aisyalam

It wasn’t supposed to be a work day, but since we decided for various reasons to leave Penang late last night instead of this morning it became one—which worked out well because I have to be at a Fulbright function on Friday so the week is already a couple of days short. I was able to catch up with a bunch of communications (being offline for four days was a luxury, but wow do things pile up quickly) and move forward on various projects. For starters, Eric Curkendall wrote to say he had posted a piece he’d engineered featuring our voices on his soundclick space (http://www.soundclick.com/bands/pagemusic.cfm?bandID=500390), which is really nutty. Another development is that Sau Bin put me in touch with Daniela Franco, a Paris-based Mexican installation artist who is putting something together in KL, so I sent her a few files and would be tickled if they were to be heard in a glitzy gallery as part of the festival of French arts that’s happening here. Perhaps best of all is that I had some contact with Keh Siong, the Java tutor, and am hoping to be seeing him soon and begin putting together (manually) the database that is nearly complete in terms of content. During the day, I saw some colleagues and students, uploaded some images from the weekend to flickr, then went back to the texts I’ve been working on the past couple of weeks, reading them aloud (I’d meant to do this with Amy over the weekend), trimming a little, further shaping, and am really pleased by most of them. Still a bit of work to do on them, but getting closer. Toward the end of the afternoon, I began to work on the final two pieces for the “13 States” piece, one for Melaka, and one for Penang—I’ll focus on these the next couple of days, listen to some “field” recordings I made on the weekend (jungle, trishaw ride, fan whirring), and work in the sound lab a little. Hopefully by week’s end I’ll be quite close to having the content done, which’ll give me two months to make the machine that presents the materials, while preparing for the two or three perfomances/installations mentioned previously.