The Ptarmigan staff will build vertical windowfarms to grow vegetables, flowers and herbs as a year-round DIY indoor farm. We're going to attempt to construct a a muti-column window farm in the blue room of Ptarmigan, using available online plans, so why don't you join us? 

From windowfarms.org: "Windowfarms let you grow food year-round inside while maximizing space. They are vertical food-growing gardens that use a dirt-free technique called hydroponics. You can buy a kit or build your own using low-impact or recycled local materials. Having a windowfarm is more about the activity and experience of windowfarming, these are living systems; not just a pretty thing to look at."

We'll start spray-painting bottles and gathering other materials Friday night around 19:00, and Saturday at 12:00 we'll start working through the plans. Come along if you'd like to help or just want to hang out.

** Seminar will be available for remote participation via Skype! Please register here and include your Skype username to be invited to the call! **

This is a seminar/class that will meet several times this summer to explore the evolution of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The meetings will begin in the mid-late 1960’s and follow the development of the AACM, mainly looking at the Art Ensemble of Chicago as central figures, up through the late 1970s.

Each week we will listen together to AACM recordings, discuss our thoughts and ideas, and share food and drink. The principal text will be George E. Lewis’s book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, but we will supplement each meeting with additional readings that span theory, criticism and other themes related to their work. We will explicitly examine the organisational elements of the AACM, as an association that supports artistic research against the grain of commercial pressure, seeking strategies that may be applicable to our creative ventures today. Additionally, we’ll look for parallel developments in non-AACM art and music from these times.

Schedule:

1. Before the Art Ensemble (3 June)
2. The new sound of Chicago (10 June)
3. A brain for the Seine (17 June)
4. The 1970s in America (24 June)
5. The dawn of the 1980s (1 July)

Back in America, the Art Ensemble added Don Moye as drummer and cemented the lineup that would continue until Bowie’s death. Meanwhile, other AACM musicians were moving to New York and expanding their circles, while the AACM approached ten years of existence.

This week's listening:

• Art Ensemble of Chicago – Live at Mandel Hall (1972) , Fanfare for the Warriors (1973)
• Creative Construction Company Volume 2 (1971)
• Anthony Braxton – New York, Fall 1974 (1975)

** Seminar will be available for remote participation via Skype! Please register here and include your Skype username to be invited to the call! **

This is a seminar/class that will meet this summer to explore the evolution of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). The meetings will begin in the mid-late 1960’s and follow the development of the AACM, mainly looking at the Art Ensemble of Chicago as central figures, up through the late 1970s.

Each week we will listen together to AACM recordings, discuss our thoughts and ideas, and share food and drink. The principal text will be George E. Lewis’s book A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music, but we will supplement each meeting with additional readings that span theory, criticism and other themes related to their work. We will explicitly examine the organisational elements of the AACM, as an association that supports artistic research against the grain of commercial pressure, seeking strategies that may be applicable to our creative ventures today. Additionally, we’ll look for parallel developments in non-AACM art and music from these times.

Schedule:

1. Before the Art Ensemble (3 June)
2. The new sound of Chicago (10 June)
3. A brain for the Seine (17 June)
4. The 1970s in America (24 June)
5. The dawn of the 1980s (1 July)

In our final meeting, we will look at how the AACM changes in the late 1970s, responding to the challenges of sustaining continued musical creativity against both the shrinking cultural environment and the organisation’s own institutional nature. We'll check in with the AACM as it exists now, where it has become a storied Chicago institution, and listen to some of the recordings from the late 1970s that hint at the future development of these artists.

This week's listening:

• Roscoe Mitchell – Nonaah (1977)
• Chico Freeman – Chico (1977)
• Art Ensemble of Chicago –Nice Guys (1978)
• Air – Open Air Suit, Montreux Suisse (1978)

At the second Strange Meetings club, we will gather on the banks of the mighty Pirita to examine the role of trout fishing in art, culture and society. Local writer/thinker Scott Diel will provide a live demonstration of the craft, while we ask attendees to use their collective energies to summon trout to the surface. The event will be supplemented by readings from Richard Brautigan's immortal Trout Fishing in America (1967) while we will improvise collaborative performance/interpretations inspired by trout, fishing, and the Pirita river.

We'll assemble where you see the green arrow on this map at precisely 6:41 PM.

Bring food; this is a picnic.

grawlix (plural grawlixes or grawlix)

1. A spiral-shaped graphic used to indicate swearing in comic strips.
2. A string of typographical symbols, especially "@#$%&!", used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swearword.
3. A series of violence related images in a speech bubble to represent obscenity or swearwords

What does it mean to be profane? In our increasingly global era, where all taboos have been broken and boundaries no longer exist to protect the sacred, the act of swearing becomes lost in the ever-increasing glossolalia of everyday life. Yet profanity, like anything else, can be approached as an art. When placed carefully, a simple 'fuck' or 'cock' can express a truth unparallelled by family-friendly language. At the same time, more grandiose constructions of the obscene can be mellifluous and sublime.

As part of Ptarmigan's Undo Lab series of collaborative creative activities without pressure for resolution or conclusion, we invite you to Grawlixes, a workshop for writers, thinkers, and people who like to curse. We will look at some great examples of obscenity in art, literature and popular culture, and try to unravel the art of the swear. We'll play simple textual games to stimulate our nasty glands, and of course we'll insult the shit out of each other. 

Leave your sensitivity behind, and bring notebooks and pencils. This event is free but please register to let us know if you're fucking coming, dickheads.

Longtime Ptarmigan friend Derek Holzer returns to present a one-day workshop on building SoundBoxes. Participants will discover the hidden sonic qualities of objects from our everyday world in this hands-on workshop, which combines the arts of electronics, noise, sculpture and collage. The basic elements we will employ are a wooden box, a speaker, a small audio amplifier and a contact microphone. To this, brave box-builders will add their own found objects, graphics, images, memories and ideas to create a unique electroacoustic cabinet of curiosities.

WHAT TO BRING

Derek will provide most of the tools and materials necessary for constructing the box. However there are a few things you should bring yourself:

1) A BOX: This should be made of thin wood or very strong cardboard. Plastic can be also used, but it doesn’t sound very good. No metal, please! This box should be a minimum of 10x15x4cm. Larger boxes have better resonance and room for speakers, objects and decorations. Cigar boxes, small suitcases, instrument cases or jewelry/silverware boxes are all good things to look for. IMPORTANT: the lid of the box should be no more than 5mm thick!

2) A SPEAKER (OPTIONAL): I often have 77mm or 92mm speakers on hand, but if you want a larger or different one you can bring it yourself. Besides buying one, you can salvage one from old hi-fi systems, clock radios or portable stereos. Please make sure it fits in the box you have chosen!

3) FOUND/SOUND OBJECTS: Please bring as many found objects as you can to decorate your soundbox or use as a sound source via the contact microphone.

4) EFFECTS PEDALS (OPTIONAL): Any kind of battery-powered effects pedals, such as distortions, filters or delays, can be very useful in creating more nonlinearities in the feedback loop.

More information on the workshop (including more photos and video) can be found on Derek's site.

Participants will perform on their soundboxes later in the evening at the SoundBoxes performance night. Invite your friends and families!

Participants from Derek Holzer's SoundBoxes workshop (earlier in the day) will perform on their new instruments. This performance is free and will also feature additional music by local electroacoustic experimentalists (to be announced later), local DJs, and refreshments.

On Saturday, 10 August 2013, Done Lab will be screening raw video footage collected from our open call and submissions of Done Kino participants. Unfinished Screenings 4 (Open Screen) is also a warm-up event opening Done Kino itself.

If you are bored by fancy post-production, tired of trendy special effects, and/or uninterested in obvious plots, then come and enjoy this nonlinear, rugged experience.

A detailed program will be published soon after the raw footage submission deadline on 29 July 2013.