"Entropy, culturally superelevated"
"Entropie, kulturell überhöht"

Irma M. Hinghofer-Szalskay, PHd

Acrylic / mixed media on canvas. Approx. 35" x 35"
Acryl-Mischtechnik auf Leinwand, 90 x 90 cm
Musik: Wind riders / Native American Flute Composition; Schubert / Piano Sonatas in A minor,D.784 in D major



Gestural Entropy, Hampstead Heath to Brazil to Military Bands



Inti Guerrero referred to an idea of "gestures of entropy" video link (copyright Inti Guerrero) within the city. In his video work he follows a group of people struggling down a hill side to get to a modernistic architetural structure that is the Brasilian congress...



I think this is a great way to respond to a city. The idea of a city's architecture being in constant flux beyond the planning of larger civic structures. Re use or misuse of spaces particularly interest me... from skateboarders to homeless people to cutting simple steps into a grass embankment because public initiated flow has made it happen, beyond the architects plans.

This all leads me back to an unfinished work, Blowing Up a reedit of Antonioni's "Blow Up" where a photographer is drawn to the entropy of London through witnessing a murder, early garage punk ending in a kind of absurd gestural pantomine...

These gestures of entropy (a perfect term Inti! mucho credit to you) point to another emergent architecture that takes place in the city. Its like an additional topography of the city that is emergent and more DIY orientated, and less to do with the authority of architecture proper.



Architects like Will Alsop seem to anticipate and revel in this entropic process, and tend to allow it to happen or even set frameworks for it and that is fascinating. (The cloud being a big loss for Liverpool I think...ah well).

Please forgive me if my project seems to be down on architecture. Its authority is of course grounded in importance and of course I like great innovative brutalist structures as much as the next hombre, but I think in terms of my research here I am trying to work out responses that do not repeat or attempt to ape architectural practice.

Do these entropic processes signify a problem...

Of course I have limited knowledge of architectural process and in many ways am making lay responses from the angle of artistic pracitces...

In many ways there is a result right there. I have found my research path has led me not to direct collaboration with architectural practice but in finding responses to perceived practices and just physically being in a different architectural space than Liverpool.

To interact and collaborate directly with an architect is I suppose the next step, but I think the path I have taken now, an almost entropic map of a city (this is not yet fully realised) 'in use' has value particularly in terms of any future work with respect to the city and Awareness of Sound. My instinct draws me to the natural hybridization of musics and their contexts and reproductions: thinking of these gestures of entropy through musics...

I now want to use a military band as a sound mechanism. There is no intention of approaching the military politics of Colombia, thats a whole other residency... though of course this kind of reading seeps through. I want to use it because a band like that is in a position of authoritive use of the city perhaps disrupted by them playing songs like Paint it Black some kind of entropy in a static model of authority... Of course pop music has its own topography of authority. Mick Jagger and Mariah are allowed on the airwaves but perhaps funky carioca (see Walter Benjamin made my Booty Bounce) is more entropic and more like pirate radio.

It follows also with the idea of using existing city sound sources (not a constructed soundscape) and processes and not imposing my own compositional authority. Of course I am doing this anyway but maybe looking at how to play with that, I hope...

Mapping the entropic topography... how in sound....