KEITH ROWE - EXHIBITION_EXPOSITION : "DOGS & RADIO" - La Fabrique - Laboratoire(S) Artistique(S)

DU 11 JUILLET AU 23 AOÛT

“Dogs & Radio”

KEITH ROWE
artiste britannique vivant à Nantes depuis plus de 20 ans. Plasticien, peintre et musicien.

Cette exposition propose une installation de l’artiste Keith Rowe à la Plateforme Intermédia / Apo33 – La Fabrique, il présentera une nouvelle pièce composée par des chiens en porcelaine et des radios se répondant dans un ensemble visuel et sonore où l’imaginaire et le passé se rencontre. Une référence à “la voix de son maître” une image du son, l’animal familier écoutant un disque 78 tours, ici une radio, le tout avec une poésie de l’instant, une musique bruiteuse et douce.

VERNISSAGE le jeudi 10 juillet 2014 – 18h30 – apéro offert!

visite de l’exposition du jeudi au samedi – de 14h30 à 18h30 - entrée libre

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english
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11th July to 23 August – Exhibition – KEITH ROWE

“Dogs & Radio”

KEITH ROWE
Rowe is a painter who directly applies methods of entries, issues of plastic arts, electric guitar, It looks like a surgeon operating on a patient. He has worked with composers Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Ben Patterson, and is a member of the Scratch Orchestra, AMM, and the Merce Cunningham Dance company.

Dog and radio … why dog and radio?
Well I guess it’s a combination of things
Such as?

The original starting point for this work was recognising the important
role of recording within the development of the music I’m involved in,
it seems to me quite possible that Blues and Jazz might not have become
known to the extent it has without its distribution through the medium of recording
and radios.
The Dog with Gramophone motif used by HMV is one of the worlds great logos, originating
from a painting by the British artist Francis Barraud In 1899. it depicted a fox
terrier dog characteristically with its head cocked to one side “ listening”
to the sound of a his masters voice emanating from the trumpet horn of a phonograph cylinder
with the descriptive working title Dog looking at and listening to a Phonograph.

Are dogs able to recognise their owner’s voice in this way?

I honestly don’t know, I’ve read that researchers reproduced the HMV situation ,
seemingly the dogs did not recognise their masters voice, but on the other hand there
are youtube snippets showing dogs getting very excited seeing and hearing their owner, on Skype
without doubt showing signs of recognition.
You changed it from a phonograph to a Radio.
Yes like many other performers I use radio transmissions in performance , much of my youth was
spent listening to the radio (often referred to as “ listening to the wireless”), I like the “live” aspect of
the radio, and interested in the relationship between the living being and the radio as machine, In
dog and radio ,the dog here represents alive breathing beings, and the radio the machine world, we
humans are able to obtain very limited amounts of information from a living dog, basically along the
lines of happy / sad / excited / sleepy, etc. we are able to train the dog to do tasks, but
essentially its pretty limited compared to what information we obtain from machines,
and the tasks we train machines to carry out, here represented by the radio,

So might we say it’s about the relationship between nature and machines?

Yes, sort of, but we need to step back, and recognise our role as viewer, it’s a three way relationship,
We, the viewer looking at the dog and the radio, but step forward, take a closer look, what
implications are there? What might we read into the relationship? Their relationship has never stood
still, it constantly evolves, look again, where is it heading?
Where is it heading?
Well I don’t want to scare you, but it’s not a pretty sight. Maybe you’ll say I’m being alarmist, and
prone to exaggeration, well yes maybe, but, my worry is, as we hand more and more control to
machines, reducing the human to a ever decreasing role in the loop, we end up with LARs.

LARs?

Yep, Lethal Autonomous Robots, it would seem there is a worry that we are at some kind of
crossroad, where those engaged in modern warfare are considering handing over the life and death
decisions to robots (LARs) where will that process end? What happens if “they,” the robots, decide
that we humans are the enemy , and act with lethal autonomy?
You mean as seen in I Robot, and with Asimov and “positronic brains”
Hmm. When looking at Dog and Radio do you think there is more than meets the eye?
Opening Thursday 10th July 2014 – 6.30pm – drinks & snacks
visit of the exhibition from Thursday to Saturday – de 2.30pm to 6.30pm
- free entrance