small things: Zoe Keating

Zoe Keating.  Pop!Tech, 18 October 2007 at Camden Opera House. 

video by Kevin Fox

A small assemblage of cello, Keating, laptop, a short composition of 9 minutes, a huge, complex and beautiful sound.  The large thing would be to compose a piece of music, find an orchestra to play it, record it, get it distributed, etc, etc.  The small thing is to sort it all out yourself with what you have: talent, new technology and an idea, or several ideas, and your own website.   

Issue 23 (call for articles) will consider small moves, small projects with large consequences.  New technological changes in the arts seem to appear when the art form is at its most corporate and most proprietal. Photography was seen as the death of painting, which was not what happened, however small cameras put the making of images into amateur hands.  Music sampling put the making of music into the hands of disenfranchised youth: it didn't kill off the recording business, it just allowed individuals to make and reproduce music themselves.  One might see all inventions as reinvigorating overstuffed productions that force audiences to be passive consumers.  New technologies are constantly put into the hands of ordinary people who use them in personal and idiosyncratic ways.  And these things start out small.  And then they get big.