“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.”
John Cage

Jay Needham

Opened.

2007
I dug out my old stamp collection and remembered that it was not really mine, but someone else’s. It consists of a shoe box of loose stamps from around the world, cancelled and therefore of no value to the real collector. I kept it through the years though, somehow protected it and also began to imagine a correspondence, a fiction that spoke about travel using my own footage, writings and sounds.
The piece is a continuation of the work that started with 13 buildings and features spare recounting of a monolouge left on an answering machine. OPENED relates to 13 buildings, but neither is the first in the series. The sounds gathered for this piece are of Spring rainstoms in Southern Illinois.

Jay Needham

Jay Needham is an artist, radio producer and composer whose sound and visual works are often concerned with the politics of borders and acts of listening. Although he primarily centers his creative and critical practice on radio and the transmission arts, screenings of his video series on memory and architecture have appeared at festivals and conferences worldwide. 13 Buildings premiered at the 9th. Videomedeja in Serbia with additional screenings at the Sydney Opera House during d/art 2006. The series has been distributed by the Centre for Art and Technology, Finland on the DVD Flux Vol.1 and Vol. 2. The second installment titled OPENED screened at the VIBGYOR Film Festival in Kerala India and during the Simultan Video and New Media Art Festival in Timisoara, Romania.

His radio documentary Listening at the Border was a special presentation during Sonic Interventions at The University of Amsterdam in 2005. Broadcast on numerous NPR stations in the United States, the work traces several years in the life of an NSA sound spy. Additional programming events include Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre and during Radiotesla as a part of War, at Tesla im Podewils Palais, Berlin, Germany.

Other works include his micro radio work There and Back performed and aired as a part of Particle/Wave during Pixel Ache 2005 at The Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the recently installed Tell Us Your Secrets during Waves, curated by RIXC and Armin Medosch at The Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga 2006.

A Slow Crash, his narrative work for radio, aired and streamed as a part of New Media Scotland’s Resonant Cities program and was released on Deep Wireless II in 2005 by New Adventures in Sound Art.

Jay is a frequent collaborator with The Association Panamericana para la Concervacion, a rainforest conservation NGO based in The Republic of Panama.

Writings and selections of his sound works will be published in 2007 in Hearing Places edited by Ros Bandt. Cambridge Scholars Press. (In press)

He is currently producing, researching and composing a radio feature on his family’s relation to the origins of the atomic bomb. A live FM performance of that work will premiere in Brussels in October during The Radiophonic Biennale. Needham holds an MFA from The School of Art at California Institute of the Arts. Jay teaches courses in Sonic Arts, in the Department of Radio–Television, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Emma Cummins

http://www.saatchionline.com/art/view/artist/141688/art/62745

Etienne Chambaud

Le Comble du Comble

(The Height of the Height / The Full of the Full / The Epitome of the Epitome)

Framed spray paint on paper

56 x 44 cm each

Unique

2007

Two of the pages that served as an underlay during the spay painting of the documents, notes and drawings in Le

Comble

Pour une exposition, Étienne CHAMBAUD avait sprayé de noir ses notes préparatoires, et exposé le résultat, brouillant ainsi ses pistes de travail. Le comble du comble est formée des deux pages qui se trouvaient sous ces notes quand elles ont été sprayées, et qui constituent en quelque sorte le négatif du processus de création.

some sort of translation....

The Roof space of Roof space For one exhibition, Steven CHAMBAUD had sprayéd black his preparative notes, and displayed the result, blurring his working lanes so. The roof space of roof space is formed by both pages which were under these notes when they were sprayéd, and that constitute in a way the negative of the process of creation.

Wet Nursing in Europe

European Aristocracy

By the 11th century, the aristocracy and royalty of Europe used wet nurses almost exclusively. In taking the baby from the mother, they prevented her from experiencing the birth control effects of producing milk and nursing. This allowed the women to stay fertile and produce more babies. It also left them open to sexual activity with their husbands as having sex with a nursing mother was considered taboo and harmful to the health of the baby. In France, the custom was to send infants to the country for wet nursing. However, by the end of the 18th century in France, the urban poor had also begun to send their babies out of the city so that the mothers could work. In fact, in 1780, only 700 babies out of 21,000 born that year nursed from their mothers. This high demand for wet-nurses caused quality to go down and infant mortality to rise.

Wet Nursing and Bourgeois Values

Because the Netherlands didn't have a court life like other European countries, their cultural ideals tended to revolve around the bourgeois lifestyle. This included a rejection of the aristocratic advocacy of wet nursing. Instead, the Dutch promoted an ideal focused around an immaculate household centered around the nursing mother as a part of civic responsibility. In fact, Pieter de Hooch and other Dutch painters documented these values burgeoning in the 17th century. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution then introduced some of these same ideas to the rest of Europe in the 18th century. Jean Jaques Rousseau himself denounced wet nursing in favor of nursing by the mother. However, only some people in the upper middle class changed their habits, and, despite the critiques of a few political radicals and women's rights defenders, wet-nursing remained popular in England through the Victorian Era and in France until World War I.

Decline of Wet Nursing

At the beginning of the 20th century, a comprehensive study by the French government showed that wide spread wet-nursing was contributing to infant death rates. This empirical information, which coincided with the development of new technology, initiated a change towards bottle feeding. The inventions of the rubber nipple, the bottle, pasteurization, and canned milk all made this new method of feeding possible and helped seal the decline of wet-nursing.

Breast Pump

rousseau

wet nurses

breast pumps

copper

armour

Yves Klein- Fire Paintings