Text by CLOT Magazine
Edited Arts are a not-for-profit group of curators, film producers, event organisers, artists and technicians that aim to provide a platform for artists and musicians to work together on events and shows, enabling overlooked artists and established practitioners to work together in new environments. They attempt to develop new ways of producing, distributing and displaying the work of experimental artists and musicians, bypassing and overcoming the necessary restraints and restrictions of more mainstream labels, promoters and events. Edited is headed up by Jo Sans, Eliza G-G (+777000) and Ru Pert.
We previously featured the Edited Arts Futureshook event in collaboration with Christian Duka’s Amoenus series. And now they are presenting their first music release, Edited Arts 001 – Extended, a compilation featuring Loraine James, Mang, Terribilis and others. The audiovisual album ranges in style from ambient to club. It includes, as well, 12 music videos, one for each track, which explore the notion of extended self, online personas and identity loss.
This publication invites musicians, artists and designers to consider the idea of the extended self, bringing together new experimental work, ranging from algorithmic avant-pop through power ambient to the new club. The idea for this release, they say, was an instinctive process: ‘Most of our events have been linked together through some conceptual theme – which helps to add more complexity and layers to just a concert or a club night, creating new possibilities for discourse and cross-fertilisation, and just providing interesting stuff for people to think about and chat about and connect with.
The conceptual framework also means that we can bring together artists, performers, and ideas that you might not often see together – it’s all about diversity. Our themes and projects have varied from a full day and night symposium on the pioneers of electronic sound, the BBC Radiophonic workshop, to a sonic investigation of how hearing develops in the womb, to an exploration of the Alvin Toffler’s idea of Futureshock We wanted the ideas that inform our events to translate also to the label, so again we’re working across mediums, genres and themes.
And when the ideas of the extended self were pitched to Alx, one of the resident designers Edited Arts continue, he decided to take the idea quite literally, imagining and recreating each and every artist on the release alongside their music, attempting to make them as one with their sound, tweaking, melting and generally spazaming them into these amazing, vivid extended beings – we built a little website where all the artists took selfies and from there Alx went ahead and transformed them into their extended selves.
They conclude that the album plays with and celebrates our relationship with digital technology in all its forms. And as we deep dive more and more into these virtual forms of ourselves, as we become enlarged and extended and engulfed virtually, it is important to remember that the essence and meaning of technology is the very fact that it reveals something about the real and physical world we reside in. Our bodies are technologies.’ At Edited Arts, despite it all, they’re hopeful about the future.
