iMMERSE! with Charlie Morrow

Micky Remann is a German media artist and producer of media events. He invented the “Liquid Sound” concept and its installation in various locations with exceptional waters such Bad Orb & Bad Sulza in Germany. They involve participants floating in body temperature salt water where they participate in immersive experiences that includes underwater sounds, music, lights and surround video. 

Playlist of samples:

Subjects discussed: immersion concerts, salt water flotation, pre-birth experiences, fulldome experiences, first immersive experience at age 3 when he almost drowned in a pond, his sister saw him in a dream-like state and yelled to his mother who ran to save him, mermaids, underwater crystal palaces, temple for underwater listening, communicated with whales of the Pacific Northwest coast with music, environmental opera & symphony, reincarnations as an Orca Whale, body temperature and salt water while simulating the musical experience of whales, underwater concerts, thermos / bad / spas, DJ nights, full moon concerts, Liquid Sound Festival ...

Today’s iMMERSE podcast is even more unusual than many of the others. I interviewed Elke and Peter Schumann in February of 2020 in their Glover, Vermont home along with Jay Walbert, the archivist for my Archive in nearby Barton, Vermont.

The octagenarian Schumanns immigrated from Germany to New York in 1961 and have led the Bread and Puppet Theater since 1963. 

In this podcast, they share their history and artistic politics and bread. As Peter says here: We went around and gave them pieces of bread to eat and found they were a better audience when they were chewing – we liked them better…"

In the beginning of our chat, Peter turns to Elke and says, "When I don’t remember something, you will".

"I will" she says. This happy conversation is ever so dear to me because Elke passed away on August 1, 2021.

I first met Peter in New York in the 1970s through public events maker, Karin Bacon. I first came to the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont in 1968 to work with Fluxus artists Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles.

In the years that followed, I bought some land from them and built a house there in the 1990, the house where I now live and am recording this introduction. Since 1990, my relationship with Bread and Puppet and the Schumann in the neighboring town of Glover continued to grow. 

The Bread and Puppet Theater engages people, after filling them with hand-milled sourdough bread. They work environmentally and for many decades now, they've been making amazing use of the landscape, natural light changes and natural acoustics.  Puppets from tiny to gigantic, signs, banners and hand-made art have always animated their events. Their roadside museum is filled with decades worth of their fanciful performance objects from their local, national and international pageants. 

The tradition of handing-out bread always guarantees good spirits and an enthusiastic audience ready to be entertained by the humor, irony, politics, pageantry and their deep concerns for humanity. But let’s just let them tell their own story.

Topics covered in podcast

Samples playlist:

iMMERSE! 19 Charley Morrow interviews Chris Wangro 

Today we talk with my long-time friend & co-conspirator in public events, Chris Wangro. We met through the New City Department of Parks, where he just had been hired as events coordinator. My colleagues and I at the New Wilderness Foundation were producing a summer solstice celebration in New York's Central Park. Chris had, at the time, the early 1980s, just returned from working in Europe with experimental rock band Henry Cow. We have continued to make things happen to the present-day.

Chris Wangro started out as the ringmaster of a one-man circus and rose to become the tzar of Special Events for the City of New York in the 1980s.

These days, he works as a Sought-After Public Space Strategist who pursues the improved design of public space, employing placemaking, community-building strategies that are enhanced by his PASSION FOR BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER IN JOYFUL, DYNAMIC, AND UNEXPECTED WAYS — all across the globe. He has produced countless prestigious events for audiences from intimate to massive including festivals, cultural programs, presidential summits, NASCAR rallies,  papal visits, Dolly Parton conerts, pachyderm parades and art festivities worldwide. The event we produced was broadcast internationally. 

Charlie Morrow: The Magnetic Still Point

[hors-serie iMMERSE! podcast]

Hello, I’m Charlie Morrow. Welcome to iMMERSE! & our conversations on immersivity. Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped.

I’ve been moving further & further north from my origins in New Jersey, US & art & business beginnings in New York City. As a 7 & 8 year-old, my summers in Maine began my north-o-tropia. In 1968, I visited Dick Higgins & Alison Knowles at their Something Else Press workshop & home in Barton, Vermont.

In the 70s, I bought property there & in the 80s built a sugar house, where maple sap is boiled to become maple syrup, in the 90s I built a Vermont home in the sugar woods, the local name for a forest of maple sugar trees.

On my first trip to Lapland in 1986, I had come the furthest north I’d ever been. It was late autumn with light snow. In the night light, as I drove north through Finland toward Kat Kat Keino, I appeared to drive past giant, very wide, dark trunked trees, separated by narrow passages of white light. I came to understand that these were tiny trees & wide expanses of tundra! Still points can be just like this, moments when life turns inside out.

There’s a ready connection to what some call vertical time. Time when the past & the present & the future are one. Music & sound, like words & images, open the mind to immersion & to time travel. Human communication starts with gestures & graphic images evolve into writing & printing, photography & sound recording, visual & sonic transmission.

Memory & imagination starts with capturing experience, evolves storing selected information & distilling information.

The phrase still point appears in T.S Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”: “At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. & do not call it fixity, Where past & future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards.”

Medically speaking, the still point is a period of time when the movement of brain activity is not apparent. This temporary cessation of motion can last from a few seconds to a minute or two. It is thought that still points occur spontaneously as well as being able to be induced.

& then there is the vanishing point, which Wikipedia tells us is “The point at which parallel lines receding from an observer seem to converge. The point in linear perspective at which all imaginary lines of perspective converge. The point at which a thing disappears or ceases to exist.

Poet Armand Schwerer writes of an Aleut shaman’s statement to anthropologist Franz Boas:  “When I do the ceremony just right & the setting sun light is just right I disappear.” Today is a still point. One of those moments when time seems to have stopped...

All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

This is a relaunch of immerse! 6 with updated information on the Notre Dame renovations

Brian Katz, acoustican, CNRS Research Director at Sorbonne University’s Institute Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Sound Lab, is also a specialist in spatial hearing, room acoustics, and virtual reality. The most interesting development in the past few years was his work on the Notre Dame reconstruction with regard to the acoustics in trying to reproduce the century-old sound.

April 2023 will see the launch of a 4-part French podcast series called “Une Fiction Sonore” @ http://alarecherchedenotredame.pasthasears.eu/.

It includes “In Search of Notre Dame” which claims to plunge listeners Victor Hugo mind as he researches his new novel about the Notre-Dames in 1828. Hugo was upset by the poor condition of the cathedral. Hugo leads listeners on an investigation/experiment regarding Notre-Dame’s acoustics and soundscapes over the centuries.

April 2024 will see the streaming (audio or VR), of various works played in Notre-Dame in the simulated historic acoustic conditions appropriate to their composition period, spanning choir, organ, to full orchestras.

He is currently working on a listening study that examines how the acoustics affects the transmission/reception of medieval music via various virtual acoustic conditions

He and his colleagues are also placing a small choir in various virtual acoustic conditions corresponding to different historical states, and examining how their performance is modified.

as well as refining acoustic material definitions by measuring various tapestries, rugs, and other fabrics at the Louvre and National Monument Archives. The results will be incorporated into simulations examining the more decorated periods of Notre-Dame’s history.

Brian FG Katz, Research Director, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, CNRS, UMR 7190, Institut Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, http://www.dalembert.upmc.fr/home/katz

photo of Brian Katz used with permission, Notre Dame Gargoyle by bart plantenga

All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

iMMERSE! is a series of podcasts I produce with Charlie Morrow who interviews colleagues & collaborators on the trending topic of immersion [think sensuround sound +]. For Morrow, it all began in the mother’s belly, eventually migrating to the Ear Inn where he met a pack of audio outliers & ended up with Ear Magazine & the Audiographics series of cassettes + countless events, interventions & concerts that forever changed the mindscape of NYC & elsewhere. We are now embarking on a sidebar Sub-iMMERSING!, which will feature offhand impromptu audio diversions ... here is the short intro to Sub-iMMERSING!

All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

Thomas Kraupe is a German astrophysicist who specialized in x-ray astronomy at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics. He’s managed a kind of magical situation by combining math & physics with his love of planetariums & music to create numerous interactive edutainment & art science crossover projects that have attracted artists such as Snap, Heaven 17 & Pink Floyd at several planetariums most recently as Director of Planetarium Hamburg, which he transformed into one of the most advanced planetariums in the world before retiring in late 2022. He continues to serve as a consultant for immersive theaters worldwide. I met Thomas in Colorado Springs, Colorado at one of the first immersive gatherings.

All iMMERSE! texts & transcripts available here: https://www.charliemorrow.com/immerse-podcast.html

* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga

Canadian artist-professor Luc Courchesne was an early convert to media arts some 50 years ago. He began utilizing computer technologies in 1984 to create interactive video and later with his immersive and interactive installations, "panoscopic" images, and devices of his own, he helped transform spectators into visitors, actors and inhabitants of his experiential crafts. Charlie Morrow interviews on immersive common ground.

Read entire interview pdf here

* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga

Canadian Claude Schryer is a Zen practitioner who believes in the power of art to shape a better future & dedicates much of his life to this pursuit. He has been a sound & media artist, having released several electroacoustic soundscape CDs in the 90s. for 20 years, He served as an arts administrator with the Canada Council for the Arts in Inter-Arts after creating that department. 

Schryer is  an environmental activist and in 2020 launched his bilingual ‘radical listening’ Conscient podcast, which explores art and the ecological crisis. He also offers workshops on art and sound & the climate emergency.  

When I heard Schryer’s podcast with Hildegard Westerkamp, I was moved as much by the interviewer as by his inspiring guest. Thoughtful dialogue and warm atmosphere. I reached out to Schryer and came away with this interview. He is enthusiastic and engaged. He welcomed the opportunity to discuss immersion and the moderating of a podcast. Midway through our interview, he turned the tables and began interviewing me and, in the end, we each came away with our own podcast – one for immerse!, a second for Conscient. 

Schryer: “The world’s a bad place and there are those who are raising awareness. And there are those who say: Here’s what you can do about it. That sort of action-oriented activist, engagé art. And then there’s a third category of escapists and dreamers, also very important ... so somewhere between those who are raising awareness, those who are inciting us into action and those who are helping us escape from it.”

Read entire interview pdf here

* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga

“I realized that we were going to be able to take audiences & immerse them in the universe, take them on a journey & surround them with the mystery & the beauty of the universe.”

Ian McLennan is a pioneer in the development of planetariums, museums, science centers, & other high-content public attractions. Based in Vancouver, Canada, he has shepherded attractions from the days before Imax to international fairs to today's immersive projects. He’s also music lover & a lover of his daily walks during which he captures special moments in his photographs.  I met him through Dan Neafus at Imersa in Denver, when he was being honored for his life's work in the field of planetariums, science domes & immersive environments.  

Read entire interview pdf here

* production & audio backdrop: bart plantenga