Blip, Blink & Move Laboratory (BBML) - About BBML

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Capitalist Evils 萬惡資本主義實體
Places where you can blow money

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Sparkfun
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Seed Studio Depot
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Parallax
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The Maker Shed
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Smart Projects
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Liquid Ware
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Adafruit Industries
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Jameco
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Digi-key
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Evil Mad Scientist Store
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Carl's Electronics
A great place for electronics kits
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Think Geek
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Robot Zone (Hong Kong)

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Learn Stuff 博學因特網
From electronics fundamentals to Arduino source codes

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Makezine
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Hackzine (Archive)
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Arduino Playground
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Arduino Taiwan User Forum
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Instructables
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Tinker It!
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Hack a Day
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Hack and Mod
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Hand Made Music
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Rod Elliott's Beginner's Guide to Electronics
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Discover Circuits
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Electronics Club Projects Page
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Electronics Project Design
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Fritzing
Create PCB layout for professional manufacturing
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Bowden's Hobby Circuits

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Circuit Bending 彎曲志向

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Get Lo Fi
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Odd Music
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Reed Ghazala on Circuit Bending
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Wiki Article on Reed Ghazala
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Casper Electronics
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Bent Festival

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Peter Erskine Alan Pasqua

Peter Erskine, Educator, Grammy-Winning Drummer and Alan Pasqua, Chair of Jazz Studies, USC
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Alice in Chains with the H1

Mike Inez and Jerry Cantrell - Alice in Chains
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Shinedown

Shinedown live in New York City
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H1 on a DSLR camera

H1 mounted on a Canon T2i
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H1 in journalism
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H1 in the boardroom
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H1 / APH-1 accessory pack
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焦點人物 楊天帥 愛蛙聲科學家：無端成為藝術家

2010年9月8日
我眼前是一位藝術家，或者數學家、生物學家、物理學家，或者什麼都不是，只是一位退休老人，那視乎你作何看法。

來自荷蘭、擁有物理及數學博士學位的Felix Hess，青絲早已成雪，但依然精神爽利。緋紅的臉總掛着微笑，給人感覺就像是一個在8月海邊嬉鬧慣的孩子。

他說話聲音很小，儘管訪問時我已把咪高峰放得極近，還是有幾句錄得不太清楚。我們在他為「聽在聲音藝術節」帶來港的藝術品前聊天的。我猜，他之所以壓低聲音說話，是因為怕驚動了他的「孩子」。

澳洲荷蘭叫聲不同

年輕時的Felix，對回力鏢情有獨鍾。

他認為回力鏢能返回投擲者手中的事實「難以置信」。這一「神奇現象」成為他在修讀學士期間研究的課題。畢業後，有教授建議他修讀空氣動力學博士學位，他答應了。

愈多接觸回力鏢的文獻，Felix對澳洲土著的文化就愈嚮往。於是，博士畢業後，Felix赴澳工作。也就是在那裏，遇上改變他一生的動物──青蛙。

不是一隻青蛙，是一群青蛙。

「澳洲與荷蘭很不同，連青蛙的叫聲也不一樣。牠們的音樂會，對我而言非常吸引。」他說。「我錄下青蛙的叫聲，好讓自己在回國後也能重聽。然而，很快我就發現錄音的不足─每次都一模一樣，毫無變化。」

「關鍵在於，青蛙音樂會與環境是互動的。例如，當牠們聽到我的腳步聲，就會靜下來，不唱了。」這發現繼回力鏢後再次勾起Felix的科學家精神，他心中盤算着要做出能模擬青蛙音樂會的「sound creature」。

「sound creature」原理不難明。其部件是咪高峰、喇叭與電路。咪高峰接收聲音，經電路分辨「好」（即其他「sound creature」的聲音）與「壞」（其他雜音）。「好」聲音愈大，「sound creature」的叫聲就愈響；「壞」聲音愈大，「sound creature」就愈閉口不唱。

寧靜活動雕塑

「我本想在生物科研究『sound creature』，但生物科教授認為意義不大，拒絕了。後來竟有搞實驗音樂的部門覺得這有點意思，但我連樂譜也不會看，哈！」Felix說。「輾轉之下，忽然有人告訴我，『sound creature』是藝術，我是藝術家。」

「OK！我是藝術家，沒所謂，只要給我機會做『sound creature』，我就OK。」就這樣，Felix從科學家變成藝術家了。

「Sound creature」已是上世紀八十年代的事。Felix這次帶來港的藝術品，名為「It's in the Air」。它不是關於聲音，是關於寧靜。超過二百幅小旗幟豎立在地上，只一點風吹草動，如參觀者輕輕走過，小旗幟就會受氣流影響而旋轉。

沒錯，就是這樣簡單。

「我花了很長時間找一種既薄又耐用的物料做旗幟。試過用鋁片、纖維等，效果都不理想，最後才找到米紙。」他解釋。「因為小旗幟實在太敏感了，展覽廳內連冷氣也不能開，以免影響氣流。」

Felix自言很愛這些小旗幟，說它們就像自己的孩子，閒時享受與它們共處的時光。由於最弱的氣流也會影響小旗幟的活動，「它們身處不同時空，表現也有所不同。」

「It's in the Air」一發表，各有各的表述又來了。Felix的老同事，空氣動力學家認為那是把「空氣流動實體化的裝置」，雕塑家則稱其為「一種活動雕塑」。Felix說，人家怎樣看，他不介意。

「我只做我喜歡做的事，誰管它關心那是關乎藝術、物理還是生物呢！」

大概這也可稱為藝術家脾氣罷。

gyeung@hkej.com
【列印文章】

Sonic Boom
Sound isn't just noise or music - it's the raw material for a growing number of audio artists, and montreal is building a strong international reputation for this form of creative expression
CAMERON SKENE, Freelance
Published: Saturday, January 13 2007

This is the latest instalment in the continuing series In Profile, which looks at a cross-section of art being produced on the island and the people who make it.

Diversity is a prominent feature of Montreal's current art scene. Previously dominated by the strong tradition of Quebec's modernist painters, the realm of artmaking has expanded beyond what is coyly called "the dirty arts" (painting, drawing and sculpture) to include photo and mixed-media, web-based installation, performance, sound, even smell.

This fourth edition of the In Profile series, Sonic Boom, examines four artists who are working in what could be called a booming field in the art world: sound, also called audio art or sound installation. To some it is just noise, albeit with banks of computers, high-tech speakers and jumbles of tangled wires, and playing to esoteric-looking crowds at performances in barns or obscure festivals.
Jean-Pierre Aube: "For some artists working with technology, the more shiny it is, the more it looks professional. When we look at Star Trek, everything looks so smooth: it's like a bourgeois living room."View Larger Image View Larger Image
Jean-Pierre Aube: "For some artists working with technology, the more shiny it is, the more it looks professional. When we look at Star Trek, everything looks so smooth: it's like a bourgeois living room."
JOHN KENNEY, THE GAZETTE
More pictures: < Prev | Next >
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But sound work, unlike video or web-based work, draws on a long history dating from the early 20th century. Artists in movements like Dada and the Italian Futurists - one of whom, Luigi Russolo, wrote the seminal 1913 sound manifesto, The Art of Noises - made the observation that the sound landscape of the modern age is entirely new, marked with a technological urbanism: the clangs, yelps, squeals and groans of machines. The first noise performances by early sound artists were received in confused silence - one dissatisfied Futurist compared it to "showing the first steam engine to a herd of cows."

continued from e1

But technologies - and the public - seem to have caught up to the concept. Desktop studios and trips to Radio Shack have increased the access to recording and editing. And as everyone knows, anything an artist can get his hands on is fair game. Montreal, in particular, has a strong reputation internationally. With yearly festivals like Mutek and Elektra, support from and access to such art centres as Quartier Ephemere, and ambitious installations like the Silophone, a disused grain silo in the Old Port that in 2000 was turned into a kind of musical instrument, sound in the city is booming.

With the visual getting most of the aesthetic coin in museums and galleries, it is easy to forget the other senses - or dismiss them as devoid of content serious enough for aesthetic investigation. Yet artists are increasingly exploring sound, smell and taste as vehicles for content.

During a stint as a bicycle courier in this city, I ran the usual range of adjustments to the haste, pace and danger of a job that is carried out in a panicky sensory jumble. One adjustment was particularly telling: since you can't swivel your head all the time to look out for traffic, you put your head down, stare fixedly ahead and listen hard. Your eyes are for steering, but your ears are for navigation, and they become the predominant tool for self-preservation.

"We use (sound) like a radar - we think we know where we are with the space in front of our eyes, but if you ever have an ear problem, it's amazing ... blind people walk with a stick, tapping it. It's not to feel out things, it's setting up echoes."Steve Heimbecker is a thickset, methodical man in his 40s. He stares - as most sound artists necessarily do during interviews - into a computer screen, going through DVDs of his work. Heimbecker explores, among other things, the sculptural dimensions of sound. His work with what he calls "acoustic mapping" situates the observer in a multi-channel sound environment.

In The Acoustic Line as the Crow Listens, the artist plotted a mile through the landscape and recorded simultaneously at eight sites placed about 200 metres equidistant. For the resulting installation, speakers are placed together in a line that compresses the mile into 64 feet. The result is a time-warped stereo experience: environmental sounds that travel a mile, like a car horn, move and fade rapidly in a squished sonic environment, bending perception.

"So conceptually, if you walk really fast, you would be travelling faster than the speed of sound," the artist says.
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He fabricates most of his installations himself; his studio is a jumble of speaker boxes built to spec for his next show. His work travels widely to sound festivals and galleries in Europe and North America.

A Saskatchewan native recently transplanted to Montreal, Heimbecker is most known for his sound work with the Silophone and a 2003 installation titled Wind Array Cascade Machine, where a field of 64 wheat-like stalks of electronic sensors bent with the wind on the roof of the

Ex-Centris building on St. Laurent Blvd. The data stream from the rooftop sensors was transmitted to galleries in Toronto and Europe, where other installations, called Pods, translated the data into rows of upright LED readouts on poles, reinterpreting the wind as a field of oscillating lights in the gallery.

"I realized that the wave patterns of a wheat field caused by the wind were exactly how the sine wave works ... so it's a metaphorically perfect thing."

If music is, as American composer John Cage said, "organized sound," then Heimbecker displays how sound, transcribed by technology, can be made into an aesthetic replication of experience: not music, but something altogether new. Heimbecker's eyes light up at the elegant idea: "So the wind in Quebec was blowing in Toronto ..."

"I don't really work with data like Steve does. Steve is really more into programming, how data inputs and then outputs differently. It's totally another way of working ..."

Jean-Pierre Gauthier, preparing for his exhibition at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal in February, is distracted and intense, with a furrowed brow, constantly looking elsewhere. A maker of sound-producing kinetic installations, Gauthier starts up a piece that's waiting to be shipped from his east-end studio: a piano with wires running from the keys to a swarm of more wires, switches and sensors stuffed into the seat.

The piece is activated by motion sensors. As the viewer moves, the piano twitches into action, plucked notes sputter here and there, initially startling me into thinking that I had stepped on something accidentally
'There are three microprocessors. I program the sequence. (The computer) chooses randomly the note ... Each sequence is tripped by motion sensors."

The effect is unsettling and twitchy at first. As you move, the volume of notes gains mass, cascading into a nervous symphony.

"I like it to be random, so at one point I lose control of the result. ... The composition gets free, like this one - I select the notes ... but the rest is out of my control. To me, the 'order' of this is about trying to get the work free from my control."
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Gauthier, represented by the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, was the 2004 winner of the Sobey Art Award, a $50,000 award given to Canadian artists under 40. Gauthier's noisy, kinetic installations have received lots of notice and justifiable acclaim.

Usually working with everyday objects like skis, mirrors or hammers, Gauthier fashions these into robotic instruments that sing: "Basically the objects are quite insignificant, they're quite normal - but the sound they can make is quite amazing," he says. "(They're) just amplified, no (added) effect. I use as much as possible the pure sound of the object, and (try) to find an object that has its own colour."

In his 2002 installation Echotriste, Gauthier combined mirrors with dangling industrial coils that scored the mirrors' surfaces to create ethereal sounds suggesting an eerie human chorus - home-made music that gives a nod to the Futurists themselves, who encouraged artists to create their own instruments.

"I loved electronics when I was a kid - I had a Radio Shack electronic kit. The work brought me to this. It was quite natural for me to do this."

"Jean-Pierre (Gauthier) and (I) have the same background - we both did our master's at UQAM - a real visual art background. When I think about Pierre, he's a craftsman: He builds stuff."

Jean-Pierre Aube started as a photographer, but instead of visual images now captures sound. "There's not a big difference. ... I go around in the woods with my VLF receiver and bring something back with a technology device - the camera is a radio receiver for me (now)."

Aube is a tall, gregarious man who works out of his home in the north end. The interview is occasionally accented by the staccato wails of his new baby in the other room. Leaning back on a thrift-store couch, we watch a video projection of a performance piece he did at the Quartier Ephemere this past summer. A huge mass of giant speakers sits in the middle of a room. Titled Save the Waves, the system - built out of plywood, old computers and scrap material - showed that he is not averse to building stuff, either.

"A critic wrote that the exhibition isn't really about the object, it was more about the sound - which surprised me a little bit because those speakers weighed 3,000 pounds ..."

Aube often works with a VLF (very low frequency) receiver that he makes himself:
"It's basically (like) a hula hoop with 300 feet of cable, ... a simple radio receiver that allows you to grab all natural electromagnetic phenomena."

Very low frequency was inadvertently discovered in the 1800s when it became apparent that telegraph lines picked up signals from atmospheric phenomena like the aurora borealis. VLF receivers also pick up what Aube considers to be the frequency of modernity: "60 hertz is the soundtrack of domestic life, because 60 hertz is everywhere. Your fridge hums at 60 hertz."

Save the Waves is a reflection on Aube's difficulty with getting far enough away from the interference of 60hz electrical lines to record the aurora himself. In the piece, a series of receivers pick up all electromagnetic signals in and around the building, while a performer runs a hand-held receiver over various appliances: a fluorescent light, a sound board, the computers themselves. The effect is an eerie accidental modulation coming from the giant speakers, like a mass of chanting Buddhist monks, all produced by our own electromagnetic pollution.
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Aube, a darling of the electronic festival circuit, has shown his work in such far-flung places as Latvia, France, the Philippines and Germany. Sound art, like a lot of technology-based work, seems to have more of a receptive audience outside North America:

"Let me put it this way: (on this continent) I've never shown my work outside of Quebec, but I've shown 20 times in Europe in the past few years." He adds: "Montreal has a big scene. ... Mutek - it's huge and known all around the world."

"Sound is big nowadays."

Christof Migone agrees. But while the audience is growing for such work, he, like a lot of others, finds that more traditional museums and galleries are taking time to adjust to the medium: "Some galleries are starting (to show more sound work) ... but it's also not an ideal space ... they've done shows, but the result is a cacophony - they just don't take into account that it's a radically different medium."

Migone - tall, slight, and reticent - sits at the kitchen table in his modest Little Italy apartment. He displays a more multidisciplinary bent in his work, but sound is his base: After starting in radio at CKUT in the 1990s with his show Danger in Paradise, he pushed the envelope of experimentation with recording and broadcasting, and has written extensively on the subject of audio art.

"I think sound is something I keep returning to, I guess because I have a certain level of skill. Once I get an idea it often translates into sound, because I guess I can sort of see how it can materialize."

In his work Crackers, Migone solicited volunteer performers through radio and print ads, seeking individuals who were willing to make cracking sounds with various parts of their bodies. Some were more than willing, cracking necks, wrists, toes and jaws - and providing Migone with enough recording material for years. Crackers started as a sound installation in 1998, but was redone in performances and installations in Paris, Geneva and Los Angeles and as recently as this fall in Montreal at UQAM's gallery.
One of the recordings was a string of cracks from various parts of the body, edited closely together, bristling and alive with varying notes and textures: the music of wet popcorn, and strangely compelling to listen to.

"When presented in artists' talks or things like that, people have a dual reaction. Some kind of wince, and other people start cracking," he says. "What interests me is also the 'uncontrollable-ness' of that action. When you crack, it's a habit, it's a compulsion."

Some of his other work displays a penchant for recording obsessive-compulsive behaviours and bodily functions - like P, where the artist recorded 1,000 moments of urination while saying "P."
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"Crackers really helped me focus, and I did a fart record afterwards which kind of applied the same kind of restrictions and focus."

Creating with a blend of old-fashioned microphone recording and software editing, Migone keeps the technology simple to focus on the product and the idea.

"I try to downplay sound, in a sense, because (the work) gets pigeonholed. Most of the time it's not necessarily about the medium. I'm much more interested in the initial idea."

Steve Heimbecker agrees: "I think a lot of sound artists are really involved in the process as much or more than the outcome. ... Many of the ideas themselves are based on expanding technologies, (and) sometimes result in a piece that's interesting, sometimes not. ... The big discussion now is, 'What is the content?', because the technology's kind of flatlined - everything you can do with it has been imagined. "

But with the plethora of noise in our world, and since part of the artist's job description is to absorb and reflect human experience, the genre is constantly brushing up against the definition of music.

"(John) Cage thought everything was music," Migone says. "There's no such thing as silence - and he incorporated everything into music. And that's dangerous for sound art, because how does it carve out its own territory outside of (music)?"

montrealgazette.com

Sound Sights: To see more photos of the artists' works and link to more information about them on the Internet, go to Editor's Picks.

姚大鈞談《中國聲音藝術: 兩千五百年的聆聽》 （第一部分）

講座日期：2009年10月16日
地點：灣仔告士打道一號 香港演藝學院4樓 EDT Lab

姚大鈞, 聲音藝術家，唱片製作人，策展人，電台主持人，藝術史研究員。長年來透過電台節目、網站、及教學推動前衛音樂發展。曾策劃北京聲納、台北聲納、上海電子藝 術節河流體開幕式等大型新媒體及聲音藝術演出。九七年起組創「中國聲音小組」對中國各地市聲音現象進行研究、紀錄及創作。近年創作包括中國城市聲音裝置作 品系列，以不同的空間譬喻及聆聽方式探討中國各城市之聲音現象。在兩岸開創聲音藝術的系統教學，目前任教於中國美術學院新媒體藝術系。

公開講座：姚大鈞談《中國聲音藝術: 兩千五百年的聆聽》
(普通話主講, 英語補充)

謝謝大家在禮拜五的晚上抽空來這邊，我首先要抱歉因為我本來是來演出的，明天晚上和後天晚上要演出，今天晚上需要綵排，他們那邊已經開始綵排了，我是偷偷溜出來的，在這邊跟大家談完以後我必須趕回去，在8 點半要離開這裏，所以時間非常短，我希望把演講的部分儘量縮短，可以讓我們有更多的時間交流。因為我覺得跟大家交流是我比較有興趣的，而不是個人的演說，我希望不要把這次談話變成一個演講，一個很規矩的演講模式，因為我真的沒有寫好一個稿子， 但是我有一些材料希望跟大家分享。如果大家在我講的過程中有任何的疑問或想法，或有不清楚的地方，可以隨時舉手發問，就是希望大家不要把這作為正式的演講，因為我沒有寫好一篇演講稿。我們現開始進入主題——“中國人的聽音”，這個課題是非常有意思的，也是我個人研究了很多年的，但是這個主題並沒有人花太多功夫去研究，尤其是沒有從宏觀的角度去研究，也就是說，很多人研究古代的樂論，文獻，聽覺（跟音樂有關的文獻有大量的史料，注釋及學術論文），但是沒有人從它真正的本體，把它作為一個聽聲音的文獻或者說從聽聲音這件事情本身去研究文獻。我們都知道很多古代文獻，比如說《禮記》，《樂記》以及歐陽修的《秋聲賦》，這些都是我們耳熟能詳的東西，但是我們都從非常傳統的角度去看它，對於歐陽修的《秋聲賦》，我們一直把它當成文學作品，甚至是我們在中學需要背誦的一篇古文，而沒有從它的內容去看它到底是怎麼回事，所以今天我希望從一種新的角度來看大家可能已經接觸過的一些材料，從新的角度把它背後的真正意思揭開來，這些材料與西方接觸衝擊後產生的新的意義，這是我們主要的研究對象。

我現在換到另外一張畫，這張畫可能大家也看過，這是很有名的南宋的一幅畫。這幅畫現在在臺北的故宮博物院，它是古代非常著名的山水畫家馬遠的兒子馬嶺畫的《靜聽松風》(Quietly Listening to the Sounds of Pine-trees)。這幅畫非常有名，但一般我們研究它多半是從畫風，或畫的主題及對象，比如這個人的身份是什麼，我們關注它的構圖，一些美術史的關注，但這張畫經過我們今天晚上的討論以後， 大家會對它有不同的看法，有一種新的角度去分析它。

我們要從古代說起，古代的很多東西是我們熟悉的，我們熟悉它們的方式是用音樂、哲學、文學古文去認識它們，或是一種古畫的方式去認識它們。但是貫穿所有這些不同領域、不同媒體、媒材的各種不管是藝術或是文獻資料背後是一個很重要的事情——聆聽。聆聽在我看來非常拗口，小時候我們不會自己講或者聽到聆聽這個詞，因為聽就是聽，現在要把這個問題提高到一個理論的學術層面，所以我們用聆聽這個詞，但實際上它是很拗口的。中文裡面關於聽或是關於聲音的字眼是非常有限的，而且相當含混，比如說我們談聲音，噪音，音樂，這裏面都有音或者聲這個字，互相摻雜，混在一起，混淆不清的，這個時候我們可以看古代的樂論，其實就比我們現在的現代漢語的說法更清楚，比如說古代的樂論我們看一段，“To illustrate my point about the confusion of the terms for sounds, music and noise, in contemporary spoken Chinese, if we can compare to classical Chinese, it was clearly delineated that there are three kinds of things we are talking about listening and objects of listening. The first is sound, which is similar to what we have today referring to all kinds of things that is audible. So the first one is ‘Sheng’, and the next is ‘Yin’ or equivalent to musical notes. And the highest level is the musical work ‘Yue’. ”所以「聲」、「音」、「樂」三個是分的很清楚的，很多古代的東西從現代的角度看，或現代的東西從古代的角度看，會有很多的衝撞，在衝撞後產生新的意義，新的認識，新的瞭解。比較古雅的方法是相互發明，這裏說的發明不是發明家的發明，而是說互相得到引證，互相刺激，互相有新的東西產生出來。我最有興趣的是把古代和現代的放在一起對比，然後有一種新的意思我們可以看得出來。這是我個人覺得最有意思的事情，也是我們現在討論聽覺為什麼把最老的和最新的放在一起的原因，所以聽覺這件事情是沒有人研究過的，應該說在近代沒有人研究過。所以我們看羅蘭巴特在1976年寫的一篇文章裏面有一句話 “Listening does not figure in the encyclopedias of the past, it belongs to no knowledge discipline”，就是說聽聲音這件事情不屬於過去的任何一個學門，它不是被承認的一個學科。雖然我們都在聽音樂、做音樂、寫音樂，都在享受音樂、散播音樂，但是我們沒有研究聽覺這件事情或是聽這個動作。所以很有意思的是在西方傳統裏是羅蘭巴特這些，或是更早幾十年的法國具象音樂學派(Music Concrete)才把聽覺這件事情提高到一個很高層次，因為過去西方古希臘的音樂文獻或是早期關於和聲或律法的文獻裏面，主要對象是音樂而不是聲音，到了20世紀中期(the birth of Music Concrete)具象音樂產生，70年代結構主義學者羅蘭巴特才開始用厚澀的方法看聽覺這件事情，這個研究是非常新穎的，尤其在中文世界裏是很少人討論的，但是中國有雄厚的古代聽音文獻，所以中西方兩個碰撞在一起是很有意思的。

提問： 「聆」和「聽」是不一樣的，「聆」是比較專心的，在你們研究中，兩者有甚麼分別？

答：其實中文字裏關於聽的有：「聆」、「聽」、「聞」是有區別的，比如說「聽而不聞」，「聽」應該是最廣義的，「聞」是比較專注在一個對象上的，而「聆」我覺得是更加專注的，我沒有研究過，但我認為是有差別的。但是現代中文常常需要兩個字來組成雙音節，比如「聲音」 ,我們知道「聲」和「音」其實是不一樣的，但是放在一起，成了漢語，就混淆了它們的區別。「聆聽」也是，「聆」跟「聽」是不一樣的，當它們成了一個複合詞的時候，便失去了一個區分。

我們從古代的一些裝置來看古代人怎麼對付「聽」這件事情，把「聽」具體化、形象化。請看這個照片是編鐘，距今二千五百年左右的一件東西。仔細看的話，這個東西其實是非常可怕的、非常嚇人的。我們平常接觸到它時直覺得認為它是一個考古的、出土的文物，不會把它當作一個聲音的儀器或是作品來看，但是你看它的複雜程度，不只是製作它本身相當複雜，是高度的科學技術和知識，在當時是高科技的。同時在看不到的那一部分，它背後藏著是非常可怕的、非常早熟的調律的知識。我們知道，這一套鐘，它是十二音的，在西方當時是沒有這麼完備的十二音的調律方式。所以中國古代人花了很大心血，在很多的心力放在聽覺這件事情，不只是音樂，它的重要性超過了音樂，在「聽」本身。

剛才我們提到了這個十二音的調律，調律是一個非常值得注意的現象，因為調律也就是tuning，它在西方是被當作樂理、聲響學的一部分，而在中國，調律絕對不只限於樂理或音樂上的意義，它是政治層面的一個重要區塊，翻開中國政史，古有廿五史，每個政史裏都有一個章節叫律治，在這個章節裏談的不是音樂。而實際上中國音樂經過這麼多時代，它的變化其實也不是那麼大，所以沒有那麼多可以談的。律治這個章節裏談的是調律的方式，調律是不是調得對，和諧不和諧會影響一個朝代或推翻前一個朝代的新政權的執政的合法性成功與否，影響到政治上的結果。所以調律被賦予了很高的政治含義，更廣來看，不只是政治，而且是中國人宇宙觀的一部分，tuning is a part of Chinese cosmological system, that is way beyond just political content，音樂、調律、天文、星相在古人看來是一體的。我們都知道五行這些算命，在古代是holistic，是一體的，它不是個別的。所以音樂這個調律跟其他的各種屬性要了解的話，我們就要現在看一個律法圖，每個音階上的音跟每個月份、方向都聯繫在一起。它是非常完整的，一個整體性的宇宙觀。剛才看的這個東西是祭祀用的禮器，同時也可以演奏的，也是一種樂器。但是如果把它放在今天看，把它放在一個展覽空間，它是一個很了不起的，是非常嚇人的裝置藝術。可以在雙年展、三年展馬上一炮而紅，因為它的造型非常可觀，背後技術很強，還可以發出聲音，它是一個聲音裝置藝術。但是我們要作一個區別，在古代，它先是主要作為樂器，之後再變成禮器，比如說在陪葬的時候，它就作為一種禮器。

聲音裝置藝術在藝術史、美學史上是一個很重要的轉捩點。我覺得聲音裝置的出現和流行普及及被炒作是人類幾千年音樂傳統的最終的終結。它比日本的噪音理論更早，這被視作是反音樂的發展，跟音樂本體的定義是完全相反的，它們做出來的不是音樂，是反音樂。但是如果退後一步更宏觀來看，不管是John Cage還是日本秋田倉美的極端暴力噪音理論，他們討論的題材還是聽覺。不管是聽得舒服還是不舒服、聽起來是暴力還是協和的，有節奏還是沒有節奏的，討論的還是聽，所言它們都是聽覺、音樂藝術廣義上延伸。為什麼說今天的聲音裝置藝術是人類音樂文化的終結，因為它開始讓人不再聽了，如放在美術館或是雙年展裏的一件裝置藝術，你多半的注意力會放在它視覺的構成，它的造型和它的實體，而可能對它的聲音並不那麼感興趣。這個影響是很了不起的，做得很好的一件裝置藝術。我們今天看大多數的市面上流行的裝置藝術作品，它們聲音的結果其實是我們不關注的。我覺得作為一件聲音的作品或是音樂作品，它唯一能夠作為判斷的標準就是我們願不願把我們生命裏的時間奉獻給這個作品，比如一個交響曲三十、四十分鐘，我們願不願意用四十分鐘的時間去聽一首現場的交響曲或家裏的唱片。如果真的是好的作品，我會不只一次甚至好多次反覆地花四十分鐘去聽。但是現在的聲音裝置藝術，我們可以做一個旁觀者來看聲音裝置藝術跟觀眾之間的互動情況怎樣，我們觀察到很多觀眾走到這個聲音裝置前面，看一看它的牌子，是誰做的、年份是多少、它背後的技術是什麼、是什麼樣的感應器、什麼樣的互動、用到什麼軟體硬體，瞭解以後，大概看一看，可能就走到下一個作品。所以我認為聲音裝置藝術已經變成一個反音樂(anti-music)，因為我們不再聽了，我們只是把它當成一個造型藝術來評價來衡量它的價值，而它的聲音那部分，只不過是把它成為一個能夠發聲的裝置藝術。(It’s an installation with sound instead of a sound installation.)

我們看古代人聽音的廣度，隨便舉一些例子，這個東西可能大家不太注意到，在墨子的時代，2500年的時候就有完整文字記錄的文獻可以證明的一件中國人的發明——「地聽」跟「甕聽」。這是宋代軍事百科全書裏《五金總要》的一個插圖，這個插圖非常簡陋，但是我們可以看到地聽的構造，它實際上就是一個大的甕、大的瓦罐。我把這把個放在一起，這是出自《中國聲學史》這一部很重要的教科書裡面的，放在一起就發現這個瓦罐實際上就是一個 tempo resonated。中國古代人當然沒有一個resonated的概念，但他們知道這個東西的特性。「地聽」（geophone）是在古代被當作戰爭防備的武器，它不是用來攻擊的武器，而是防備的時候需要用的一個設備。先在地上挖一個大洞，把大的瓦罐埋在裏面，再派一個人坐到裏面去聽。因為在古代攻城的時候會有挖地道，要想知道敵人挖地道的進度和方向，必須通過地聽的裝置來探測。所以它是防衛的時候一個重要的軍時設備。這個很有意思，我們從今天的角度來看，它是一個非常早的發明。現在我們多半用geophone來聽埋在地下的油管是不是漏油，越戰時美軍用來geophone監聽地下越共挖地道。中國人是很早就應用geophone。

剛才提到我喜歡新的跟舊的結合、衝擊，我也曾經為南京這個城市做的一個作品叫《地聽南京》。希望用地聽這個模式建構一個空間，在裡面可以聽到四方有不同的聲音傳過來，模擬從前地聽的概念。我們當然不可能在畫廊挖一個地洞，所以做了一個地地面上的空間。

Industrial Bloom By Christopher Dewolf

Earlier this year, in the last few days before the heat of summer, nearly 50,000 people visited the Hong Kong International Art Fair, a 65% jump in attendance over last year. It's another step up for the aspiring capital of Asia's art market, a city where auction houses sold $502 million in art last year alone. But while collectors flock to Hong Kong to scoop up works by popular mainland Chinese artists such as Yue Minjun and Zhang Xiaogang, Hong Kong's real artistic vanguard can be found 40 minutes by train from the city center, in the grimy industrial area of Fo Tan, where artists work next to sausagemakers and metalsmiths in hulking, derelict factories. For years, manufacturers have been fleeing to cheaper pastures in China, so Hong Kong, notorious for high rents, has had a surplus of vacant industrial space. The result has been an explosion of creativity.

Fo Tan's pioneering artists arrived in the early 2000s, when a sluggish economy and the SARS crisis sent rents tumbling. Now there are more than 200 in the area, many of them graduates of the nearby Chinese University of Hong Kong. While there's nothing new about artists setting up shop in obsolete industrial areas — it happened in New York City's SoHo in the 1960s and Beijing's Dashanzi in the 1990s — its impact in Hong Kong has been profound. There are now more full-time artists than ever before and they're catching the eye of both local and international publics. In January, more than 10,000 people flocked to Fo Tan's annual open-studios event. (See the 10 reasons to visit Hong Kong's NoHo.)

The district has given "a lot of people space and a community that wasn't there before," says Tobias Berger, a German curator who worked at Hong Kong's Para/Site Art Space during the years of Fo Tan's emergence. He and other curators helped draw attention to the district's artists, and since then a number of them have made a mark at international events like the Venice Biennale and in galleries as far afield as Sydney and Stockholm. "And it's not only Fo Tan," Berger says. "There's more happening now in other parts of the city too."

Kacey Wong, 38, has seen the transformation firsthand. Trained as an architect, he began working on conceptual-art installations in the 1990s. Last year, Wong dressed up as a skyscraper at the Subvision Festival in Hamburg, and in 2008, his installation Wandering Home, a miniature Hong Kong apartment set atop a tricycle, was shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale. (See pictures of Hong Kong.)

"Usually, the artist grows in scale to the studio," he says, recalling how he started off working in his mom's living room. "I was making this 20-ft.-long crocodile out of corrugated cardboard. It was a huge mess. Suddenly, I heard the keychain jangling by the door and it was my mom coming home. I froze with such a feeling of guilt. That's when I realized I needed my own space." Like other local artists, Wong had long carried with him the stigma of working in an inscrutable profession that was rarely lucrative or even feasible. "Before, people were just doing art at home and getting yelled at by their parents," says Wong. "These days, a fresh graduate from art school can share a studio for HK$1,000 [$130] a month. It's a system that allows people to grow as artists."

Casper Chan is hoping to do just that. After graduating from Chinese University's art school two years ago, the 25-year-old painter spent some time renting a studio with former classmates. "My work wouldn't have been so large if I hadn't had a studio," she says. (Her series of Hong Kong teenagers rendered on big wood panels stands in testament to that fact.) Being in Fo Tan also gave her a shot at greater exposure. "A lot of gallery owners came to the open-studio days and talked to me and invited me to have a show," she says. (See the top 10 Chinese knockoffs.)

Some artists have gone a step further, using their studios to market themselves and each other. Last year, photographer Quist Tsang joined up with two friends to open Hidden Culture in another run-down industrial district in east Kowloon. The venture serves as a work space and exhibition venue for emerging artists. "We are not popular, we are not famous, but we have passion for the things we do," says Tsang.

Since studio space became more readily available, Hong Kong artists have grown more sophisticated says Tang Ying-chi, herself a mixed-media artist and the editor of the coffee-table volume Oasis: Artists' Studios in Hong Kong. "Their work has become more complex than 10 or 20 years ago, when there were more watercolors and Chinese ink paintings. Now they use everyday materials in their work. It's more closely connected to the city they live in."

But they aren't the only ones to have noticed the potential of old industrial premises. Property developers are keen on putting them to use too, and they have successfully pressured the government to make it easier to convert former factories into apartments, offices and even hotels. Rents are already skyrocketing. Last month, Chan was evicted from her studio after her landlord sold it. At the same time, the bigger the arts community becomes, the louder its voice gets. Artists' complaints about rising rents have caught the ear of a government keen to address the charges of philistinism historically leveled at Hong Kong by fostering the development of local creativity. More subsidized space for artists is in the pipeline — so is a study to determine just how many artists are out there. If the phenomenon of Fo Tan is anything to go by, the answer could be higher than anyone supposes.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2008795,00.html#ixzz0w1x6qXEk

Reading Images: Multimodality, Representation and New Media © 2004 Gunther Kress

Image: Roman Duszek © 2003

Conference presentation Video

Keywords


Multimodality, literacy, representation, design, media affordances

Abstract


In this paper I wish to point to what I see as the central issues in the linked shifts in representation and dissemination: that is, from the constellation of mode of writing and medium of book / page, to the constellation of mode of image and medium of screen. In particular I will draw attention to consequent shifts in authority, in changes in forms of reading, shifts in shapes of knowledge and in forms of human engagement with the social and natural world.
Paper


Readers of this journal are experts in design. What I can offer is a particular take on certain issues in design from the perspective of (Social) Semiotics, and more specifically, from the perspective of multimodality, which deals with all the means we have for making meanings – the modes of representation - and considers their specific way of configuring the world. To make this concrete, here is a small example. Say I am designing a biology text-book. The subject matter is ‘plant-cells’. If I use words, I will have to say “Every cell has a nucleus”. If I use an image, I will need to place a large dot somewhere in the circle which indicates the cell to represent the nucleus (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Cell and nucleus





To reflect on this: in writing or speaking I have to use a sentence in which two entities – cell and nucleus – are related by a verb, have, indicating a possessive relation: the cell has something (much like: “I have a car, a house, two kids, etc”). I could use a different verb: “In every cell there is a nucleus”. The meaning is now quite different: about existence, there is and location, in. If I draw, I have to place a large dot representing the nucleus somewhere in a circle which represents the cell. Wherever I place it, someone looking at the image is entitled to assume that the nucleus actually is where I have placed it in the circle/cell – whether I intended to or not, or whether it actually belongs there or not. Each mode forces me into making certain kinds of commitments about meaning, intended or not. The choice of mode has profound effects on meaning, and textbook designers, for instance, need to be aware of such meaning effects of different modes.

Meanings are always disseminated through particular media: the medium of the book; or the medium of the CD-ROM, involving still and moving images, speech, writing, cartoon-like characters in comic strips, music, and so on. It might be the medium of the teacher’s body, involving speech, movement and gesture. All media offer specific possibilities to the designer, and to the reader/user in their reading and / or use.

The approach from Social Semiotics not only draws attention to the many kinds of meanings which are at issue in design, but the “social” in “Social Semiotics” draws attention to the fact that meanings always relate to specific societies and their cultures, and to the meanings of the members of those cultures. Semiotics takes the sign - a fusion of a form and a meaning – as its basic unit. In making signs we –embedded in our cultures - select forms in such a way that they expresses the meanings that we ‘have’ always ‘aptly’; hence signs always express, through their form, the meanings that the makers of signs have wished to make.

Take a simple example. I am in an American airport, looking for something to eat. I see a sign Bar and Grille, outlined in lurid red neon lights. Being hungry, I am attracted by “Grille”; I am aware that I am particularly drawn by the “e” on “Grille”. As a semiotician – even a hungry one – I wonder about this ”e”, in part because just the night before I have had a discussion with a colleague about how signs work. I order a brisket sandwich and think about this sign. What the “e” tells me is something about tradition and ‘Englishness’; it relates to many other signs I have seen where the “e” has had similar meanings, as in “Ye olde gifte shoppe”. And, even though I know it is a marketing gimmick, I want to be seduced by its meanings. Of course all the other parts of the sign also mean: the ‘Grill’ – with or without the “e” - speaks of barbeques, of the outdoors, of freshly cooked food. For the sauce I had the choice of mild, medium and make my day (- which I chose; and it did). “Bar” has its specific meanings for Americans reading the sign; and the lurid red neon sign of course ‘means’ to attract my attention, and maybe offer whatever promises ‘lurid red’, in the context of “Bar”, might hold.

All these are social meanings, specific to a particular culture. At the same time they are chosen, put together for their potential to mean, by the deliberate action of the designer. The sign - a complex message of words, of letters, of colour and font-types with all their cultural resonances - reflects the interests of its designer as much as the designer’s imagined sense of those who will see and read the sign. The sign is based on a specific rhetorical purpose, and intent to persuade with all means possible those who pass by and notice it.
Modes and their affordances: the materiality of modes
The kinds of meanings made by the letter “e”, by the word “Grille”, and by the colour “red” are different kinds of meanings. Not only do they mean different things, they mean differently. You can’t look up the meaning of “e”, nor the meaning of “lurid red”. What “e” does is not so much refer to some object, such as a Grill, or a Bar, but rather to evoke by cultural associations. It has a history of use in particular places (in ‘marketing speak’ for instance), and it is knowing its provenance that gives it its meaning. “e” puts me in the world of ‘Olde England’ with all its mythic associations. In one sense, colours work similarly: I have encountered the colour ‘red’ in many instances, as in “red light district”, as a colour of lipsticks: so in this context it is eroticized. Words have their histories, but they also refer; they name things (as nouns) or actions (as verbs) or attributes (as adjectives) or as relations of location (as prepositions), and so on.

One of the present tasks of a social semiotic approach to multimodality is to describe the potentials and limitations for meaning which inhere in different modes. For that, it is essential to consider the materiality of modes. Speech uses the material of (human) sound; writing uses the material of graphic substance. There are things you can do with sound that you cannot do with graphic substance, either easily or at all; not even imitate all that successfully graphically. The up and down of the voice, which produces the melody of (English) speech, makes many meanings, from straightforward questions to highly modulated ones: imagine saying, in a tone of incredulity, ”you did what?”; to many varying forms of emotion and affect. Even highly experienced writers find it impossible to reproduce these meanings in writing and need to take recourse to devices such as “… she said incredulously”. Maybe the major shift in the new landscape of communication in this respect lies in the increasing use of image, even in situations where previously writing would have been used. Consequently an urgent task is understanding the different affordances of writing and image.

In alphabetic cultures writing tends to start, in words, grammar and syntax, as the transcription of speech. It quickly develops its own structures and forms (syntax, punctuation, layout, for instance), so that written English is now very different to spoken English; yet writing does ‘lean on’ speech. Speech happens in time: one sound, one word, one sentence follows another. The ‘logic’ of temporal sequence is the major principle of ordering of languages such as English. Speech and writing are organized by the logic and the ordering principle of sequence in time. This underlies the syntax of English, which is enormously more complex than mere sequence, but is there nonetheless. If I have two simple sentences, such as:

The mists dissolved and the sun rose. It matters in what sequence I place them.
The sun rose and the mists dissolved is very different in meaning from
The mists dissolved and the sun rose.

The one tells us how weather works; the other puts us in the magical, mysterious world of Lord of the Rings maybe. Sequence implies causality: the sentence which comes first seems to be causally prior to that which comes after. But notice that that is so whether I want that meaning or not: I cannot but order them in some way. If I have two friends, Amanda and Josh, and they have jus got married, I might want to say either Amanda married Josh or Josh married Amanda; the two are different in causal terms – who was responsible for what. They are also different in terms of affective ‘proximity’: I may be closer to Amanda than to Josh, and so I place that person’s name first.

In speech as in writing we use words. Yet only that for which there is a word can be brought into communication: no word, no communication about it. In image, if there is something that we wish to depict, we can depict whatever we want. We don’t ask: ”Is there an appropriate image we can use?” Contrary to common sense assumptions about language, words are vague. You have no doubt fully understood the sentences about Josh and Amanda, yet you know very little about either of them: how tall Josh is, what age Amanda, what colour hair they have, and so on. If you saw a photo of them, or even a drawing, much of this would be clear. Words are (relatively) vague, often nearly empty of meanings; by contrast images are full, ‘plain’ with meaning. With image the placement of the depicted entities relative to one another in the image-space is the principle used for making meaning. Take the two images below, drawn by the then four year-old Georgia.

Figure 2a, 2b. Georgia at the side of her mother, and Georgia between her parents







The difference in meaning depends on the relation of the depicted entities to each other in the frame of the picture-space: the resultant difference in Georgia’s sense of herself and her family is an effect of these spatial relations. In drawing the materiality of sound is not available for making, to indicate just how ‘being’ Georgia’s parents seem to her, instead the affordance of space is used – making things taller or shorter, broader or thinner. In fact, Georgia was quite a bit taller than she drew herself here; and her father was quite a bit shorter than her mother. Size here shows the metaphoric use of vertical extension: Georgia sees her parents as affectively /psychically much taller than they actually were; and she makes her father seem as tall as her mother by ‘lifting him off the ground’ somewhat. That leaves aside the meanings of colour.

One further point needs to be mentioned here; it follows from the distinct ordering principles of the two modes. The written text – as indeed the spoken – forces the reader (and the listener) to stick to its order: the elements have to be read in the sequence in which they occur. That is not the case, or far less so, with the image text. Yes, the elements are there in certain spatial relations, but how the reader reconstitutes them is largely up to the reader. The order of the written text is fixed; the order of the image text is (relatively) open.

Media and their interrelation with modes
Modes and media exist in culturally and historically shaped ‘constellations’. The one that has dominated the alphabetic cultures of the ‘West’ over the last 300 years or so is that of mode of writing with medium of book and page. Writing as mode and book as medium have shaped western imagination, forms of knowledge, practices of reading; the technology of writing has shaped the book, and the technology of the book has shaped how writing has developed. The traditional book represented the work of the author, who had laboured to produce a text, which in its ordering represented a ‘body of knowledge’ or the shape of the world – whether fictional or actual. Chapters in the book were coherent and complete in themselves; paragraphs had their logic; and sentences derived their form and purpose from the organization of the paragraph and the larger text.

In that world the reader’s task was to attempt to follow the pre-given ordering of the written text, embodying the authority of the author, working assiduously to reproduce the meaning which the author had intended for the reader. In that world, authors could confidently speak and act on behalf of the reader, as did the author of the example in Figure 3, The Boy Electrician: “The prime instinct of almost any boy is to make and to create… At seven he will wire the whole house with his telephone system made from empty tins connected with varying lengths of string. His older brother will improve on that by purchasing a crystal, a telephone receiver, and a few pieces of insulated copper wire…” (p 5)
Figure 3. Spread from “The Boy Electrician”



Certain texts – novels for instance – encourage the reader to engage in the semiotic work of imagination, following the given order of words on the line but filling the relatively ‘empty’ words with the reader’s meaning. Contemporary texts - whether information books of all kinds, web-pages, the screens of CD ROMs, and so on - in their increasingly often image-like textual organization, ask the reader to perform different semiotic work, namely to design the order of the text for themselves. Consequently two phenomena are now becoming noticeable, as in Figure 4, which had been present but never noticed before: the entry point of the ‘page’ and its reading path.
Figure 4. Home page of the University of London Institute of Education (www.ioe.ac.uk)

The page of The Boy Electrician has one entry point, at the top left of the page; it had long become naturalized and therefore was no longer visible. Nor was the reading path: it asked the reader to follow the lines, in the order in which the culture had determined. The page/screen in Figure 4 has, by contrast, about 13 entry points. The reader interest determines where he or she wishes to enter the page. The same applies to the ‘reading path’ which the reader (now usually called a ‘visitor’) wishes to construct: it too is determined by the reader’s interest.

For design this is a crucial factor, and a profound change. The designer of such ‘pages’ / sites is no longer the ‘author’ of an authoritative text, but is a provider of material arranged in relation to the assumed characteristics of the imagined audience. The power of the designer is to assemble materials which can become ‘information’ for the visitor, in arrangements which might correspond to the interests of the visitor. For the visitor however “Information is material which is selected by individuals to be transformed by them into knowledge to solve a problem in their life world” (Boeck, 2002)

Making texts and reading texts
In the conception outlined here, the processes of making texts and reading texts are both are processes of design; and both are in important sense inversions of the social and semiotic arrangements of the era of the dominance of the constellation of writing and book. It has now been overtaken by the new constellation of image and screen. The (at least mythically) dominant media are now those of the screen - whether of the Gameboy, the mobile telephone, the PC, or still the TV and video. The book and its page had been the site of writing and the logic of writing had shaped the order of the page and the book; the screen is the site of the image and the logic of the image is shaping the order and the arrangements of the screen.

Writing can appear on the screen; but when it does it is subordinated to the logic of the image; just as image could appear on the page, though subordinated to the logic of writing. The logic image will more and more shape the appearance and the uses of writing, a process which is already apparent in many instances of public communication. In the former arrangement, the figure of the author and the mode of writing dominated; in the new arrangements the designer and the mode of image dominate; the story-board is an apt metaphor for this change - image led, and very often the product of a design-team.
Design as choice in context
In the multimodal landscape of communication, choice and therefore design become central issues. If I have a number of ways of expressing and shaping my message, then the questions that confront me are: which mode is best, most apt, for the content / meaning I wish to communicate? Which mode most appeals to the audience whom I intend to address? Which mode most corresponds to my own interest at this point in shaping the message for communication? Which medium is preferred by my audience? Or by me? How am I positioning myself if I choose this medium or this mode rather than those others? All of these call for choices to be made, resting on my assessment of the environment in which communication takes place, in all its complexity, in its widest sense, in which a commodity – the smell of my shampoo, the packaging of the bag of flour, the shape of the bottle of soft-drink – are all ‘messages’ to interpret. The question of choice is illustrated by the contrast of say, Figure 3 with Figure 4, or of Figure 3 with Figure 5.
Figure 5. Visual geography-tectonics

The page in Figure 3 is the realization of choices – of stylistic choices in relation to writing, choices of font (though for any one publishing house there might not have been choice), the framings of the text through syntax (marked by punctuation) and in text (marked by paragraphing, for instance), and by layout in spacings, as well as the frame around the ‘densely printed page’ (Reading Images, 1996). However, these choices had nearly faded into invisibility through the two aspects of habituation and convention. By contrast, the page in Figure 5 shows a plethora of choices made and realized through the modes of writing, layout, colour, and image.

Design is a prospective enterprise. The question it asks is: “what, in this environment, with this kind of audience, with these resources that are available for implementing my design, given these social, economic, ‘political’ constraints, and with my interests now at this moment, is the best way of shaping that which I wish to make, whether as ‘message’ or as any object (of design)?” Here, briefly, are two examples, showing choices made and interests expressed. Figure 6 is the result of the request of the teacher of a class of six year-olds to “make me a drawing and write me a story of our trip to the British museum.”
Figure 6. Notes from a trip to the British Museum

The different ‘take’ on the representation of the day in writing and drawing is startling (all the images and stories showed this contrast): salient object-entities in spatial relation in the visually represented world, contrasted with salient events/actions in temporal relations. We might dismiss this as childish representation. Or we might say that these six-year olds are using the two modes of writing and image in line with their inherent affordances – the (transformed) recollection of the visually encountered world through the spatially organized mode; and the (transformed) recollection of the actionally experienced world through the temporally organized mode. If we take that approach we see that the children have made apt use of the affordances of each mode. The facts of the representational world are certainly moving in the same direction.

In the next example two modes co-exist in one integrated textual object, the question is the same one: what are the principles for the use the modes (the question of “principled use” can and needs to be asked of all my examples). At the end of four lessons on ‘plant cells’, the teacher had asked the 14 year old students, working in groups of four, to prepare a slide of the epidermis of an onion, look at it through a microscope, and then “write what you did” and “draw what you saw”.
Figure 7a, 7b. Eye-piece of the microscope, and Cells as a “brick wall”

The teacher had given two additional instructions: ”put your writing at the top of the page, and the drawing at the bottom”, and “use only black pencils in your drawing”. Apart from the different responses to this instruction (7 b used colour pencils) there is the startling difference in what each “saw” and what each wrote. One written text is a recount, the other a procedure. The recount, generically speaking, says: “this is what happened”; the procedure, generically speaking, says: “this is what ought to happen”. The drawings differ equally profoundly. One declares “this is what theory tells us is the case” (on a worksheet there had been a comment “what you should see is something like a brick wall; each cell is a brick”); the other declares “this is what I actually observed and recorded”. The first is the "truth" of theory; the second is the "truth" of the empirical, reliably recorded.

The question of design is in the center here. The matter at issue is of course ‘plant cells’; but maybe even more than that it is: ”what is it to be scientific?” In each case the answer is broadly the same (though differently realized modally): “to be scientific is to adhere to the "truth" of theory”. In Figure 7 a, the student lodges the "truth" of the facts of the empirical world in the drawing, and the "truth" of theory through the replicability of scientific practice in the written text. In Figure 7 b, the student lodges the "truth" of scientific theory in the drawing, and the "truth" of actual practice in the written. In each case event-like representation uses the mode of writing; and the representation of object-entities is lodged in drawing.
Design as a part of rhetoric of communication
The contemporary social world is marked by increasing fragmentation and individuation (Beck, 1986); in stark contrast to the world of the 19th and early 20th century, the world of stable structures and of individual integration and definition in those structures. Strong frames, and integration into strong frames had their analogues in communication through stable genres, and through stable modal ‘choices’. In periods of stability the question of effective communication is answered by the idea of convention and of competent action in relation to those conventions. In periods of fragmentation and individuation communication is fraught: each environment of communication asks that social and ‘political’ relations, tastes, needs and desires be newly assessed. The question of rhetoric – how to make my communication most effective in relation to this audience, here and now - has moved newly, urgently into the center. Rhetoric has become a major issue for design.
Bibliography Kress, G.R. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. London: RoutledgeFalmer
Kress, G.R. and van Leeuwen, T. (1996). Reading Images: the grammar of graphic design. London: Routledge
Kress, G.R. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2002). Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. London: Edward Arnold
Jewitt, C. and G.R. Kress (eds) (2003). Multimodal Literacie. New York: Peter Lang
Burn, A. and Parker, D. (2003). Analysing media texts. London: Continuum
Gunther Kress

Gunther Kress is professor of Education/English at the Institute of Education, University of London. He has a specific interest in the interrelations in contemporary texts of different modes of communication - writing, image, speech, music - and their effects on forms of learning and knowing. He is interested in the changes - and their effects and consequences - brought by the shift in the major media of communication from the page to the screen. Some of his recent publications are: Reading Images: the grammar of graphic design; Before Writing: rethinking the paths to literacy; (both published by Routledge); Multimodal teaching and learning: the rhetorics of the Science Classroom (Continuum); Multimodal Discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication (Edward Arnold); and Literacy in the New Media Age (Routledge).
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漂洋上海 陳期 藝術有什麼用

2010年5月13日

今年五十三歲的蔡國強，以他獨特的火藥草圖和裝置藝術，成為國際當代藝術圈認知度最高的中國藝術家之一，他的作品在各大拍賣行屢屢拍出天價，用最庸俗的說法，是名成利就了，所以我並沒有預期他是這樣平實的人。看起來比實際年輕，穿風褸、卡其褲，一臉陽光笑容。

他介紹自己的創作經歷，提及一個火藥爆破習作，他坐在一塊空地上，醫學儀器監測着他的心跳和腦電波，他保持着平靜，如腳下的大地一樣沉穩，然後，他預先裝置好的火藥爆炸，儀器顯示，他的心跳腦電波和大地同一頻率震動。他在這時候回歸大地，和自然成為一體。

有時他要收起自己，做很自我的創作，有時他又希望展示自己給很多人看，所以他策劃一些大型活動。他說自己就是這樣時內時外，忽左忽右，亦中亦西。

一方面他會為自己有所成就，並可以幫助他人而高興，一方面他又覺得成就這東西很虛。一般人早上起來知道自己那一天會做什麼，但他就漫無目的。在他演說時，他的助手兼傳譯把他作品的拍賣價七千萬元說成是七十萬，他笑說，少一兩個零會覺得比較安全。

說到批評政府，會場突然斷電，米高風嘎然靜默，全場人都在調笑會場裏是不是有監聽。器材修復，他不忘幽一默，說這不過是技術故障，有時候我們也要負起責任，不能一味責怪政府。

我並不認為他這樣的觀點模稜兩可，態度騎牆，我反而樂見一個藝術家這樣充滿人性，在庸俗世界中遊刃有餘，一點沒顯得曲高和寡。

這可能和他個人在不同文化中的生活經歷有關，蔡國強出生在福建，在上海學舞台設計，一九八六年去了日本，開始了他的爆破藝術習作，一九九五年移居紐約。

蔡國強說，藝術可以表達自己的感情，也可啟發他人，我還覺得，藝術之偉大在於可以令人思想更深刻，而胸懷更開闊。

「蔡國強：農民達芬奇」要表現在集體意願和集體行為以外的這些農民個體的創造力。集體和個人，看似矛盾，其實也並非相生相剋。

世博已經開幕了，你一定看到不少混亂場面，然後尖刻地批判，以中國的國民素質，這是意料中事。你可能覺得世博會只是另一個國際笑話，不值得看。

但是你也可以想想，像蔡國強這樣的個體，作品中宣洩着傳統藝術和社會制度的壓抑，搞個農民創作展覽看似和世博唱反調，卻又獲邀策劃亞太高峰會和奧運等官方活動。

你可以並且應該繼續批判，因為這樣的批判在推動着某種進步，很有必要。但置身在這個社會中，我又不由得感到一點安慰，上海有世博，同時也有「農民達芬奇」，包容性正在逐漸擴大，這就是改變，而且看似方向正確。就算你不來看世博，至少也值得來看看這種改變。

Why artists are turning to video as a medium

Jonathan Brooks-Jones explores a burgeoning art form

Artes Mundi is a biennial competition that showcases the work of emerging artists from around the world. It celebrates art that discusses the human condition and/or the human form. Within that broader area of interest each individual competition, or ‘cycle’, has a central theme that links the artworks. Two new selectors are enlisted each time, who determine each cycle’s theme. This year, its fourth, the selectors are curators Viktor Misiano from Russia and Levent Çalikoğlu from Turkey. Both have a keen interest in political art, and a belief in its capacity to encourage debate. This year, the theme is migration and social mobility, although many others permeate the works, such as globalisation, and the fall of communism.

From over 500 nominations, Misiano and Çalikoğlu short-listed eight artists. A new panel of independent judges from around the world is selected each year, made up of artists, art historians, critics, theorists and curators. The winner of the £40,000 prize will be announced on the 19 May. It is the largest arts prize in the UK and is dedicated to providing a platform for emerging artists.

While there are paintings, drawings and photographic works, it is video art that has the most gallery space. This has drawn a mixed reaction from the public, many of whom complain that there is ‘too much video’.

This might have been expected, but it does seem a little odd that people aren’t excited about the chance to experience what is to many a new art form. In fact it’s not even that new. Video art has existed in the contemporary form since the 1960s, and in other forms even longer. However, the Welsh audience is rarely exposed to it, as there is a lack of modern art galleries in Wales. Video art can be difficult to interpret for one who is not acquainted with it, so I will here try to explain some of the central ideas explored in video art, and why artists are turning to video as a medium.

A common objection is that the artist could have or should have made a movie instead. It is true that artists could make movies instead, but why should they? It is not the sole right of movie-makers in Hollywood and such places to use the medium of film, and it has always been a part of artistic creation to take advantage of new technologies and ways of working. In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of video art is its capacity to deconstruct our experience and understanding of moving images on a screen, making us think about how we view television and movies.

Most people are well acquainted with the protocol of visiting the cinema. You sit in your seat, watch the film and keep quiet until the end, when you are once again allowed to talk and move around. While you are entitled to leave whenever you like, there is a tendency to sit it out to the end and ‘get your moneys worth’. Video art, on the other hand, grants the viewer much more freedom.

Bulgarian Ergin Çavuşoğlu is one of the short-listed artists whose work deconstructs our understanding of video and film. He takes up the theme of migration and boundaries in two pieces, Voyage of No Return and Liminal Crossing. The former uses five screens, which are separated, placed at different heights with one placed on the floor, facing up and angled slightly towards the viewer. The central screen features the dialogue and beneath it is the fifth screen, with Welsh subtitles projected onto it.

This film is about migration and questions surrounding identification with a particular place, and seeing it as ‘home’. Voyage of No Return was filmed on location on Oban, an island historically used as a pit-stop when travelling on to the Hebrides, or back to mainland Scotland. Migration is therefore a key part of the island’s history and character. Here, the method of splitting the film onto different screens is used to establish locality, and to try and capture the atmosphere of Oban. This fragmentation of the screens encourages the viewer to interact with the work, perhaps walking up close to a screen and blocking the shaft of light, causing a silhouette, thus in some way becoming a part of the piece. In previous exhibitions he has projected the film directly onto the floor, so the audience can literally walk through it.

One of the interesting aspects in his other piece, Liminal Crossing, is the use of sound. In this film, a group pushes a piano across the Captain Andreevo border between Bulgaria and Turkey. The video is projected onto two screens, which face each other at a 45 – 90 degree angle, with a gap where the two edges meet. The only sound to be heard is that of the wheels turning as the piano is pushed along. This, coupled with the absence of human voices chatting, points to the sombre and somewhat lonely atmosphere. This use of diagetic sound adds realism, and in turn, tension to the piece. This contrasts with his use of a musical score in Voyage of No Return.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the soundtrack is his use of reflections. The purpose of the gap between the two screens is to encourage the viewer to walk behind the screens where only the soundtrack is perceptible. If we venture deep enough into the empty space, we hear the sound as it hits the back wall and reflect back to our ears. This amounts to a rather strange and unique sensation, one rarely experienced outside an acousmatic music event.

Here, Çavuşoğlu is at once deconstructing our understanding of video and film (which really is a post-modern pass-time), and also reforming an idea that has been in circulation since the impressionists, that of light and its reflective qualities.

In all art, light must first of all play a physical, and perhaps rather obvious role, in that it enables us to see the works in the first place. This is true in painting and other forms of art, but its role is extended in video art. Light must first hit the subject, reflect into the artist’s eye and the lens of the camera. Light is then shone through the film in order to project the image onto the screen. From there it is reflected into the eyes of the audience. As with the impressionists, the importance of light has taken on a role of conceptual importance, in which the art comes to discuss light.

For example, Per Speculum by Albanian artist Adrian Paci, draws our attention to the importance of light. In the final, wide-angle shot, a group of children sit in amongst the branches of a tree and use the broken pieces of a mirror to reflect the sunlight back to the camera. This draws our attention to the distance travelled by light, especially in video art. Paci also draws our attention to the projector, a unique feature of video art. He does this by using a particularly old-fashioned and noisy one (however, against the artist’s intentions, for health and safety reasons it had to be sealed in a metal box, thus trapping much of its sound).

The importance of light and the projector may also be seen in Çavuşoğlu’s choice of where to mount the plaque with his name and title of the work (Voyage…). It is placed on the wall onto which the projectors are mounted. This suggests that the projector, and the role it performs, is of equal importance to the installation as a whole.

For many, video and film seems too commercial, because we are so used to it being used for commercial purposes such as adverts, television, movies and music videos. While some of these may be termed ‘artistic’, video art’s focus is directed exclusively on the artistic capacity of video.

Part of video art’s power comes from the fact that we are so used to seeing video and film in other forms. This means that when we are asked to look at video as an artistic form, and it contains images we are not expecting, the effect is automatically, at first, surreal. Imagine tuning into the Chris Moyles show and hearing the music of Arnold Schoenberg! Hearing music without a tonal centre is likely to be a new and unsettling experience for the average Radio 1 listener in any case, but it is doubly surprising because that is the last place one would expect to hear atonal music. Similarly, we are so used to the kind of content normally contained on video, that when we see something more artistic and adventurous than, say, Coronation Street or Big Brother, it tends to shock. This gives video art added depth of impact.

As Çavuşoğlu demonstrates with his experimental approach, one thing video art does is reference other forms, styles and techniques. In a sense this makes them ‘antique’. The new, reformed use of an old style can bring us a new awareness of it. Previously we just took it for granted and didn’t normally think about where it had come from, it simply exists. When something is presented to us again, and we are asked to look at it afresh, we tend to understand it differently.

While some artists dispense with the use of a narrative plot, others make use of a reformed narrative style in order to get their point across. Israeli artist, Yael Bartana, makes use of narrative form in her piece Wall and Tower, which is, in my opinion, one of the strongest pieces at this year’s Artes Mundi. This piece, which is the second in a trilogy, raises questions about nationalism and Zionism by depicting the construction of a kibbutz (which has a striking resemblance to a concentration camp) in what used to be the Warsaw ghetto. The film opens with a speech written and delivered by (real-life left-wing activist and campaigner) Slawomir Sierakowski, calling all Jews to return to Poland.

This piece is one of the most thorough and comprehensive works in the exhibition, in which each part bears the weight of the whole. The enlistment of a real-life political activist, the use of propaganda film styles, through to the printing and supplication of the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland’s manifesto, as well as instructions on how to build a wall and tower like the one in the film. The artist’s instructions are to ‘take and distribute’, adding yet another layer to an already complex piece. It is also interesting because the movement did not exist before the first film had been made, and Bartana apparently did not even intend to start the movement by creating this artwork. She was merely trying to “ask questions, not tell people what to think”. A likely story! In any case, those questions are being raised, about nationalism, Zionism, the situation in Israel and Palestine, and also Poland (an interesting blog about the Polish reaction to this piece can be read here).

This film makes use of cinematic, documentary, and propaganda film techniques. It is a highly effecting piece, due to the polished acting and musical soundtrack, featuring the triumphant sounding Polish national anthem. The use of cinematic formulae probably makes it easier to digest for the uninitiated, while the content remains highly engaging and requires the viewer to keep watching in order to see where it is going. This is also an example, by the way, of a film that probably should be seen all the way through in order to fully appreciate the meaning, which is not immediately given to the viewer on a plate, but is slowly teased out as the events unfold.

Another idea at work in video art is the performative aspect. Considering a piece of video as a performance raises the question of which part, exactly, does the art consist in – is it the subject? The film of the subject? The (temporary) projection of the film? Which part is valuable? Is it the film itself, or the moment at which it is projected onto a screen? Is the screening to be considered a ‘performance’?

Video art differs from other forms of art because paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings etc. are physically there, mounted on the wall, or placed on a stand or otherwise. Of course, a projected video is in some way ‘physically’ there, but in a different way, it is, rather, the projection of something which has happened before that has been captured on film, and is not actually happening any more. Note the difference between this and a play or performance art piece, which are viewed as they happen.

Artists have always been interested in the elements that are unique to a particular form of art. For example, sculpture has the greatest capacity for three-dimensional work. However, it is also interesting that some painters have taken their work in a three-dimensional direction. Expressionist painter Frank Auerbach layers oil paints onto the canvas in thick measure (‘impasto’), thus creating works that have a three-dimensional quality. This links in with the earlier point about the practice of reforming other styles, which much modern art is concerned with.

So, for artists making video, the materials that are unique to them are movement and time. No other art form has the capacity to explore those materials in quite the same way. Performance art, of course, features movement, and is often referred to as ‘time-based art’. However, video has a greater control over these materials, as video can be sped up or slowed down to any degree. An interesting example in which this is done is the film See you later / Au Revoir, by Michael Snow, in which a 30 second interaction is slowed down to last twelve minutes. Video art has a somewhat stronger hold over the manipulation of time as a material than performance art. However, performance artists have a stronger hold on the performative aspect, which video art sometimes tries to incorporate, as touched on above.

Finally, something must be said about the political nature of much of the work at this year’s Artes Mundi. It was suggested during one of the lunchtime tours, that the serious political nature of many of the pieces makes it difficult for those who are new to video art to get the most out of them. The fact that it overwhelms some may be taken to show that video is worthy of political art, in that it has the capacity to convey the seriousness and magnitude of social and political problems, themselves often overwhelming.

The crucial point to make here is that for political art to be successful in raising awareness and encouraging debate, it must refuse to offer any resolution. If a work of art has a political impetus, and that political issue remains unresolved, the film must end without having supplied resolution. If a film supplies resolution, it makes it far easier for the viewer to walk away and forget all about it.

Many of the pieces at the Artes Mundi resist the supplication of resolution. In particular, Taiwanese artist Chen Chieh-jen’s work features the staunchest resistance to resolution, and is unlikely to leave the viewer’s conscience for some time once it has been absorbed. His films entitled Empire’s Borders 1 & 2, feature women from Taiwan telling the stories of how their husbands have been detained for no good reason whilst traveling to in and out of Taiwan. There is no resolution, because the men are still detained, and their wives have no idea when they will see them again. Bartana’s work also resists the supplication of resolution, partly due to the fact that the final part of the trilogy is yet to have been made. It will be interesting to see how the final installment turns out.

In conclusion, we have seen that there are a great number of ideas at work in this burgeoning art form. We can see that it is valid, not least because it has often been thoroughly worked and reworked at all stages from conception to production to screening. Avant-garde film is almost always designed to confront the viewer, who is often forced to concentrate and think about what it is they’re viewing.

It is also important to remember that as it is a new form, there is an element of experimentation to video art. This can cause problems, such as the overflow of sound between pieces in close proximity to one another. The worst case of this at the Artes Mundi is that the soundtrack from Wall and Tower can be heard when one is watching Chieh-jen’s other piece, Factory, which is meant to be a silent film. However, I would say that while this is unfortunate, it is perhaps to be expected, as the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff was never designed to exhibit video works, and was not purpose built to prevent such overspill. It is also indicative of something larger and more exciting happening in the world of art, the growth of something that feels like a new form.

The public’s unfavourable reaction may be put down to a general reluctance to appreciate something new and crucially, unfamiliar. In a world where we are bombarded with the eternal sameness of mainstream art, music, theatre and film it can be difficult for people to accept something more or less unprecedented in their cultural experience. It requires more ‘cultural capital’, to use Bourdieu’s phrase, than dominant mainstream culture provides us. However, the galleries were busy on many of the occasions that I visited. This is down to the good work of the Artes Mundi association, which no-doubt encourages interest in the avant-garde.

Indeed, as a burgeoning art form video is conceptually and aesthetically rich. It provides the artist with unique opportunities to experiment with a vast array of elements: screen, soundtrack, projector, content, style, and others. While it may require a little more effort to unravel the meaning of a piece, it can be a highly rewarding and unique experience, one that is likely to become easier the more often we’re exposed to it. It is helpful, therefore, that Artes Mundi employs a team of ‘live guides’ who have met the artists and discussed the pieces with them. They act as the link between the artist and the public that is all-too-often missing from modern art galleries. They provide a valuable insight into the meaning and history behind the works.
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Tags: Artes Mundi, cinema, Deconstruction, Ergin Cavusoglu, Impressionism, Migration and Social Mobility, performance art, Video art, Yael Bartana

Jonathan Brooks-Jones is an intern with the IWA

本地文化遊記

本地文化遊記（一）：Fotanian 2008
週一, 2008-01-28 12:07 — Self

上星期參觀了兩個不同藝術活動，一是深港雙城雙年展於中區警署群舉辦的“再織城市“，另一為伙炭藝術工作室開放計劃--“Fotanian 2008“。感覺很不同，第一當然因為兩者為不同類形的活動，第二因為參觀的目的不同。因著不同的參觀目的，對於兩個活動，我產生了不同的體會。今次我希望集中講述對伙炭的感受。

整個火炭藝術村開放計劃中，有七幢工業大廈內的工作室參加展覽。工作室主要分佈於華聯及華樂兩幢工業大廈，而其他工作室則零散地分佈於其餘五幢大廈，主要只有一至兩間工作室在其他工業大廈裡開放。開放計劃在一月的第二及第三個週末及週日舉行，每天開放時間為下午二時至晚上八時。

繼續被邊緣化的工作室

其間大會會安排導賞團帶領參觀者參觀。但大部份人都是“自由行“，如果參觀者只抱著“行逛“的心態去參觀，當然能夠一天六小時內完成整個參觀，但問題是，參觀者中的確有很多人仔細觀賞作品，而他們用六小時（包括休息時間）只能完成於一至兩幢工業大廈內的參觀。而大部份人亦會選擇由華聯、華樂兩幢開始 “掃 “下去，最終導致其他工業大廈內的藝術工作室被邊緣化。我（持著仔細觀察的態度）在第一天用了三小時，也只能完成參觀大半幢華聯工業大廈的工作室，因為太累之故，決定要截返歸家。對，開放計劃開放整整四天，如果一天看不完，不可以第二天再看嗎？可以的，我相信總有人採取這種方法，但問題在於香港人的時間未必這般充裕: 今天能夠濟出時間，明天未必可以; 故此，這邊緣化問題亦會持續。

主辦機構應與參展團體共同商討解決這種持續的邊緣化的問題。因為不能夠移動藝術租戶的緣故，主辦機構可巧慮投放更多資源或尋找贊助，鼓勵大眾參觀被邊緣化的工業大廈；例如設計儲印章計劃，鼓勵參觀人士盡量完成整個展覽，然後以小小的大會紀念品送給參觀人士。所有方法都有其不足之處，雖然此舉可能會改變了他們的參觀目的，但這方法不排除人們為了拿紀念品而可能會越行越有興趣，忘記了本身為了拿紀念品的目的，而認真的參觀起來。

藝術繼續無界

另外，我發覺這次開放日中有些得意的現象：工作室的背景音樂。在參觀過程中，不難發現藝術家喜歡播一些柔和的音樂：由輕民謠至爵士，甚至藍調和輕板的靈魂都是他們的選擇。這很合理，如果行蘇豪區的畫廊，他們大致上都是播這類型音樂，令整個氣氛除了變得悠閒舒暢外，亦不禁增強那種說不出的高雅；感覺很 high class。如果蘇豪區是法國社會學大師Pierre Bourdieu 所認為--文化活動和品味生活因為人民的等級產生階層化的呈現，那麼整體上的火炭藝術村則為抹掉這種階層意識的粉刷；低下街層的地理位置，彈性高的說話聲調，沒有裝煌的藝術室，及歡迎各方人仕的包容量，配上蘇豪區所用的音樂，實在是一種mix and match。把難明的高雅文化帶到普羅大眾裡。有些工作室更走前衛路線，它們播放的是K 場，的士高所選的remixes。一邊參觀一邊有超remixed版（節奏快而激）Celine Dion的”All By My Self”，另有一番感覺。

多樣化的工作空間

其中一幢工業大廈的頂層的工作室為一位較知名的藝術家的藝術室。不知是有意或無意，該名藝術家的地點位於叉燒工場旁邊。一門之隔，分別是頂香卻油膩的叉燒工場及格調一流的工作室，就像到了雲咸街的畫樓般的工作室。筆者不是要貶低叉燒工場，但它確實不經意地反襯出該工作室的高尚。
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比較陰暗的樓層盡頭有一間別樹一格的工作室

再下幾層，有法籍本地藝術家的工作室。同樣，其工作室都是裝修得很美麗，優雅；這是因為該工作室是被買下的，故值得花錢把其裝修一下。在那個展覽中，我見到在法國人眼中的中國，雖然眼光是奇異的，卻奇妙得真實。發展中的中國及新舊交替的中國文化，雖然對我們來說是很熟悉，熟悉得不太察覺，但就是由外國人那種奇異的眼光表達出來，重新被察覺出來。

再下再下，就是一大班年輕藝術家，走出學校，到這裡建造新天地的一群。他們很有活力，他們的作品亦很有力量，題材大膽但不失感情。我訪問了一位陳姓的女年輕藝術家，她的最新作品其中一樣為人般高大的毛織衛生巾。據陳小姐透露，她希望透過衛生巾作為一種容器，去看生命，而該作品其實是她的衛生巾作品的第三部，之前已在學校做過陶製和青銅製的衛生巾。她認為以往的作品質感上（texture）比較硬，而感覺上亦比較冷。製作這第三部作品則一反以往的作品的特點，質為軟，感為暖，所表達的是作者對母愛的珍重。雖然題材敏感，卻流露濃厚的感情，更啟發不斷的思考性。年青一輩的藝術家雖未必有年長一輩的經驗及知名度，卻冒著失敗的機會，願意作破傳統的嘗試，可見年青藝術家有著等待被發掘的勇氣，難能可貴。
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陳小姐與她的衛生巾作品

P.S.: 我不知道下年會否再有這個開放日，如果有的話，到時我會反轉參觀的次序，由下面向上走：P

工廈加租 藝術家工作室 In or Out？

2008/01/04
RE: 香港經濟日報 C05 專題 By 蕭曉華 2008-01-10

　　沙士前後、地產市道最低迷期間，得一批清貧藝術家進駐，因工業北移而日漸沒落的火炭工廠區，才不致於完全被人遺忘。
　　藝術家工作室數目增加，漸漸形成規模，藝術家自發組織的「伙炭藝術工作室開放計劃」，亦成為一年一度藝壇大事。
　　近期，地產市道再度熾熱起來，火炭工業區的業主亦乘勢大幅加租。
　　面臨重新洗牌的火炭工廈，將來還有沒有藝術家立錐之地？
　　據土地註冊處最新資料顯示，07 年首 7 個月共有 4,290 份買賣合約，比 06 年同期的 3,687 份增加16.4%，數字亦高於 96 年至 03 年每年總數。這些數字反映工廈市場持續交投理想，中原集團副主席黎明楷分析：「住宅和商廈投資市況熱烈，投資氣氛良好，帶動工廈的需求、價格上升。」

藝術租客

　　位處新界的火炭工廠區，因較偏遠，周邊亦暫未有完善的社區設備，仍屬全港最平的工廈物業。不過，其租金和賣價一樣要加。
　　近半年，該區工廈租金和賣價的升幅分別約為 15% 和 20%，「賣價升幅較大，顯示市場樂觀。最明顯的是，不少業主為大廈翻新，把大堂都裝修成商廈般靚，以吸引投資者。」中原地產新界工商舖助理營業董事張志傑說。
　　工業北移，工廈使用者亦隨之轉型。該區近年成為物流（即平價倉）、電子和化工業的工業陣地。叫人估不到的，是近年藝術家的進駐。 　　　　
　　記者自稱藝術家到附近的地產舖問價，發現經紀對藝術家租客的要求瞭如指掌，「你係一個人用，定同其他藝術家夾租？13 呎高樓底、較平的華聯單位比較適合，可惜無盤。11、12 呎樓底的地方有無興趣？」

「臭味相投」

　　「過去幾年，我們每月租金平均約 $4,300，今年業主突然提出加價到 $7,500，最後還價至 $6,300 。」藝術家周俊輝和關尚智說。與火炭差不多同時期出現藝術家工作室的觀塘工廈，亦面對加租問題，租金約由 $4,000 加至 $5,000。一比較，今年火炭工廈租金的加幅實在令人咋舌。
　　周俊輝和關尚智屬近年藝術圈冒起得較快的一群，自 04 年開始，他們與另一位中大藝術系同學遷入火炭華聯工業大廈，夾租一個面積約 1,200 平方呎的單位（「615 工作室」），進行油畫、裝置及概念藝術創作。
　　因樓齡高，華聯簡陋殘舊、黑黑沉沉，不時傳來燒臘和腸粉魚蛋的氣味。
　　「這裏是全區樓價最平之處，亦有不少從事食品加工的租戶。它不能轉型為工貿大廈，因商業租客不接受這種環境。」中原的張志傑解釋。
　　工廈地方「污糟邋遢、無厘貴格」，卻合晒藝術家合尺，「它地方大、樓底高、租金平。」受訪者不約而同地說。03 年沙士爆發，樓市下滑，造就這班初出道、「清貧型」租客「趁低吸納」的關鍵時刻。
　　當年，一個千多呎的單位，租金約為三四千元，賣價亦不超過 30 萬元（今年已升至 70 多萬元）。
　　「當時我剛畢業，藝術前景還很模糊，如果沒有這地方讓藝術家堅持理想，或許有人早已放棄創作。」關尚智說。如今華聯已聚集約 26 個工作室，其他工廈則有約 8 個。
　　「大家沒有夾定聚在一起，工作室分散不同位置，偶然碰面才傾偈。」周俊輝每日留在工作室的時間頗多，因他的作品多為 2 米乘 3 米以上的巨畫，作畫需時，「中午肚餓，便到工廈內的茶餐廳吃 23
蚊一客的經濟午餐，好方便。」
　　另一租客「水獺工作室」的藝術家黃慧妍則說：「隔籬家俬廠位先生好好人，有時鐵閘壞，會幫我修理。」

遷出，搬入

　　業主大幅加租，周俊輝和關尚智如何打算？兩人考慮各有不同。
　　周俊輝部署作「個人發展」，最近他以 79 萬元購入華聯一個 1,200 平方呎的單位。「發展到今日，作品逐漸走進藝術市場，收入有一定保障。我考慮到長期支付租金的錢，日後也夠買一個單位。曾留意不同區的工廈，始終認為火炭的價錢、環境較合適。」
　　關尚智則準備在租約期滿後遷出火炭，另覓新址。從事概念藝術的他表示，他的創作不一定要用上大空間。他在即將於本周六開幕的本年度「伙炭藝術工作室開放計劃」中展示的作品，只是一張寫「3 年內不賣作品」的 A4 紙。另外，亦由於他的創作動機不是賣作品，買家亦不多，所以他不想承擔昂貴租金。
　　港台節目《四維賣藝》主持人羅文樂，是華聯的前租客，對於逐漸形成的火炭藝術區即將面臨商業挑戰，有這樣的評論：「藝術有很多面向，有些較能迎合藝術市場，有些因較具爭議性或搗蛋，未必有買家。火炭加租某程度上是 taste dictating，篩走某類藝術家，影響該區多元的藝術發展。」
　　黃慧妍對加租表現得逆來順受，「可找多幾個租客夾租」，她使用的千多呎工作室，現由 7 人分租。
　　不過，這批最初「發展」火炭的藝術家，無論未來決定去或留，過去幾年他們在這區營造的藝術氣氛和建立起的形象，已慢慢發揮作用，吸引其他藝術單位遷入。
　　本地著名畫廊漢雅軒，兩年前亦於華聯購入單位。職員 Loretta 說：「本想用這地方與藝術家交流，所以入來湊熱鬧。」現單位用作存畫的貨倉。
　　兩個月前，比利時人 Sara Van Ingelgom 亦在華聯開設畫廊 Blue Lotus Gallery，單位的裝修非常優雅舒適。「我對火炭一見鍾情。相對在中環設畫廊，在這裏策劃展覽的彈性較大，因沒有太大的資金壓力，亦不必引入迎合市場的主流藝術。」

藝術影響樓價？

　　07 年至今，火炭約有 5 個藝術工作室遷出，6 個搬入。「搬入的多為經濟能力較高的藝術單位，專業與非專業的都有，亦有建築與設計界人士。」藝評人梁展峰說。
　　看來加租使這區出現了一場小型的洗牌效應。連續舉辦了幾年的「伙炭藝術工作室開放計劃」，參觀人數逐年上升，由初期的千多人到去年增至近萬人，藝術或藝術家的進駐對該區的人氣實有正面作用，但又有沒有能力影響這區的地產價格？
　　「成個火炭工廠區有過千個單位，藝術租戶只有數十個，不足以構成影響。」在該區營商的廠家Charles Drapers 說。
　　「藝術家死了，作品才值錢。以藝術帶動或以支持藝術來影響樓價，方式似乎太迂迴。」中原的黎明楷說。
　　「藝術家租客從事創作，並非進行商業活動。除非有從商的展覽製作單位遷入，推動經濟效益。」梁展峰說。
　　不過，藝術帶來的人氣始終屬「利好因素」。「今年在華聯放出的單位好少，估計是業主看到這『藝術潛力』，暫不放盤。」中原的張志傑說。
　　「像『615 工作室』這類單位已成為品牌，自然成為業主加租目標。」Charles Drapers 說。
　　「曾有地產舖張貼『適合藝術家使用』的招租廣告，不排除了解市況的地產經紀，會刻意向藝術租客調高價錢。」梁展峰說。他認為，火炭工廠區是自然而生的藝術社區，遭遇市場壓力亦屬正常。但他擔心，若刻意將該區炒作成如紐約或倫敦等 loft 時尚社區，只會趕走藝術家，「大部分藝術家都無可能在樓價高昂兼被規管的旅遊熱點裏生存。」

商業支持藝術

　　一年一度的「伙炭藝術工作室開放計劃」，將於 1 月 12 日起連續兩個周末舉行，今年共有 34 個工作室參與，屆時藝術家會開放平日創作的「私竇」，與大眾分享自己的創作成果。
　　此開放計劃，一直是新晉藝術家展示作品的難得平台。上年起，計劃獲得即將在該區有樓盤落成的信和集團的宣傳贊助，參觀人數倍增。藝術與商業的互動關係，實在難以簡單計得清。
　　「開放日由每個工作室自費參與，確保營運與創作自主，亦沒有任何金錢資助。不過，商業機構在宣傳上的支持，如燈箱廣告、大量單張，擴闊了以往只有小圈子的觀眾層面。」梁展峰說。但他認為，開放日觀眾多，與藝術質素沒有必然關係，同時藝術家的荷包亦不會進帳，「有興趣的買家不算多，反而失竊事件增多。」
Posted by jaspar at 11:29 PM

一個人跑場﹕按圖索驥﹕誰在 誰不在

(明報)2009年11月1日 星期日 05:10


【明報專訊】地點﹕火炭藝術工作室

題旨﹕仍在進行中



搬家時整理雜物，

在書架上翻到一張火炭藝術村地圖，

是年初當地Open Day的地標圖。

折了幾折的綠色紙頁上，

不但有簡單的地圖，

也配有每一個參展的工作室介紹。

於是記起那時候也曾一層層走落梯級，

走馬觀花的「到此一遊」過。

忽然好奇起來，

不是Open Day的普通日子，

那些本就隱蔽的工作室、畫廊

會是什麼樣子？

於是找一個勉強得閒的星期，

捧著這一張薄薄的地圖想要舊地重遊。

其實很多藝術家的電話號碼已經附在簡介裏面，但一來覺得自己並無什麼官方或是職業身分，二來更怕在電話上就吃閉門羹。反而決定要厚著面孔，一扇門一扇門這樣尋過去。

一早就去沙田 乘坐直去火炭村的60K小巴。車開起來，一兩分鐘就駛出了商場區，路兩旁還留有2008奧運 的標記。穿過一系列運動場，上橋落橋，眼前就佈滿了舊工廠大廈。每棟都近20層高，牆壁灰黃，頂層窗外掛著工廠大名，多是「德」、「華」、「利」等吉祥莊嚴的漢字組合，每個和每個都很相像，留不下印象。可是字符們疊在一起，凸浮在樓宇前，就織成一片舊工業區的背景，彷彿電影裏面的畫面。轉念想，也真可怕，真實場景需要借助媒介的影像來認識，抑或是現時工業的香港不在我的想像之內。車輕輕一轉彎，進了坳背灣街，路段窄了些許，視野也被兩旁的幾幢大樓遮去不少。

跳下車，路邊是大大小小的五金 店舖和文印店，一家美聯就立在喜力佳大廈旁邊，門玻璃上貼著這一帶倉庫、寫字間的售價。行下幾步是安華和其他幾個工廠大廈，二、三層臨街一面停著一排可能是待售的汽車，樓下有修車舖和木料場，路兩旁參差的放著木材和油漆顏料桶。印著「深圳 」或「廣州」在車身上的貨車正在裝載玩具。想到那些studio就隱身於這些工廠裏，覺得像是在玩捉迷藏。

Studio隱身工廈

G座入門處有兩塊寬寬的directory，寫滿了這家公司那家倉庫的名字和房號，我找5樓C座卻找不到。記得年初來5樓C座看到過不錯的陶藝，是把齊白石水墨裏的魚重新創作，在細處彙集小小的英文字母做出的小件陶器，現下不知又有什麽新作品。上到5樓，就聽到搬運 木材的聲音，走到C室，果然鐵門中間部分被白漆塗過，左方用藍色筆寫道「陶房」，右邊更有工筆勾勒的藍色花瓣圖案，好似青花。可屋內卻只有兩個裝修 師傅，地上幾攤木料。「我想他們是搬走了，搬去哪裏就不知道了，現在這裏是一家私人公司的單位了」。其中一個師傅蹲在地上解釋了兩句，又回過頭去和同伴計算尺寸了。

又走了幾家，單位都易了主，變作廣告公司、設計公司，有幾家還在，只是沒人。還有一家，據鄰居說已經數月沒有開門，門外地上疊著一層外賣菜單。不免有些悻悻然。

陶房不在 攝影室還在

「豐盛工業中心一樓6室﹕工作再工作室」——地圖上寫著，走進看門右邊有招牌 是「實發工業」，是不是又是換了主人呢？有人開了裏間的燈，打開門疑惑的看我。我忙問﹕「請問這一間工作室是否還在？」來人點頭，放我入內﹕「當然在了。」這一位女士是這裏的業主，笑容可掬﹕「叫我湯太好啦。」湯太最早買了這個單位，那時候樓市比現在好很多。一開始是做私家工廠用，後來湯太的兒子租了這裏做自己的攝影工作室。門廳牆上掛了不少他的攝影作品，而隔壁偌大一塊空間可以用來佈景。「這裏地方大，又高，很適合佈置，燈光也好打。」湯太解說著。二樓則有地方可以做後期的冲洗加工。

聽聞我的拜訪計劃，她從樓上拿下了一本小書，是更加詳細版的Open Day圖錄，她幫我在紙上勾勾畫畫﹕「我時常走去其他工作室看看的，很多藝術家我都認識。你的時間計算的不好，這時候，他們不是在睡覺就是返工，很少有人在工作室的。」

她也擔心我見不到幾個藝術家，因為就算他們在工作室也不見得會打開門和我講話。2009年的Open Day她的兒子湯舜有份參與策劃，當時就有些駐在火炭的藝術家不願意參加，所以這張地圖並不完整。不願參展的藝術家更閒雲野鶴，對於他們，火炭不僅僅是租金便宜的工廠區，也是少人騷擾的幽靜地。

謝過湯太，我重又上路。雖然她說逢周末大多數藝術家才會回來火炭，我都還是想碰碰運氣。按圖索驥，一路落下桂地街，樓的後方就是九肚山，山上吹來陣陣微風，愜意舒服。但樓就愈來愈舊，也愈來愈污濁。聽講九肚山也是地價很高的地方，租個小屋在山對面，憑窗遠望，有不付錢的山景，算不算是一種抵抗。

華聯工業中心在路的盡頭，門口也有60K小巴站。這樓怕有二三十年的年齡，有A、B兩座。每座每層基本上都有一兩家studio。我進了B座，準備從最上面的18樓試起。電梯門開，濃濃的燒臘味飄來，地面滑溜溜的，想是灑了豬油。12室「被逼裸體工作室」久久無人應門。隔壁燒臘的阿姐探身出來說﹕「他走了好久了，你是不是來找他影像啊？」看來鄰居們都很在意這個studio主人的舉動。

落兩層是伙紅孩studio，按鐘竟有人開門。是個瘦瘦小小，著黑衣的年輕女孩子。她叫Kako，從香港藝術中心畢業不久，擅長illustration。畢業後還想繼續創作，經朋友介紹就來這裏和其他幾個人合租。此時只有她一個人使用工作室，地上有些凌亂的擺著畫筆、顏料和畫板。「這裏不錯啊，有火炭的 Open Day可以參加，租金也都OK。有時工作太晚，也可以過夜。」如果沒有這一塊小的空間，很多練習和創作都要在家裏完成，吃飯用一張桌，之後畫畫也用，真是不方便。

我來的時候，她剛剛完成一幅作品，正準備把它晾乾。「我每天差不多都在這裏，因為我是剛開始創作，很多自我的東西尚未發現，正在探索。畫畫也是想多籌一些作品交給gallery辦展覽。」

租金便宜 創意集群

不久，studio的另一個主人入來，是一個戴黑色紗質禮帽的男生。他叫Moon，演藝學院 畢業幾年，是個雜家。舞台設計、寫歌、畫畫都有涉獵。在火炭都有兩三年，「有時候需要空間創作，就會帶一些props回來，或是回來畫畫彈琴。」臨窗有幾個人形model，有一個眼旁有黑色的眼淚，有一個本就不完整的身體上束著黑色布條。

不知是不是因為做舞台的原因，他的角落裏堆滿了各式各樣，不同風格的物件。舊鋼琴，封在布包裏面的鼓，大大小小的盒子，舊座椅。他興致勃勃，指著他的 model和道具﹕「你知道麼？這些東西都是我撿來的。比如這個，」他拎起一個長方形的木盒，「是我早上三點走在市場發現的。但是重點不是在撿東西還是買東西，重點是在你如何判斷人或是物的價值。別人也許覺得這個是垃圾，我覺得幾好啊，可以把這椅子搬回去給我的模特兒坐。」

Moon因為很多兼職，又愛交朋友，所以這一帶都很熟。他叫我不必擔心沒有工作室存在，「我倒覺得，你應該想想要是沒有人願意和你說話怎麼辦？」一副非常憂心的樣子。

（四之一）

文 蕭鳴澗

一個人跑場﹕個個都有另一份工？

(明報)2009年11月8日 星期日 05:10


【明報專訊】地點﹕火炭藝術工作室

題旨﹕仍在進行中



那天離開火炭不過還是傍晚，

回家路上接到Whimsy Garden主人

張美儀小姐的電話，

說她剛從內陸返來，

約我周六去她工作室看看。

而電郵給Antonio Wong，陶房主人，

則被告知工作室

搬去了另一座也在火炭的大廈。

周五傍晚再來，

火炭工業區已是燈火通明，

路旁滿是剛剛放工趕著回家的人們，個個行色匆匆。

我和他們方向相反，

向大廈裏面走去。

敲開5@5的門，是一個溫柔素淨的女子。5@5其實即是寓意五個相識的女孩在大廈的第五層合用一個工作間。雖然房間堆滿東西，但可以看出是幾個不同的地盤。「當時2004年我畢業，有很多東西要搬出去，也想找新的地方創作。這裏比其他地方平，六千多，我們五個好友就一起租下來了。不過大家都有正職，沒有時間總是在這裏。」她說這裏大部分藝術家都有兼職，多是freelance，也有全職的老師教授。正職多數也是和藝術相關的，但是很易受到商業或上司的影響，更加程式化。但是有了正職，才有能力租下這個單位。「其實很矛盾。你有了一份工，就給這裏付租金；可是呆在這裏的時間愈多就愈會影響工作。」

全職藝術家很少見，尤其是年輕一代。即使有，也是短期的。Kako就講過她是如何用一段時期的freelance來支撐後來的full time創作﹕「我有時也做freelance，在fashion show的後台，幫模特兒換衣服。有一年，我停下來沒有搞自己的創作，因為沒有錢也沒有地方。後來不斷做freelance，才有錢在這裏開始。現在我都算是個fulltime artist，如果做其他全職的工作，我會沒時間全情投入。」

而那一位Moon更是夜夜有工返，也為電影做布景，也會為特殊event設計吓，或是寫歌什麽的。有還在讀書的藝術學生問他這樣是不是很多錢，他苦笑﹕「工就很多，錢就沒有。因為你的工作在別人眼中是不值錢的，創意啊、藝術啊、天賦啊，商業價值很低。」

天賦重要 堅持更重要

但是他不介意這麼辛苦﹕「其實火炭這麼多藝術家，沒有哪一個是很有野心的，也都很少人是想靠創作來賺錢成名的。所以很多人都freelance啦。反而我們都好像沒什麼大志。別人以為搞藝術只要天賦，其實要的是堅持。」不過他也感慨堅持很難﹕「在香港，你要花好大力氣買一個大的房子，買一個stable的男女關係。可是人和人的關係就不會有太多人cherish。反而愛創作的人很重感情，也很emotional，但是就不懂得計較金錢得失。」

另一方面freelance確實也會自由一些，工作比較有彈性，所以即使穩定度低而且工酬多變，還是很多藝術家的選擇。比如Rocky的工作就是這樣。其實差一點就不會認識到Rocky，因為他的那個studio剛剛建立，門上的招牌 還是上一家廣告公司留下的。

那天從5@5出來，再上一層，出電梯就聽到好大聲的交響樂，不禁循聲而去，裏面也像是一個畫室，靠窗的桌旁擺著幾幅水粉畫，色彩清新，原來Rocky那夜返來溫書。他在中大藝術系讀master學位，之前也是做freelance﹕「我覺得長工不適合我，有些官僚和人際關係要很辛苦應對。所以做 freelance嘍，比如一些活動的video shooting。」

上去到伙紅孩，Kako正在走廊裏等她的新畫筆，房間裏傳出很大的電視聲，TVB的《宮心計》。「裏邊還有人在？」我問道，她微微笑﹕「沒人，我是把電視打開，讓它一直響著，那路過的人就以為有很多人，不會走近。」她手裏夾著煙，只是默默地等著。也沒出去吃晚飯，怕別人偷走了自己的畫。Studio其它幾人也回來了，大家都有些餓了，就一起去吃晚飯。幾瓶啤酒，5碟小菜，還有一個附送的粥，大家邊吃邊講。也講共同熟悉的人，也講生活的壓力，也講對某個概念的不同認識，真是不亦樂乎。Moon忽然對我說﹕「其實你為什麽要來看我們？你們和我們根本不同，好像在看freak show一樣。你碰到這麼多人願意和你講話，算你好彩，一般才不會理你呢？」

同道中人 自成一隅

我不知怎麼回應，覺得自己並非來窺視，但又知道他講的道理。忽然想到之前讀過關於the knower和the known的複雜關係，求知的人似乎有了「求知慾」這個金字招牌就可以刺探被知者的生活故事，為的是什麽呢？好奇？知識本身？還是純粹無聊消遣而已。就算是個記者，也沒有什麽不同。有藝術家對我說﹕「記者根本不是來聽我們的故事，或是想知道我們想說什麼。他們不過是有自己的任務，找到了他們想要的故事就走了。然後把我們寫成神仙或是妖怪，給reader閱讀的快感。」又或者是寫藝術家和常人一樣，也是吃大牌檔，坐小巴。正常和不正常，藝術家的形象就在這兩段游走，似乎沒有第三種描述的可能。

愈想愈不能說服自己，但是還是想繼續敲門，剛好周六是和Whimsy Garden的張小姐約好的日子，於是背著相機、筆記冊和地圖，又上了60K。

Whimsy Garden在華麗工業大廈，單位大而明亮，中間有幾個成衣model，旁邊則是寫字枱。我到的有點早，張小姐的助手給了我一些雜誌，都是fashion 或是design類的。書上貼滿了標籤。來不及翻看，張小姐已經到了。這個工作室就是她的公司辦公室，在這裏可以專心服裝設計。「好像做時裝設計的，火炭只有我一家，其實時裝設計也都是art來的。我的一些作品都不會拿去賣的，因為很誇張，有很多symbolic的東西在裏面，是想要表達一些理念。如果做好賣去讓人出街穿，就不合適。可是在香港，人們還是常常會把設計和藝術分開。我也會幫客人揀選衣服，因為想要做藝術創作，也要先填飽肚子。可能我很實際吧。」她爽朗的笑道。

搞藝術 先填飽肚子

陶房的Antonio在隔壁街找了新的工作室，乾淨，明亮。一個小隔間裏擺著所有製陶要用的工具，外面的大間則可以設計、拉坯。整個屋子空空的，和其他幾個studio的亂中有序（或是無序）並不相同，反而也很有味道。「我喜歡陶器，我覺得好像一個art therapy，是個很自我的過程，比如在拉坯的時候人會很靜。我在陶瓷創作裏可以找到自己，我覺得那些陶瓷，他們好像在對我講話。」來這裏之前，他曾在 art center按小時租工作室。現有了自己工作室，那自然是開心的。「我差不多每晚工作後也會來這裏看看。我的工作是web design。做陶瓷真是創作，沒有很多的想過成名，那需要很多機會。也不是寄望賣陶瓷來賺錢，那些對我都不重要。我的收入滿足到日常生活所需，也就夠了。」但他沒有過多抱怨香港藝術家的生存狀態不夠好﹕「人們總是以為國外會不同，其實我問過在日本 、歐洲的藝術家們，他們也都需要自己支持自己。」

沒有幾個全職artists，卻不停碰到freelancer回來小憩，火炭的藝術家們和我想像的不一樣。創作是生活的重要片段，創作本身即是目的，所以精神的滿足可以在藝術形成中自然完成，不一定要換算成作品的價格或是畫家的知名度。如此想來，即使是辛苦兼職養著一個工作室偶爾回來，雖然奢侈，都很值得。

（四之二）

文 蕭鳴澗

編輯 徐志堅

火炭藝術工作室

一個人跑場﹕Space in the making(2009-11-29) 寄給朋友
【明報專訊】地點﹕火炭藝術工作室
題旨﹕仍在進行中
幾乎每一個我訪問過的藝術家
都會拿筆出來在那張
早就皺皺巴巴的地圖上勾上幾筆，
推薦一些火炭的重要的工作室。
火炭藝術家的關係
由此看來是私人的，
親密的朋友往往是讀書時的同學，
或是一起工作過的同事。
5@5、伙紅孩還有恆發行
都是舊同學畢業後合租的場地。
中文大學的學生尤其多，
但其他院校畢業的學生
也慢慢多起來。
一起吃飯的時候，有人就表示不滿﹕「中大人有時候好霸道，好像火炭是他們的地方一樣，不過是他們離得近來得早罷了，為什揦要這麼囂張？」幾個中大畢業的藝術家開始反思，自己是不是有些地主風頭﹕「中大人的確是最早來火炭的。有幾位教授五六年前，也可能更早吧，就在這裏買了單位。後來就有了中大的學生，師兄師姐介紹給師弟師妹，好像是一種傳統了。在數量上我們真的是最多的，和其他學院的藝術家比可能會更像一個團體。其實不同院校風格不同，這一點最容易體現在新鮮畢業生的作品裏，都有強烈的學院烙印。不過大家平日這麼多交流下，自己的風格又在成熟，日後就不太看得出了。」也有中大人很緊張其他人的看法，急切的解釋﹕「我們沒有什揦校內組織，最多就是同學一起吃飯了，不會搞派系鬥爭的。」

一般來說，藝術家與其他工作室的藝術家交往並不頻繁，如果有，往往是在偶爾共用的空間和特殊的事件。Open Day算是這樣一個場合，藝術家自己也會互相走動，看看別人新的作品和風格的轉變。陶房的Antonio甚至告訴我，因為上一年活動自己不得不一直坐在 studio裏面錯失了觀賞別家的機會，今年會考慮不參加開放活動，關門去其他大廈逛逛。


偶爾交往 欠缺互動

Open Day之外集體範圍的互動是較少的，我甚至覺得大廈裏的藝術家們好像幾米漫畫裏總是碰不到的有緣人。相互不認識的藝術家們其實都會光顧三樓的餐廳、底座的士多，都會指覑樓下便利店門口那條懶洋洋的狗向我介紹﹕「牠不會咬人，每天都趴在這裏。」不過不少藝術家在我的地圖上都圈了Blue Lotus這家畫廊，還不忘讚賞畫廊主人Sarah﹕「她人很好。」

Blue Lotus是火炭最早的畫廊之一，在華聯A座。我三月曾經去那裏看朋友策劃的Doll Complex展覽，當時就見過主人Sarah，大眼睛的比利時女人，笑聲嘹亮。這次去碰到她的助手Sum。因為Sarah有一份正職做trading，每周最多一兩天時間回來畫廊，所以大小事務都是由Sum主持。現在正是管偉邦「經典再造」的展覽，牆上掛覑他的筆墨。

「我們的定位是支持香港本地藝術家，尤其是年輕藝術家，但也會邀請國內外已經成名的畫家開展。我覺得香港大多數畫廊不會冒險去推年輕人。」我告訴她的確很多藝術家認同 Blue Lotus在火炭的地位，她想了想，回應﹕「這裏最出名都是studio，畫廊很少。再有也許是因為，我們的一些展覽請的就是火炭的artists。而且 Open Day的開會地址常常選在這裏，因為這裏空間大，雜物少。」


支持本地年輕藝術家

Sum自己一周會有五六天都在畫廊，工作繁忙。聯絡藝術家，贊助人，媒體，布展等等事務，都不簡單。來得多了，自然也認識了很多人，但不僅限於藝術家。「我們對面那家是製作飾品的，我也喜歡和他們閒聊。我不覺得和其他公司比，我們是特殊的。你可以這樣想，工作室也沒什麼不同，也是一種工廠，交流一下真的不錯。」她是我遇到的唯一幾個和鄰居公司常常說話的人。也有人用了工廠的比喻，不過是為了闡述另一種邏輯﹕「我們和別家一樣都是工廠，只不過返工時間不一樣。既然同是工廠，也就沒有什揦可以好奇的，個人做好自己的事，就離開了。」

Blue Lotus之外，同一棟樓上的Joy Art Club也有很多人推薦我去看看。女主人蕭愛冰作品風格多樣，工作室外邊牆上掛覑女體畫和政治諷刺畫作，下面得桌上則擺覑小型雕塑，門口的畫作多和今日政治文化有關——一副習作Women Liberation，背景是國旗到碼頭邊高樓商廈的漸變，近景則是一雙小腳女人穿的繡花鞋和一雙高跟鞋，不無諷刺。每到周六下午，這家畫室會對外開放，歡迎畫家們來練習。也會請人體模特來供畫家們寫生，模特的費用人人分攤，也不會很貴。

我進去畫室不久，模特就到了，是一個小巧玲瓏的女孩子。去洗手間換了衣服，就坐在中間的台上開始準備。她今天本不會來，但是約好的模特臨時有事，她來替補。「如果事前知道我會多些準備，一般我都會準備棉布可以墊在身下，不過也沒關係。」她喜歡表演，喜歡和身體有關的議題，除了做模特兒，也會參與行為藝術、話劇表演甚至舞蹈。5點左右陸陸續續來了三個畫家，女主人說畫家很少準時上門，一會兒會有更多。三個畫家各據一角，模特除去衣衫，抱膝而坐。我想拍照，她囑咐我只要背影，「我日間的工作是文職，也許面部不要上鏡比較好，不希望影響到那一份工。」

走出大廈已經夜了，樓下幾間五金店還沒有關門，有一個畫家從裏面搬覑一堆東西走出來和我打招呼，「火炭雖然不比深圳東西多價又平，但是材料什揦的還算ok，也不難找。」想想覺得這些工廠大廈裏的藝術空間也真是有趣，畫廊、畫室、五金、文印，裏應外合；畫家、作曲家、雕塑家、舞台設計人、助理、模特，各有姿態。雖然不是點點相通，但或多或少的往來無聲無息的塑造覑這個分散的空間。


活化政策衍生迫遷危機

藝術家們對火炭的評價全是正面的，地價低、環境大、風景好是人人都提到過的原因。張美儀還有些神秘的說﹕「火炭真的很好，有山有水有靈氣。賽馬會雖然現在很紅，但還是在鬧市之中，有點喧嘩。」也有人喜歡火炭的自由和獨立﹕「賽馬會像政府的cage。火炭是比較民間的，就是Open Day政府資助也只是整個財政的一小部分，自主性很高。」雖然今年內，地價有上漲，但是相比較其他的選擇來說，火炭還是很有吸引力的。

最近提出的活化工業大廈政策無疑牽動覑藝術家們的神經，恆發行的Joe甚至見我就問是不是來採訪她對這個政策的反應的。Homan的說法可以反映到很多藝術家的憂慮﹕「業主當然是希望活化改造的，這樣可以升地價，吸引工商業投資，可是到時候我們很可能負擔不起地租，就被擠出去。」普遍的看法是活化後的大廈不歡迎藝術工作室，而火炭大片的工業樓宇應該會是政策執行地之一。如果地價升的不要太高，火炭仍會是這些人的第一選擇。我想，愈來愈具規模的Open Day有機會把一個分散的火炭藝術群體凝聚起來，一同發聲，也在為香港藝術出力的同時擴大覑影響力。這對於抵抗協商政府政策是有利的，但是也將會慢慢改變這個藝術生態區的很多原生狀態。

夜裏想覑這些充滿變數的議題，在大廈樓梯間行走，數覑地上的煙頭，摸摸牆上的塗鴉，心裏也生出幾分眷戀，竟在工廠裏找到了這城市缺乏的清新和自由。

（衷心感謝所有接受我訪問的藝術家們。）