Title: Blow Up: Exploding Sound and Noise (London to Brighton 1959-1969)
Location: FTHo, 210 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4BW, http://www.flattimeho.org.uk/project/41/
Description: featuring material from AMM, Better Books, Bob Cobbing, DIAS, Coleridge Goode, Joe Harriott, James Joyce, Jeff Keen, John Latham, Annea Lockwood, Gustav Metzger, John Stevens, Val Wilmer and more.

PRESS RELEASE

Flat Time House hosts an exhibition of artworks, archive, movies and sound curated by Tony Herrington (Editor-in-Chief & Publisher, The Wire) and David Toop (musician, curator, long-time collaborator of John Latham).

For a period in the 1960s there was a great creative synergy in the UK between the visual arts, experimental film, free jazz, psychedelic rock, and the energetic poetry scene that formed the UK\’s so-called Underground. BLOW UP will present a visual and aural map of those connections through art works, recordings, archival film and documents, contemporary accounts, posters and album art.

The artist John Latham, who lived at Flat Time House until his death in 2006, was a central protagonist in this explosion of cross-talk and the mythologies surrounding his film Speak (1962) were a catalyst for exhibition. Speak is a powerfully strobing, paper-disc animation and, although it precedes the psychedelics of the high sixties by half a decade, its physical effect on the viewer is typical of the whole mind/body experiences of the early light-show gigs of Soft Machine or Pink Floyd and the environmental happenings of the late 60s organised by artists including Cobbing, Keen, Latham and Jeff Nuttall.

In fact, Speak illuminated some of the seminal events of the UK\’s new counter culture: it served as the Floyd\’s light show at early gigs at the UFO club and the Roundhouse; it was screened at Better Books on Charing Cross Road, the bookshop where Bob Cobbing hatched plans with Allen Ginsberg and Alex Trocchi for the International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, and founded the London Filmmakers Coop with Keen and others in 1966. But it is the film\’s soundtrack that really connects the dots between London\’s art scene and contemporaries in free jazz and psychedelic rock: remarkably Latham rejected as \’too musical\’ scores recorded for him first by the Joe Harriott Quintet and then the Pink Floyd, before adding his own circular-saw soundtrack, pointing towards the simultaneously emerging noise aesthetic.

This exhibition begins to write a history of these connections, artistic, personal, or just in the air, and Speak\’s story is just one of the many told in BLOW UP.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs
Location: IMT Unit2/210, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2 9NQ UK
Description: Dead Fingers Talk is an exhibition presenting two unreleased tape experiments by William Burroughs from the mid 1960s alongside responses by 23 artists, musicians, writers, composers and curators.

Few writers have exerted as great an influence over such a diverse range of art forms as William Burroughs. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine and Junky, continues to be regularly referenced in music, visual art, sound art, film, web-based practice and literature. One typically overlooked, yet critically important, manifestation of his radical ideas about manipulation, technology and society is found in his extensive experiments with tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s. Dead Fingers Talk: The Tape Experiments of William S. Burroughs is the first exhibition to truly demonstrate the diversity of resonance in the arts of Burroughs’ theories of sound.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: NARCISSUS TRANCE
Location: E:ventGallery, 96 Teesdale Street, London E2 6PU
Description: The exhibition explores McLuhan’s premise that the technological dynamics of the present are concealed from human perception via an innate protective mechanism he defined as the Narcissus Trance. A process that anaesthetises the nervous system in order to allow technological media to merge with the mind. During the advent of consumer electronics, McLuhan warned that the new dawning age of instantaneity would produce an accelerated phase of transition that would lead ultimately to ‘pain and identity loss’ in humanity as the nervous system struggled to compensate for an ever increasing rate of change. He believed the only hope for the future given this predicament was to break the feedback loop imposed by the trance, and instead access technological media through a state of active conscious awareness. Within his ambition he proposed artists to be the instigators of this mass shift in perception.
Date: 2010-07-09

Title: Trisha Brown: Early Works
Location: Tate Modern, Turbine Hall
Description: Created between 1968 and 1975, Trisha Brown\’s pioneering Early Works blur the boundaries between dance and installation art. Originally created for loft spaces and art galleries as well as the outdoors, the Company now brings this collection of works for the first time to UK audiences in a gallery setting.

Rigorous yet playful, these iconic works include Accumulation (1971), Group Primary Accumulation (1973), Sticks (1973), Figure Eight (1974) and Spanish Dance (1973). From the starting point on the bridge of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the audience is directed to other parts of the gallery to discover the works as they unfold amongst the permanent collection. This is a unique opportunity to see seminal works that have influenced dancemakers worldwide.
Date: 2010-10-16