David Linton

Soundmaker and media producer David Linton has been a vital creative force in the downtown NYC intermedia community since the early 1980's. Throughout that decade, first as a 'performer' (percussionist), then as a 'designer' (sound or set), he was a frequent collaborator among a broad range of artists who, it can be argued, all worked (sometimes inadvertently) to forge new links between seemingly diverse media by defying the traditional stylistic dictates normally required by a commitment to any given medium. This led to much activity that was geared mostly toward 'the stage' (the mythic mother of all 'bastard' arts) of one sort or another...i.e.: music, dance, theater, or performance... etc., rather than along any singular career vector focused on being a 'pure' musician in any particular vein. This was a very gradual development that seems clearer now only in retrospect.

For richer or poorer, hereís a list of some of the artists with whom Linton has worked from the early 1980's till present: (in roughly chronological order) Lee Renaldo, Robert Longo, Rhys Chatham, Eric Bogosian, Kinematic, Karole Armitage, Charles Atlas, Plus Instruments, Anne DeMariness, Michael Brown, Kurt Hoffman, Dan Witz, Tony Silvestrini, Glenn Branca, Elliot Sharp, Christian Marclay, Jim Self, DANCENOISE, Fred Holland, Steven Petronio, David Parsons, Shaliko Co., Rudolf Grey, Randy Warshaw, Zeena Parkins, God Is My Co-Pilot, Kyle de Camp, Diamanda Galas, Ben Neill, James Lo, Yuval Gabay, Kumiko Kimoto, UI, Cesq Gelabert, Cultural Alchemy, Meg Stuart 'Damaged Goods', Constanza Macras, Denis OíConnor, Renee Copraig, The Wooster Group, Harry De Witt, Hahn Rowe, Ruth Kahn, Benton Bainbridge, Anney Bonney, Charles Cohen, Isabelle Sigal, Tim Feldman/Wilda, and so on...

By the end of the 1980's, just prior to retiring his drum sticks for good, Linton was performing solo assaults upon a proto electro-acoustic drum kit of his own design. From one gig to the next the sound thus produced could either thrill or clear a room... depending on where that room was and who happened to be in it... (Or perhaps what he had had for dinner.) By the early 90's, with a primary focus now on electronic performance, Linton began to turn his attention toward the very notion of "venue" and what that meant to the kind work one might actually make. It was at this point, based in the Chinatown loft which eventually came to be known as the 'haus of ouch', that he began to organize events where the environmental and presentational aspects of performance gained equal consideration 'in the work process' along side the 'content' aspects of said 'work' (either his own or other people's). This too was a gradual process which, by the mid 90's, was leading to a complete operational paradigm overhaul in performative assumptions. Early indications of this shift were glimpsed with the launch of events such as ëSoundLabí, which in turn spawned a cascade of mutant presentational strategies concerned with 'media performance' and ' immersive environments'. Some of these notions survived first contact with reality to an extent where, by the late 90's, they had formed a bed from which the architectural ideas for the 'Unitygain' platform emerged. These have primarily to do with the belief that all meaningful 'content', regardless of what it's 'carrier' medium happens to be, is (or should be) context specific in socio-temporal-spatial terms... (As in: a commitment to real-time processes on the part of all participants in whatever medium = real relationships unfolding in time that everyone 'in the room' can share) and that a broader range of experiential possibilities can be more effectfully brought into play by locating these concerns at the forefront in all subsequent stages of making work. Or... in other words, how do we define 'the room' at the same time as we project what can happen within it?

This is the approach informing this season's Mixology Festival... Are we able to know with any certainty if the boon brought to artists by expanded access to the high powered tools provided by the desktop media revolution of the past decade and a half has brought with it a comparable boon in the 'culture' of real-time audio-visual performance and it's understanding in any real social space... or has it merely fed the further dissolution of same through the illusion of hyper abundance and infinite spectacular 'recursive' multiplication along the corporate modalities of commodified technological 'progress'? Dunno... Let's party? For the time being, Performance is still a 'physical' activity, regardless how compressed the range of input or subtle the interface... and the 'receiver' is still in a room somewhere where that performance must be platform 'delivered'. Most recently Linton has come to believe that the implications of collaborative experimental electromedia practice, considered from within the expanded/contracted 'hypothetical' space of narrow band 'niche' television or broadband streaming media, demarcate a crucial point of convergence for electronic artists, the work they will make, the issues they will need to confront in doing so, and how that work will be perceived by everyone else, for the immediately foreseeable future. For now it still seems helpful to get together in physical rooms to try to work some of this stuff out... And for many reasons the Performing Garage seems to be a particularly appropriate place.

www.unitygain.org