NU PEDAGOGIX
Nate Harrison
Can I Get An Amen?
(2004)
“Can I Get An Amen? is an audio installation that unfolds a critical perspective of perhaps the most sampled drum beat in the history of recorded music, the Amen Break. It begins with the pop track Amen Brother by 60’s soul band The Winstons, and traces the transformation of their drum solo from its original context as part of a ‘B’ side vinyl single into its use as a key aural ingredient in contemporary cultural expression. The work attempts to bring into scrutiny the techno-utopian notion that ‘information wants to be free’- it questions its effectiveness as a democratizing agent. This as well as other issues are foregrounded through a history of the Amen Break and its peculiar relationship to current copyright law.” Nate Harrison
The Etcetera Principle - Jason Coburn (26mins)
A lecture format taking E.H. Gombrich’s notion of the Etc Principle as a way of navigating pattern and decoration through a selection of images and non-sequiturs. The Etc Principle describes the point at which the detail of a mass becomes lost in an overall texture – the moment where we go from reading to ‘reading in’; “The blob may be a man or it may be a brush, but while we wonder, we tentatively transform it.” The lecture combines a sampling methodology with a hosting approach to construct a mutating lecture with always the same starting point - the Canaletto painting Gombrich uses to illustrate his etc. principle idea. It then develops to an endpoint informed by the work of an artist. For this version it was a wall drawing by Evi Vingerling showing a simple toilet paper pattern. The lecture was given at “Brak Talk 1: New Minimalism” organised by Jack Segbars and Edward Clydesdale Thompson as part of the Brak series of exhibitions and talks at Duende Studios, Rotterdam.
