
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| Name |
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Flow Motion (Anna Piva, Edward George) |
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| City |
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London |
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| Country |
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United Kingdom |
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| Date of Formation |
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--/--/1996 |
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Statement / Description
I
the cosmos, like the world,
like music, begins with
the blurring
of a line.
the cosmos, like music, is a
product of relations of harmonious
and disharmonious activity, deducible by
numbers, interwoven by
strings.
we are interested in the dialogue
between science
and sound across time and
form.
our interest in the cosmos has
autobiographical roots in
the cold war space race of the mid
twentieth century; in black
music and its traditions
of exploration
of space in
sound,
in the conceptual
overlaps between science
fiction and the literature of the
fantastic, and metaphysical
and scientific writing on the nature
of the universe
and the crossing and
blurring
of lines;
in
interdisciplinary collaboration with
scientists and artists, institutions and
agencies, in the space between
a piece
of string and a line of thought
and the possibilities to be found
and made in
the space between
one piece of
string, one
tiny
line, and
another.
Flow Motion
II
Looking up into the night sky our vision is mediated by the memory traces, the debris from the history of representations of the cosmos, the scientific, poetic, artistic, metaphysical uses to which it has been put.
The work, the job at hand, is to trace and make correspondences, to create dialogue across disciplinary and cultural lines. Across time.
The job is to make something or someplace, a creative, productive space of connection between sonic space and the space of the cosmos. To produce a sense of the one from the poetic, or formal workings of the other.
Flow Motion
III
ON FLOW MOTION
When in 1996 Anna Piva, Edward George and Trevor Mathison* formed Flow Motion and Hallucinator, their basic concern was an exploration of different concepts of space and their translation into music and art. In particular, the group’s work demonstrates a preoccupation with the cosmos.
For George the landing of the first man on the moon was a pivotal moment that ignited his fascination with outer space. With Anna Piva the formative moment proved to be a concert she attended by Sun Ra & his Arkestra in the late 1970s. Ra's ability to create “the sound of outer space” with a semblance of three-dimensionality while “connecting with ideas about it and about being there” deeply impressed her (1). Her studies in science, philosophy and music served to deepen her understanding.
Flow Motion’s interest in the cosmos is rooted in a concern “with the cosmos as a pre-enlightenment, metaphysical space shaped by a process of figuration, which oscillates between cosmos as an opening onto the sacred and transcendent, and cosmos as object of scientific speculation”(2). These issues have been addressed in different ways both in Flow Motion’s multimedia work and in the music of Hallucinator.
In October 2001 Edward George and Anna Piva were given the unique opportunity to explore sensory and physical spaces in weightlessness when invited to participate in the Arts Catalyst’s ‘microgravity interdisciplinary research’ (M.I.R) project realised on a parabolic flight departing from the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre, Star City in Russia. The project with which they applied was ‘Kosmos in Blue’, named after a composition by Sun Ra.
For George, the experience proved thrilling, yet strangely familiar. He explains how in a dream the act of flying is tied into a structured narrative that “provides the gravitational ballast” and thus makes it seem less terrifying. In zero gravity, however, the floating is ‘uncontrolled’ and the environment unknown. To George it felt like “being less like Clark Kent and more like Homer Simpson because everything that you knew about the world was suddenly wrong; it is like being a child again.”
Piva likens the experience of floating in zero gravity to a foetus suspended in the womb, while simultaneously she was strongly aware of the world of science and technology existing parallel to this protected state. Tai Chi and meditation had mentally prepared her for the quick alterations between zero gravity and double gravity characteristic to parabolic flight: “In Tai Chi you create a physical space in which gravity and anti-gravity are working; you are close to the ground but have the impression of floating.”
In hindsight, Piva admits that the parabolic flight does not seem like a viable way for experiencing and finally understanding the cosmos: “I was happy to return to music as a way to expansion.” George adds that “if you spend enough time in sonic space, you feel as though you have been in zero gravity before.” He makes reference to a lineage of musicians, like Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Underground Resistance and Rhythm & Sound, who created a sense of Space with their music.
Piva made recordings during the parabolic flight. Sound was an important component of the flight itself, the alteration between zero gravity and double gravity giving it a sense of time. “You heard the sound of the plane, not of space itself,” Piva explains. It was the sound of humans in a machine labouring to achieve moments of weightlessness. The plane was crowded and the sound of people and engines loud and overpowering.
For Piva a big part of the musical process “involves listening to machines, not so much composing, but editing data and then allowing the machine to transform the data.” They are both composers and receptors of something that is being composed live in front of them.
George describes their work as ‘process based’: “we shape sounds, we mould spaces into sounds and make sound pictures.” He adds that the experience of floating in zero gravity has enabled them to erode and dissolve the boundary separating inside from outside in their music: “Once you have got the anchor of the gravitational pull away from you, it feels as though you are neither inside nor outside of something, but curiously a bit of both.”
* Trevor Mathison has since left the group.
Text by Carlotta Graedel Matthäi; (1) quotations, if not otherwise marked, from a conversation between Annick Bureaud, CGM, Anna Piva and Edward George on 30.06.2003; (2) Edward George & Anna Piva: “Flow Motion: Out There”, in: ‘Space Art. Festival @rt Outsiders 2003’, Anomalie Digital_Arts N° 4 (Orléans: Editions Hys & Anomalie digital art, September 2003), p. 125.
Group Resume
Flow Motion are electronic musicians and sound artists Anna Piva and Eddie George. They produce multimedia installations and sound art performances. As Hallucinator, they record for Berlin's experimental electronic label Chain Reaction. Their work has been shown at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, the International Institute of Visual Art, London; the Steirischer Herbst Arts Festival in Austria, Star City's historic Cosmonaut’s Club, Russia, and Sadlers Wells’ Lilian Baylis Theatre as part of the Arts Catalyst’s ‘Artists & Cosmonauts’ season.
Flow Motion's interest in the cosmos precedes and runs parallel to their formation.
Anna Piva's research in the possibilities for a cosmic music based on an interface between electronic music and radio astronomy began in 1999, and provided the basis for collaborations with astrophysicists Tim O'Brien at Jodrell Bank Observatory and Phil Uttley at Southampton University.
With director John Akomfrah, Edward George wrote the ground breaking documentary Last Angel of History/Mothership Connection [ZDF, Ger/Channel Four, UK 1995]. Featuring interviews with Juan Atkins/Model 500, Derrick May, Carl Craig, DJ Spooky, Ishmael Reed, George Clinton and astronaut Bernard Harris, as well as Sun Ra, Underground Resisistance, and Lee Perry, the documentary essayed the forms and formative historical moments and founding figures responsible for rerouting black (un)popular culture's quest for freedom from the terrestrial, into the cosmos.
Exhibitions
2003 Ghost Dance, Centre Pompidou [Paris, France]
2002 Ghost Dance, Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art [Barcelona, Spain]
2001 Artists & Scientists workshop in Zero Gravity, [Star City, Russia]
2001 Dissolve, International Institute of Visual Arts, [London, UK]
1999 The Dub Museum , Steirischer Herbst [Graz, Austria]
Curation
1999 Dub Housing, Secret Histories of Art, Pop, & The Avant-garde,
Steirischer Herbst [Graz, Austria]
Hallucinator discography
2003 Morpheus/Waterline/Transition/Reverie[Edit II] [Chain Reaction 12", D]
2000 Frontier/Rainmaker[Sudan II]/Kilimanjaro [Chain Reaction 12", D]
1999 Red Angel/Sethos/Phebes [Chain Reaction 12", D]
Black Angel/Goldcoast/Moonshot [Chain Reaction 12", D]
Landlocked [Chain Reaction CD, D]
1998 People/Dusk/Hallucinator (in memory of Steven Lawrence) [Chain Reaction 12", D]
Compilations
2002 w/Lama Ganchen: 21 Aspects of Female Divinity/Chang Tzel. United Peace Voices CD, [Irma Records, I]
Frontier, Sonic Process catalogue CD, [Centre Pompidou, F]
Ghost Dance/Ghost Version, Sonic Process CD, [Milan Music, F]
2000 Messenger, Absolute Zero CD, [Chaarm, UK]
Sound design
Film:
2002 Universal Substitute (Andrey and Julia Velikanov, Russia)
1998 Behind Closed Doors (BBC 2 TV, UK)
1997 Memory Room 451 (ZDF TV, D)
Theatre:
2002 The Incredible Disappearing Woman (Coco Fusco, USA/ICA UK)
Multimedia:
2004 Aya Mod 2 (Ki - Keiko Courdy, SAT, Canada)
Live [selected]
2003 Volkesbhune, Berlin, Ger.
2002 Artists and Cosmonauts w/Arts Catalyst,
Sadler's Wells/Lilian Baylis Theatre, London, UK
Centre Pompidou, F
Batofar, Paris, F
2001 Podewill, Berlin, D
Cosmonauts Club, Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre,
Star City, Russia
2000 Link, Bologna, I
ICA, London, UK
1999 Digital Equinox, Birmingham, UK
Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria
References
Edward George & Anna Piva: “Flow Motion: Out There”, in: ‘Space Art. Festival @rt Outsiders 2003’, Anomalie Digital_Arts N° 4 (Orléans: Editions Hys & Anomalie digital art, September 2003), pp. 125-129.
“Version Fantome/Ghost Version”, in: ‘Sonic Process: Une nouvelle géographie des sons’, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 16 October 2002 – 6 January 2003), pp.225-229.
Art Works
Links
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Flow Motion (Anna Piva, Edward George)
