'The audience moves around in their minds trying to "get a grip" with the aural horizons and fields (Emmerson) that these relational elements create.' c.vear more to follow:
Merleau-Ponty writes that when we encounter an experience, say a piece of furniture, we position ourselves sensorially in a way as to embody the experience - to get a grip of the sensations of physical proximity, visual field, eyes of the skin - in relation to our 'perception filters, memories and imagination perspectives.
So with the relational elements of sound and the aural horizons and fields in my works the listener embodies the dimensional experience and positions himself within this dimension to get a grip of it.
Listen to track 3 [?] of side 2 France Folk Music
- first section just the man
- second section he music hall
Notice the shifts we each make to get to grip with the information and phenomonology of the sound worlds.
These are 2 different dimensional situations BUT we all volunteered some solution for the information we experienced. Each individual would allow in different elements through the perception filter and coloured this with memory and imagination. We all get to grip with it, embody the experience and make it fit.
When I talk the sound is always in more than one space - and more than just physical space. "It emanates and in doing so fills space and others ears. To speak then is to live in more than one head, beyond an individual mind. Listening is thus a form of perticipation in the sharing of a sound event' (LaBelle pg 3) Furthermore: there is no sound between my voice and your mind, just air molecules vibrating fully to every agent. As I am talking I am inside all your minds at the same time. I am forcing you - actually you are volunteering - to make some experiential sense of it beyond semantic.
This dimensional embodiment in the audience is a similar psychological/ physiological process that happens to musicians embodying an instrument, the mental 'driver' is adjusting, compensating, desiring and making sense of the new sensations inputted through the senses by this new body extension (the instrument); the audience are to shifting and making sense of these new situations but their cognitive output is not motor.
Friday 28 May 2010
Thursday 27 May 2010
ev2's Sentimental Journey
Proposed schedule:
Tuesday 24th August: York to Calais
25th: Calais to Paris
26th: Paris/ Versailles
27th: Paris to Rennes
28th: Rennes to Paris
29th Paris to York (Eurostar)
Priority for recording - street music esp chaps like "Happiest Accordion Player in Paris"
The book centres around Paris and only towards the final pages does it venture to Moulines, Bourbonnois, Lyon and presumably onto Turin. ev2's Sentimental Journey will not go here; field recordings from Moulines will be replaced by Poitiers, and Turin from SFX library as it is a meta-journey in the book. Furthermore, the logistics and cost of heading for Turin are more than double the overall cost of the SJ. Will consider the implication of this omission.
Tuesday 24th August: York to Calais
25th: Calais to Paris
26th: Paris/ Versailles
27th: Paris to Rennes
28th: Rennes to Paris
29th Paris to York (Eurostar)
Priority for recording - street music esp chaps like "Happiest Accordion Player in Paris"
The book centres around Paris and only towards the final pages does it venture to Moulines, Bourbonnois, Lyon and presumably onto Turin. ev2's Sentimental Journey will not go here; field recordings from Moulines will be replaced by Poitiers, and Turin from SFX library as it is a meta-journey in the book. Furthermore, the logistics and cost of heading for Turin are more than double the overall cost of the SJ. Will consider the implication of this omission.
Tuesday 25 May 2010
Merleau-Ponty on the phenomonology of perception
In order for me to manipulate and have command my chosen medium I need to understand how my chosen medium works. I have chosen MP as a philosopher not through any hierarchical judgment but because I understood his way of explaining in terms that were closer to my understanding of phenomenology than, say, Heidegger of Derrida.
When I begin to reflect my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience; moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself. The real has to be described, not constructed or formed. Which means that I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications. My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately 'place' in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine people and things whose presence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in fact involved in it; they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of 'representations', it ought to be for ever hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place, but this does not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man', 1 or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to the world. (xi-xii)
I aim at and perceive a world. If I said, as do the sensationalists, that we have here only 'states of conscious-ness', and if I tried to distinguish my perceptions from my dreams with the aid of 'criteria', I should overlook the phenomenon of the world. For if I am able to talk about 'dreams' and 'reality', to bother my head about the distinction between imaginary and real, and cast doubt upon the 'real', it is because this distinction is already made by me before any analysis; it is because I have an experience of the real as of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one not of asking how critical thought can provide for itself secondary equivalents of his distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge of he 'real', of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is forever based. We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive. (xvii-xviii)
The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people's in my own. (xxii)
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. (xxiii)
We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by 'solution', it is on the hither side of all solutions. (xxiii)
We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither. We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. (p5)
To perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal settings. To perceive is not to remember. (p26)
When I begin to reflect my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience; moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself. The real has to be described, not constructed or formed. Which means that I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications. My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately 'place' in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine people and things whose presence is not incompatible with the context, yet who are not in fact involved in it; they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of 'representations', it ought to be for ever hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place, but this does not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not 'inhabit' only 'the inner man', 1 or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to the world. (xi-xii)
I aim at and perceive a world. If I said, as do the sensationalists, that we have here only 'states of conscious-ness', and if I tried to distinguish my perceptions from my dreams with the aid of 'criteria', I should overlook the phenomenon of the world. For if I am able to talk about 'dreams' and 'reality', to bother my head about the distinction between imaginary and real, and cast doubt upon the 'real', it is because this distinction is already made by me before any analysis; it is because I have an experience of the real as of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one not of asking how critical thought can provide for itself secondary equivalents of his distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge of he 'real', of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is forever based. We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive. (xvii-xviii)
The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where my own and other people's intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people's in my own. (xxii)
The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. (xxiii)
We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by 'solution', it is on the hither side of all solutions. (xxiii)
We think we know perfectly well what ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, ‘sensing’ are, because perception has long provided us with objects which are coloured or emit sounds. When we try to analyse it, we transpose these objects into consciousness. We commit what psychologists call ‘the experience error’, which means that what we know to be in things themselves we take as being in our consciousness of them. We make perception out of things perceived. And since perceived things themselves are obviously accessible only through perception, we end by understanding neither. We are caught up in the world and we do not succeed in extricating ourselves from it in order to achieve consciousness of the world. (p5)
To perceive is not to experience a host of impressions accompanied by memories capable of clinching them it is to see, standing forth from a cluster of data, an immanent significance without which no appeal to memory is possible. To remember is not to bring into the focus of consciousness a self-subsistent picture of the past; it is to thrust deeply into the horizon of the past and take apart step by step the interlocked perspectives until the experiences which it epitomizes are as if relived in their temporal settings. To perceive is not to remember. (p26)
Wednesday 19 May 2010
Analysis of Cage's Europera
Extracts taken from 'A light- and soundscape as musical manifesto' by Stefan Beyst (online)
The Material (2): the scenery
As usual in an opera, dancers and singers are integrated in the scenery. Unusual is that also the instrumentalists are integrated. And even more unusual is that the aural appearance of the singers is divorced from their visual appearance. [...] The character they are supposed to embody disappears behind the visual appearance of the singer himself. And that is altogether the case when the pianist has to play in shadow play: where we were supposed to hear music, we eventually get to see a pantomime.
The Material (3): the text
To John Cage, and in tradition of Antonin Artaud, the text - or the plot - is no longer a structuring element, but a material more on the same footing as music, acting and scenery.
The Structure of the operas
But, whereas the Surrealists used random combinations of disparate elements as a way of generating unsuspected resonances between apparently on-related objects, with John Cage it serves the opposite aim: to maintain the independence of the elements combined. And such autonomy goes inexorably lost when the elements are subordinated under an encompassing intention, be it intentionally or unconsciously, 'realistic' or 'surrealistic'.
The Material (4): revisited
'Independent but coexistent' hence: a radical negation of the organic integration of the arts in an encompassing 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. But, precisely therefore, opera is not quite suited for the division in its constituting parts.
Revolution
not only the oppressed parameters are freed from the hegemony of pitch, but also the sounds from the tyranny of music.
John Cage revolts not only against Schönberg-Boulez and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk van Wagner, but above all against the 'authoritarian society' of which they are but the manifestations.
Composition
"Die Negation des musikalischen Objekts als eines mit sich selber Identischen ist als historische Aufgabe John Cage zugefallen"
Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musik wozu, Literatur zu Noten, p. 223.
[Trans: The negation of the musical object as one with itself identical has fallen to historic task as John Cage]
It is apparent then that Heinz-Klaus Metzger's quotation above misses the mark. He confuses the medium with the message and overlooks that John Cage does not at all free the sound, but rather subordinates it under a discourse on music. And that is not the only metamorphosis that music undergoes under the hands of John Cage.
As long as we can listen to the music that they make, we do not perceive them because we are submerged in the invisible world of music. As soon as they are transformed into sound sources, there appear pianists sitting behind their pianos, and Victrola(s) with their operator(s) as purely visual elements on the scene. And that sheds a new light on the introduction of the 'shadow play'. It appears that this is more than the third step in the silencing of music as described above: it also seals the transformation of music in sound source - an visual object, like the radio or the television in the living room. In that sense, the Europeras are a refined synthesis of both statements of John Cage in 1952: the transformation of music into sound - into soundscape - and the transformation of musical composition into the composition of real, visual and aural objects in real space.
But where we hear the historic recording from the Victrola or the magnificent transcriptions, the broken magic of music is restored in all its splendour. Nobody can remain unmoved by such beauty. To phrase it with Ryan: 'The 78s provide endearing snapshots of an irretrievable past and conjure up an expressivities that is implicit in their materiality--rather like faded old photographs in an album, they appear as images of both mortality and tenderness'.
The Material (2): the scenery
As usual in an opera, dancers and singers are integrated in the scenery. Unusual is that also the instrumentalists are integrated. And even more unusual is that the aural appearance of the singers is divorced from their visual appearance. [...] The character they are supposed to embody disappears behind the visual appearance of the singer himself. And that is altogether the case when the pianist has to play in shadow play: where we were supposed to hear music, we eventually get to see a pantomime.
The Material (3): the text
To John Cage, and in tradition of Antonin Artaud, the text - or the plot - is no longer a structuring element, but a material more on the same footing as music, acting and scenery.
The Structure of the operas
But, whereas the Surrealists used random combinations of disparate elements as a way of generating unsuspected resonances between apparently on-related objects, with John Cage it serves the opposite aim: to maintain the independence of the elements combined. And such autonomy goes inexorably lost when the elements are subordinated under an encompassing intention, be it intentionally or unconsciously, 'realistic' or 'surrealistic'.
The Material (4): revisited
'Independent but coexistent' hence: a radical negation of the organic integration of the arts in an encompassing 'Gesamtkunstwerk'. But, precisely therefore, opera is not quite suited for the division in its constituting parts.
Revolution
not only the oppressed parameters are freed from the hegemony of pitch, but also the sounds from the tyranny of music.
John Cage revolts not only against Schönberg-Boulez and Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk van Wagner, but above all against the 'authoritarian society' of which they are but the manifestations.
Composition
"Die Negation des musikalischen Objekts als eines mit sich selber Identischen ist als historische Aufgabe John Cage zugefallen"
Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musik wozu, Literatur zu Noten, p. 223.
[Trans: The negation of the musical object as one with itself identical has fallen to historic task as John Cage]
It is apparent then that Heinz-Klaus Metzger's quotation above misses the mark. He confuses the medium with the message and overlooks that John Cage does not at all free the sound, but rather subordinates it under a discourse on music. And that is not the only metamorphosis that music undergoes under the hands of John Cage.
As long as we can listen to the music that they make, we do not perceive them because we are submerged in the invisible world of music. As soon as they are transformed into sound sources, there appear pianists sitting behind their pianos, and Victrola(s) with their operator(s) as purely visual elements on the scene. And that sheds a new light on the introduction of the 'shadow play'. It appears that this is more than the third step in the silencing of music as described above: it also seals the transformation of music in sound source - an visual object, like the radio or the television in the living room. In that sense, the Europeras are a refined synthesis of both statements of John Cage in 1952: the transformation of music into sound - into soundscape - and the transformation of musical composition into the composition of real, visual and aural objects in real space.
But where we hear the historic recording from the Victrola or the magnificent transcriptions, the broken magic of music is restored in all its splendour. Nobody can remain unmoved by such beauty. To phrase it with Ryan: 'The 78s provide endearing snapshots of an irretrievable past and conjure up an expressivities that is implicit in their materiality--rather like faded old photographs in an album, they appear as images of both mortality and tenderness'.
All game play is performance
All Game Play is Performance: The State of the Art Game - by Jane McGonigal
An interesting article: LINK
and a good Ted vid : http://www.avantgame.com/
EXTRACT
A few weeks ago, game designer Ernest Adams stated in an interview:
I certainly don't think Wagner would recognize the Gesamtkunstwerk in today's video games. They don't contain the breadth and depth of vision that he expected of himself. Could they perhaps be a Gesamtkunstwerk in the future? I'm not sure. We have to remember that Wagner lived in the days before motion pictures, before recorded sound, and in a time when all art was presentational, not interactive. Therefore Wagner's own intentions were informed by an assumption that drama would be live action performed by real human beings directly in front of other real human beings. Because video games do not (and
generally will not in the future) include an element of live performance, I don't think Wagner would recognize them as Gesamtkunstwerk (1).
Adams is wrong. Digital games do include an element of live performance already. All game play is performance.
Digital game play is dramatic performance. Players act “as if,” that magic Stanislavski acting technique; they act as if they believe the rules are real limitations, as if the artificial goal is of real importance. Digital game play is spectacular performance. Digital game play, especially physical, pervasive and tournament game play, generates attention and audiences. Digital game play is demonstrative performance. Players demonstrate their mastery of the game system, showing off their understanding and skill in manipulating and reading the game system’s input, feedback and control mechanisms. Digital game play is expressive performance. Players reveal aspects of their personal identity through their choices in avatar and verbal exchange. And digital game play is, increasingly, about traditional kinds of performance: singing, rhythm, dance, movement, social engineering, and even in-game protest.
*
The same year that John Reaves claimed all interactive art in the name of theater, new media theorist Lev Manovich wrote: “We are still waiting for a true digital Gesamtkunstwerk which will take full advantage of the ability to interweave the distinct languages of different media” (2).
We are no longer waiting. All games are performance, and today’s avant game is already approaching the Gesamtkunstwerk. Total performance is the state of the digital art game.
An interesting article: LINK
and a good Ted vid : http://www.avantgame.com/
EXTRACT
A few weeks ago, game designer Ernest Adams stated in an interview:
I certainly don't think Wagner would recognize the Gesamtkunstwerk in today's video games. They don't contain the breadth and depth of vision that he expected of himself. Could they perhaps be a Gesamtkunstwerk in the future? I'm not sure. We have to remember that Wagner lived in the days before motion pictures, before recorded sound, and in a time when all art was presentational, not interactive. Therefore Wagner's own intentions were informed by an assumption that drama would be live action performed by real human beings directly in front of other real human beings. Because video games do not (and
generally will not in the future) include an element of live performance, I don't think Wagner would recognize them as Gesamtkunstwerk (1).
Adams is wrong. Digital games do include an element of live performance already. All game play is performance.
Digital game play is dramatic performance. Players act “as if,” that magic Stanislavski acting technique; they act as if they believe the rules are real limitations, as if the artificial goal is of real importance. Digital game play is spectacular performance. Digital game play, especially physical, pervasive and tournament game play, generates attention and audiences. Digital game play is demonstrative performance. Players demonstrate their mastery of the game system, showing off their understanding and skill in manipulating and reading the game system’s input, feedback and control mechanisms. Digital game play is expressive performance. Players reveal aspects of their personal identity through their choices in avatar and verbal exchange. And digital game play is, increasingly, about traditional kinds of performance: singing, rhythm, dance, movement, social engineering, and even in-game protest.
*
The same year that John Reaves claimed all interactive art in the name of theater, new media theorist Lev Manovich wrote: “We are still waiting for a true digital Gesamtkunstwerk which will take full advantage of the ability to interweave the distinct languages of different media” (2).
We are no longer waiting. All games are performance, and today’s avant game is already approaching the Gesamtkunstwerk. Total performance is the state of the digital art game.
Tuesday 18 May 2010
Post-Opera and Postdramatic Music Theatre
Jelena Novak Contextualizing Opera in a Post-dramatic context: Differences and Repetitions
Postdramatic music theatre is a subspecies of postdramatic theatre in which verbal texts should be sung and not spoken. Here we come to a definition of the term music theatre. According to Patrice Pavis, music theatre is
[a] contemporary form of theatre (to be distinguished from opera, operetta and musical comedy) [that] endeavors to bring together text, music and visual staging without integrating them, merging them, or reducing them to a common denominator (as in Wagnerian opera), and without distancing them from one another (as in the didactic operas of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht).17
The term postdramatic music theatre differs from postopera in its intention to deconstruct the institution of theatre, and not that of opera.
Postoperatic Characteristics
Through the history of opera most librettos possessed some form of dramatic origin or structure. In this respect, most traditional operas could be provisionally termed ‘dramatic operas’. Einstein on the Beach by Glass/Wilson was a turning point in that respect and could serve as a paradigmatic example of postopera.
The characteristics of postopera are as follows:
Postdramatic music theatre is a subspecies of postdramatic theatre in which verbal texts should be sung and not spoken. Here we come to a definition of the term music theatre. According to Patrice Pavis, music theatre is
[a] contemporary form of theatre (to be distinguished from opera, operetta and musical comedy) [that] endeavors to bring together text, music and visual staging without integrating them, merging them, or reducing them to a common denominator (as in Wagnerian opera), and without distancing them from one another (as in the didactic operas of Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht).17
The term postdramatic music theatre differs from postopera in its intention to deconstruct the institution of theatre, and not that of opera.
Postoperatic Characteristics
Through the history of opera most librettos possessed some form of dramatic origin or structure. In this respect, most traditional operas could be provisionally termed ‘dramatic operas’. Einstein on the Beach by Glass/Wilson was a turning point in that respect and could serve as a paradigmatic example of postopera.
The characteristics of postopera are as follows:
- There is no domination of one operatic text over the others
- Differing from the works of postdramatic music theatre, postopera primarily questions, problematizes, and redefines the institution of opera, and not theatre
- The impossibility of any unity of operatic texts is shown. Texts exists in a rhizome-like relationship. Operatic works whose texts are not in a subordinated hierarchy have abandoned the search for a unity of texts which had featured throughout the history of opera.
Digital performance as Gesamtkunstwerk
Wagner and the Total Artwork - Steve Dixon
'While writers such as Grau have traced precedents to digital arts stretching back through antiquity, we will begin our own analysis of the ancestry of digital performance in the nineteenth century, with Richard Wagner and his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork). Wagner's vision, expressed in writings such as The Artwork of the Future (1849), was the creative unification of multiple artforms: theater, music, singing, dance, dramatic poetry, design, lighting, and visual art. Wagner's conception is central to the lineage of digital performance both in its advocacy for grand theatrical spectacle and in the paradigm of "convergence" that unites the Gesamtkunstwerk with contemporary understandings of the modern computer as a "meta-medium" that unifies all media (text, image, sound, video, and so on) within a single interface.
Wagner's own version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as expressed in his epic "music-dramas" (he disdained those who described his work as "opera") sought not only a synthesis of artforms but also the Holy Grail of many multimedia endeavors: user immersion. Wagner attempted to engineer a wholly immersive audience experience through a variety of technical and artistic strategies, from hiding the orchestra out of view to negate any "alienation effect" to his use of hypnotically repetitive musical leitmotifs and sonorous, elongated chords.' (pp41-42)
'While writers such as Grau have traced precedents to digital arts stretching back through antiquity, we will begin our own analysis of the ancestry of digital performance in the nineteenth century, with Richard Wagner and his notion of the Gesamtkunstwerk (Total Artwork). Wagner's vision, expressed in writings such as The Artwork of the Future (1849), was the creative unification of multiple artforms: theater, music, singing, dance, dramatic poetry, design, lighting, and visual art. Wagner's conception is central to the lineage of digital performance both in its advocacy for grand theatrical spectacle and in the paradigm of "convergence" that unites the Gesamtkunstwerk with contemporary understandings of the modern computer as a "meta-medium" that unifies all media (text, image, sound, video, and so on) within a single interface.
Wagner's own version of the Gesamtkunstwerk, as expressed in his epic "music-dramas" (he disdained those who described his work as "opera") sought not only a synthesis of artforms but also the Holy Grail of many multimedia endeavors: user immersion. Wagner attempted to engineer a wholly immersive audience experience through a variety of technical and artistic strategies, from hiding the orchestra out of view to negate any "alienation effect" to his use of hypnotically repetitive musical leitmotifs and sonorous, elongated chords.' (pp41-42)
Why improv?
Four factors:
1) the only solution for navigating through the wholeness of the composition
2) play - serious play; a method of finding other solutions, limited by a single mind
3) it allows each musician an opportunity to realise their full creativity within a trusting and boundered environment
4) I, too, hate 'helvetica' [dogmatic belief systems about music]
1) the only solution for navigating through the wholeness of the composition
2) play - serious play; a method of finding other solutions, limited by a single mind
3) it allows each musician an opportunity to realise their full creativity within a trusting and boundered environment
4) I, too, hate 'helvetica' [dogmatic belief systems about music]
Hubert Dreyfus on Merleau Ponty, embodyment and intercorporeality
Transcriptions from:
"The basic idea with Merleau-Ponty is that we are always moving to get an optimal grip. And now comes the place beneath what Heidegger was doing: even in perception; even in perceiving this table I am at a comfortable distance; but if I were that close I would sense that it was not the way to see it at its best way to get a grip. To talk Like MP he would say 'to get too close then there is too many details, if you get to far away you lose the details. He talks about how in a museum your body is led by a picture to move to the optimal distance where you experience maximum richness in all the detail, and the maximum clarity in the form."
CV- of interest here for ASJ is this notion of the embodiment of both the muscian 'getting to grips' with the instrument and meta-characters, and the play of improvisation; but also the audience embodying the artwork; finding ways to 'get a grip' by seeking its optimal richness and clarity.
Hubert Dreyfus on Embodiment (II-II) YOUTUBE
'Extract from 'On the Internet' "In cyberspace then, without out embodied ability to grasp meaning, relevence slips through our non existent fingers" ... "The world is a field of significance organised by and for beings like us with our bodies, desire, interest and purpose". Right: and that were Merleau Ponty comes in, non of that would have been said by Heidegger - Heidegger was just interested in how we could disclose the world without mental representation. But Merleau-Ponty sees that there isn't anything mental about it; at its basic level its our bodies and its skills for dealing with things and getting an optimal grip on things is what we need to understand. Then it becomes clear that computers just haven't got it: they haven't got bodies and they haven't got skills. And now something that you just read that is interesting: the world is organinsed by embodied beings like us to be coped with by embodied beings like us. And the computer is lost in the world from the bottom up' (6'30")
[On artificial minds] "Merleau-Ponty said: 'Its our body with its skills which allow us to relate to things by going around them, and with people through this interesting thing called intercorporeality where I don;t have to figure out your gestures - what you are thinking, what you are doing - I respond immediately with mine. MP thought of it as magical; now we have found something called mirror neurons, and these are also responsible for the firing nerves that lead to physical gestures"
CV- this reinforces my statement that ev2 (in CJA) are doing 75% of the work, we are the 'glue'
Hubert Dreyfus on Embodiment (I-II)YOUTUBE
Interviwer: discuss a little more about what Merleau-Ponty says 'get a grip on reality' because its much more than about learning; its not just what a distinguished doctor does in the surgery, or a pilot does when he is flying a plane"..."The basic idea with Merleau-Ponty is that we are always moving to get an optimal grip. And now comes the place beneath what Heidegger was doing: even in perception; even in perceiving this table I am at a comfortable distance; but if I were that close I would sense that it was not the way to see it at its best way to get a grip. To talk Like MP he would say 'to get too close then there is too many details, if you get to far away you lose the details. He talks about how in a museum your body is led by a picture to move to the optimal distance where you experience maximum richness in all the detail, and the maximum clarity in the form."
CV- of interest here for ASJ is this notion of the embodiment of both the muscian 'getting to grips' with the instrument and meta-characters, and the play of improvisation; but also the audience embodying the artwork; finding ways to 'get a grip' by seeking its optimal richness and clarity.
Hubert Dreyfus on Embodiment (II-II) YOUTUBE
'Extract from 'On the Internet' "In cyberspace then, without out embodied ability to grasp meaning, relevence slips through our non existent fingers" ... "The world is a field of significance organised by and for beings like us with our bodies, desire, interest and purpose". Right: and that were Merleau Ponty comes in, non of that would have been said by Heidegger - Heidegger was just interested in how we could disclose the world without mental representation. But Merleau-Ponty sees that there isn't anything mental about it; at its basic level its our bodies and its skills for dealing with things and getting an optimal grip on things is what we need to understand. Then it becomes clear that computers just haven't got it: they haven't got bodies and they haven't got skills. And now something that you just read that is interesting: the world is organinsed by embodied beings like us to be coped with by embodied beings like us. And the computer is lost in the world from the bottom up' (6'30")[On artificial minds] "Merleau-Ponty said: 'Its our body with its skills which allow us to relate to things by going around them, and with people through this interesting thing called intercorporeality where I don;t have to figure out your gestures - what you are thinking, what you are doing - I respond immediately with mine. MP thought of it as magical; now we have found something called mirror neurons, and these are also responsible for the firing nerves that lead to physical gestures"
CV- this reinforces my statement that ev2 (in CJA) are doing 75% of the work, we are the 'glue'
Friday 14 May 2010
What to do with Kyma
Some themes worth exploring:
- Plunderphonics - "to be and to refer"
- Choppy audio - LINK - COLDRAIN.mp3
- Teresa's broken Cd player
- the Mash-up
United State of pop 2008 - LINK
United State of pop 2007 - LINK
- Plunderphonics - "to be and to refer"
- Choppy audio - LINK - COLDRAIN.mp3
- Teresa's broken Cd player
- the Mash-up
United State of pop 2008 - LINK
United State of pop 2007 - LINK
Creativity and play 4 - Larry Lessig
Ted lecture - LINK
Larry Lessig, the Net’s most celebrated lawyer, cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the "ASCAP cartel" in his argument for reviving our creative culture.
Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues, with a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.
It's important to emphasize that what this is not -- is not what we call, quote, "piracy." I'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other people's content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner. I'm talking about people taking and recreating using other people's content, using digital technologies to say things differently. Now, the importance of this is not the technique that you've seen here. Because, of course, every technique that you've seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. It is how our kids think; it is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves.
First, that artists and creators embrace the idea; choose that their work be made available more freely. So, for example, they can say their work is available freely for non-commercial, this amateur-type of use, but not freely for any commercial use. And second, we need the businesses that are building out this read-write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly, to enable it, so that this ecology of free content, or freer content can grow on a neutral platform where they both exist simultaneously, so that more-free can compete with less-free, and the opportunity to develop the creativity in that competition can teach one the lessons of the other.
Larry Lessig, the Net’s most celebrated lawyer, cites John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the "ASCAP cartel" in his argument for reviving our creative culture.
Stanford professor Larry Lessig is one of our foremost authorities on copyright issues, with a vision for reconciling creative freedom with marketplace competition.
It's important to emphasize that what this is not -- is not what we call, quote, "piracy." I'm not talking about nor justifying people taking other people's content in wholesale and distributing it without the permission of the copyright owner. I'm talking about people taking and recreating using other people's content, using digital technologies to say things differently. Now, the importance of this is not the technique that you've seen here. Because, of course, every technique that you've seen here is something that television and film producers have been able to do for the last 50 years. The importance is that that technique has been democratized. It is now anybody with access to a $1,500 computer who can take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. These tools of creativity have become tools of speech. It is a literacy for this generation. This is how our kids speak. It is how our kids think; it is what your kids are as they increasingly understand digital technologies and their relationship to themselves.
First, that artists and creators embrace the idea; choose that their work be made available more freely. So, for example, they can say their work is available freely for non-commercial, this amateur-type of use, but not freely for any commercial use. And second, we need the businesses that are building out this read-write culture to embrace this opportunity expressly, to enable it, so that this ecology of free content, or freer content can grow on a neutral platform where they both exist simultaneously, so that more-free can compete with less-free, and the opportunity to develop the creativity in that competition can teach one the lessons of the other.
Creativity and play 3 - Paula Scher
Ted Lecture - LINK
Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she's done album covers, books, the Citibank logo ...) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Look for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.
the definition of play, number one, was engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor, and number two was gambling. And I realize I do both when I'm designing. I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time. And I think that if you're not, there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in,
Be serious, it says. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn. Taking a long walk by yourself, during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's, is serious. (Russell Baker)
Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance, or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense.
Serious design is imperfect. It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also -- often -- quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view. That's because the art of serious play is about invention, change, rebellion -- not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play.
And what -- the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was, what was going on around me and the things that came at the time I walked into design were the enemy. I really, really, really hated the typeface Helvetica. I thought the typeface Helvetica was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic, really repressive typeface, and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica.
so, my goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica was actually kind of hard because you had to find it. And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design in the early 70s. There weren't -- there wasn't a plethora of design publishing. You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe. You had to go places and find the stuff.
I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist -- because I didn't know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica.
And that kind of passion drove me into very serious play, a kind of play I could never do now because I'm too well-educated. And there's something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things.
The best way to accomplish serious design -- which I think we all have the opportunity to do -- is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. That doesn't happen very often,
People wanted it in big, expensive places. And that began to make it solemn. […] But it became the end of the seriousness of the play, and it started to, once again, become solemn.
I liked about it was, I was controlling my own idiotic information, and I was creating my own palette of information, and I was totally and completely at play.
I found that I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started with these things. So, while they became successful, I know how to make them, so I'm not a neophyte, and they're no longer serious -- they have become solemn. And that's a terrifying factor -- when you start something and it turns that way -- because it means that all that's left for you is to go back and to find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow, and that's all that matters.
Paula Scher looks back at a life in design (she's done album covers, books, the Citibank logo ...) and pinpoints the moment when she started really having fun. Look for gorgeous designs and images from her legendary career.
the definition of play, number one, was engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor, and number two was gambling. And I realize I do both when I'm designing. I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time. And I think that if you're not, there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in,
Be serious, it says. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn. Taking a long walk by yourself, during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's, is serious. (Russell Baker)
Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance, or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense.
Serious design is imperfect. It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also -- often -- quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view. That's because the art of serious play is about invention, change, rebellion -- not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play.
And what -- the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was, what was going on around me and the things that came at the time I walked into design were the enemy. I really, really, really hated the typeface Helvetica. I thought the typeface Helvetica was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic, really repressive typeface, and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica.
so, my goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica was actually kind of hard because you had to find it. And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design in the early 70s. There weren't -- there wasn't a plethora of design publishing. You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe. You had to go places and find the stuff.
I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist -- because I didn't know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica.
And that kind of passion drove me into very serious play, a kind of play I could never do now because I'm too well-educated. And there's something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things.
The best way to accomplish serious design -- which I think we all have the opportunity to do -- is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. That doesn't happen very often,
People wanted it in big, expensive places. And that began to make it solemn. […] But it became the end of the seriousness of the play, and it started to, once again, become solemn.
I liked about it was, I was controlling my own idiotic information, and I was creating my own palette of information, and I was totally and completely at play.
I found that I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started with these things. So, while they became successful, I know how to make them, so I'm not a neophyte, and they're no longer serious -- they have become solemn. And that's a terrifying factor -- when you start something and it turns that way -- because it means that all that's left for you is to go back and to find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow, and that's all that matters.
Creativity and play 2 - Dr Stuart Brown
Ted Lecture - LINK
A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults -- and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.
They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us.
And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play.
The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain. The brain is in search of a hand, and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way.
Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration.
A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play.
We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play.
if you think about life without play -- no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy -- and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime.
Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do.
So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell -- and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals.
neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability.
A pioneer in research on play, Dr. Stuart Brown says humor, games, roughhousing, flirtation and fantasy are more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults -- and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.
They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us.
And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play.
The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain. The brain is in search of a hand, and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way.
Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration.
A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play.
We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play.
if you think about life without play -- no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy -- and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime.
Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do.
So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell -- and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals.
neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability.
Peripheral vision test video
Subtitled films - what effect does the visual film have on the periphery of vision when reading the book on film i.e. subtitles?
Below is an extract from Godard's 'Le Weekend', which has been processed to give the impression the type of visual input through peripheral vision. The precise extract was the long rolling shot of the traffic jam, and was processed in Isadora using:
- findings from CJA at YTR about the ice movie (from After The Sinking) alluding to a sense of journey within the music
- watching a movie with subtitles we are, most of the time reading the 'book' but we are also aware of movement, shade, colour. Occasionally to frequently, we look up and catch snatches of faces, scenery, environment that helps us colour in our meta-film (the dimensionality Murch talks about). Sometimes we watch for longer periods filling in our narrative with supposition derived from intonation, paralinguistic and non-verbal communication (facial expression mostly).
- Godard was mentioned in Alvarez, and I have mentioned Le Weekend as an influence
- Massive pixelation avoiding copyright issues.
Below is an extract from Godard's 'Le Weekend', which has been processed to give the impression the type of visual input through peripheral vision. The precise extract was the long rolling shot of the traffic jam, and was processed in Isadora using:
- playback 0.4
- chop pixels = 1
- motion blur = 32, 28
- findings from CJA at YTR about the ice movie (from After The Sinking) alluding to a sense of journey within the music
- watching a movie with subtitles we are, most of the time reading the 'book' but we are also aware of movement, shade, colour. Occasionally to frequently, we look up and catch snatches of faces, scenery, environment that helps us colour in our meta-film (the dimensionality Murch talks about). Sometimes we watch for longer periods filling in our narrative with supposition derived from intonation, paralinguistic and non-verbal communication (facial expression mostly).
- Godard was mentioned in Alvarez, and I have mentioned Le Weekend as an influence
- Massive pixelation avoiding copyright issues.
Wednesday 12 May 2010
Creativity and play 1 - Tim Brown
Ted Lectures - LINK
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play.
[After first exercise - face drawing]
He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s.
And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about, kind of, showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And it’s this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.
But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.
David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as a designer.
creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed. Familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that, you know, creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment.
playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.
This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily.
[Picture of child dressed as an alien in foil]
(Laughter)
Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly -- when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really, kind of, interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?
We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.
And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas … And some cases. our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to, kind of, go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play.
And getting them to, kind of, forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits.
who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily.
Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, that’s just happening because they’re acting it out.
Research into kid’s behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role playing seriously. Because when children play a role they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays store, and another one’s playing house, then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to, quite quickly, to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken.
So when, as adults, we role play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life. And they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity.
Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to, kind of, unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play.
So playful exploration, playful building and role play. And those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I kind of admit, that this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play.
And as a result, you know, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time -- but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together.
You can be a serious professional adult, and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. You can be serious and play. So to kind of sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative, so there’s a connection.
At the 2008 Serious Play conference, designer Tim Brown talks about the powerful relationship between creative thinking and play.
[After first exercise - face drawing]
He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s.
And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about, kind of, showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And it’s this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else.
But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time, that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment, they’re the ones that feel most free to play.
David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as a designer.
creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed. Familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that, you know, creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment.
playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them.
This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily.
[Picture of child dressed as an alien in foil]
(Laughter)
Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly -- when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, what is it? Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, what can I do with it? And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really, kind of, interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we?
We’ve all told stories about how on Christmas morning, you know, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo, which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities, that as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn.
And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas … And some cases. our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to, kind of, go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play.
And getting them to, kind of, forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits.
who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily.
Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, that’s just happening because they’re acting it out.
Research into kid’s behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role playing seriously. Because when children play a role they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays store, and another one’s playing house, then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to, quite quickly, to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken.
So when, as adults, we role play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life. And they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity.
Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to, kind of, unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play.
So playful exploration, playful building and role play. And those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I kind of admit, that this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play.
And as a result, you know, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time -- but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together.
You can be a serious professional adult, and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or, it’s an and. You can be serious and play. So to kind of sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative, so there’s a connection.
Journal to Eliza
The most overtly gushing, self-indulgent, pathetic section of the Journal can be read in the entries for July 6th - 11th (inc.). One particular passage reads:
"eating my fowl, and my trouts & my cream & my strawberries, as meloncholly as a Cat; for want of you - by the by I have got one which sits quietly besides me, purring all day to my sorrows – & looking up gravely from time to time in my face, as if she knew my Situation. – how soothable my heart is Eliza, when such little things sooth it! for in some pathetic sinkings I feel even some support from this poor Cat – I attend to her purrings – & think they harmonize me - they are pianissimo at least, & do not disturb me. - poor Yorick! to be driven, wth all his sensibilities, to these resources - all powerful Eliza, that has had this Magic authority over him; to bend him thus to the dust - But I'll have my revenge, Hussy!
Download extract
http://www.ev2.co.uk/vear/sentimental/pp131-138new.pdf
cv - There may some mileage in including Sterne's Journal to Eliza (or his letters) in the Sentimental digital opera. It seems they complement each other, given that they were written during the some period. I am thinking of inviting an old voice to record them, perhaps in Shandy Hall. This would work well to have the pre-recorded "voice of Sterne" and his frailties working in polyphony with the vivacity of the live Yorick.
"eating my fowl, and my trouts & my cream & my strawberries, as meloncholly as a Cat; for want of you - by the by I have got one which sits quietly besides me, purring all day to my sorrows – & looking up gravely from time to time in my face, as if she knew my Situation. – how soothable my heart is Eliza, when such little things sooth it! for in some pathetic sinkings I feel even some support from this poor Cat – I attend to her purrings – & think they harmonize me - they are pianissimo at least, & do not disturb me. - poor Yorick! to be driven, wth all his sensibilities, to these resources - all powerful Eliza, that has had this Magic authority over him; to bend him thus to the dust - But I'll have my revenge, Hussy!
Download extract
http://www.ev2.co.uk/vear/sentimental/pp131-138new.pdf
cv - There may some mileage in including Sterne's Journal to Eliza (or his letters) in the Sentimental digital opera. It seems they complement each other, given that they were written during the some period. I am thinking of inviting an old voice to record them, perhaps in Shandy Hall. This would work well to have the pre-recorded "voice of Sterne" and his frailties working in polyphony with the vivacity of the live Yorick.
from the introduction by A. Alvarez
LS is a distinctly 'modern' novelist. He has the freedom, the total originality, the sense of a man creating the form from scratch and for himself, that we now expect from any serious artist. He has, too, the modernist's indifference to rules, as though aesthetic formalities were, in the final amalysis, boring, and the only vindication of a work of art were the immediacy with which it expresses the personality of it creator. Casualness, in short, was his declared artistic principle. [my italics] (p7)
the picaresque is essentially the form for obsessional story-tellers: one tale leads compulsively to another. (p7-8)
The whole rickety substance is supported and validated simply by the flow of talk, talk, talk. (p8)
Controlled inconsequentiality, irrelevance and continual interruption (p8)
He wrote to his daughter that the design of the book was 'to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do - so it runs most upon those gentle passions and affections, which aid so much to it' (p11)
and that is my Journey, which shall make you cry as much as ever it made me laugh - or I'll give up the Business of sentimental writing - and write to the body. (p11)
The more elegantly sentimental the narrator's responses, the more absurd the after-effects. (p13)
no matter how whole-heartedly he pursues high feeling, unredeemed reality keeps breaking in. (p13)
What Sterne and Godard have in common is a style and an obsession, or rather, a style to cope with an obsession. By style I mean something beyond their elegance and wit and detachment. Instead, it is the ability to maintain all those qualities whilst not leaving anything out, whilst refusing a narrow, exclusive focus. (p14)
And the action itself is casual. The plot in Godard's movies may be marginally tighter than in Sterne's novels, but it is rarely more important. What matters are the incidents that proliferate along the route, and the way in which they are handled. (p15)
The joke is there for those to see it, but is not insistent enough to offend those who can't. Either way, it remains a joke; the criterion is enjoyment; the aurthor demands simply that the reader relish as much as he does the full ambiguous subtlety of the situation, with no moral parti pris. (p17)
Sterne, by his own confession, also thought of himself as a man obsessed by women, a perpetually pinning lover. It seems to me to be nearer the truth to say that he was obsessed by feeling itself. (p18)
He [Sterne] was in the final months of his life, knowingly dying of consumption, racked by the after-effects of a savage cure for venereal disease, and desperate at the loss of a woman with whom he was - or imagined himself to be - violently in love. Mercifully none of this gets into the Journey. Instead it is chronicled at length in his Journal to Eliza, which was written literally in tandem with the novel. [...] So to say that it is a terrible production - indulgent, self-pitying, hysterical - is beside the point. Yet by the tiresome excess itself, the Journal somehow validates the Journey. For it helps to define a quality ion the wit which is hard to pin down. (p18)
the picaresque is essentially the form for obsessional story-tellers: one tale leads compulsively to another. (p7-8)
The whole rickety substance is supported and validated simply by the flow of talk, talk, talk. (p8)
Controlled inconsequentiality, irrelevance and continual interruption (p8)
He wrote to his daughter that the design of the book was 'to teach us to love the world and our fellow creatures better than we do - so it runs most upon those gentle passions and affections, which aid so much to it' (p11)
and that is my Journey, which shall make you cry as much as ever it made me laugh - or I'll give up the Business of sentimental writing - and write to the body. (p11)
The more elegantly sentimental the narrator's responses, the more absurd the after-effects. (p13)
no matter how whole-heartedly he pursues high feeling, unredeemed reality keeps breaking in. (p13)
What Sterne and Godard have in common is a style and an obsession, or rather, a style to cope with an obsession. By style I mean something beyond their elegance and wit and detachment. Instead, it is the ability to maintain all those qualities whilst not leaving anything out, whilst refusing a narrow, exclusive focus. (p14)
And the action itself is casual. The plot in Godard's movies may be marginally tighter than in Sterne's novels, but it is rarely more important. What matters are the incidents that proliferate along the route, and the way in which they are handled. (p15)
The joke is there for those to see it, but is not insistent enough to offend those who can't. Either way, it remains a joke; the criterion is enjoyment; the aurthor demands simply that the reader relish as much as he does the full ambiguous subtlety of the situation, with no moral parti pris. (p17)
Sterne, by his own confession, also thought of himself as a man obsessed by women, a perpetually pinning lover. It seems to me to be nearer the truth to say that he was obsessed by feeling itself. (p18)
He [Sterne] was in the final months of his life, knowingly dying of consumption, racked by the after-effects of a savage cure for venereal disease, and desperate at the loss of a woman with whom he was - or imagined himself to be - violently in love. Mercifully none of this gets into the Journey. Instead it is chronicled at length in his Journal to Eliza, which was written literally in tandem with the novel. [...] So to say that it is a terrible production - indulgent, self-pitying, hysterical - is beside the point. Yet by the tiresome excess itself, the Journal somehow validates the Journey. For it helps to define a quality ion the wit which is hard to pin down. (p18)
Saturday 8 May 2010
things to discuss further
Simultaneity - Describing the temporality of source material and the quantum possibility of other versions existing
Gesamkuntzwerk - analyze the translation with regard to interdisciplinarity (Vear)
Subtitled films - what effect does the visual film have on the periphery of vision when reading the book on film i.e. subtitles?
Use computers? Why not. Money they become performers. Possibilities they offer. Performativity
corporeality and embodiment with regard to today's dance class and relate it to CJA and ASJ
Repetition of material - link to comments of SFM; Delilio's Underworld repeating phrases and sentences; Godard and Legrand theme and Variations from Vivre sa vie; do we step in the same river twice?
Notion of play in creativity - Ted lecture
Gesamkuntzwerk - analyze the translation with regard to interdisciplinarity (Vear)
Subtitled films - what effect does the visual film have on the periphery of vision when reading the book on film i.e. subtitles?
Use computers? Why not. Money they become performers. Possibilities they offer. Performativity
corporeality and embodiment with regard to today's dance class and relate it to CJA and ASJ
Repetition of material - link to comments of SFM; Delilio's Underworld repeating phrases and sentences; Godard and Legrand theme and Variations from Vivre sa vie; do we step in the same river twice?
Notion of play in creativity - Ted lecture
Thursday 6 May 2010
Lost in translation
Gesamkuntzwerk:
"universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form, total work of art, or total artwork"
INTERMEDIA:
"universal artwork, synthesis of the arts, comprehensive artwork, all-embracing art form, total work of art, or total artwork"
INTERMEDIA:
- The ready-made or found object, in a sense an intermedium since it was not intended to conform to the pure medium, usually suggests this, and therefore suggests a location in the field between the general area of art media and those of life media. However, at this time, the locations of this sort are relatively unexplored, as compared with media between the arts. I cannot, for example, name work which has consciously been placed in the intermedium between painting and shoes. The closest thing would seem to be the sculpture of Claus Oldenburg, which falls between sculpture and hamburgers or Eskimo Pies, yet it is not the sources of these images themselves. An Oldenburg Eskimo Pie may look something like an Eskimo Pie, yet is neither edible nor cold. There is still a great deal to be done in this direction in the way of opening up aesthetically rewarding possibilities.
- Intermedia in general is the space that these works create, or re-open. It would be working with these disciplines in a way that is not bound by them, nor would it resolve them into a new unity.
- The vehicle I chose, the word "intermedia," appears in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1812 in exactly its contemporary sense--to define works which fall conceptually between media that are already known, and I had been using the term for several years in lectures and discussions before my little essay was written. Furthermore, as part of my campaign to popularize what was known as "avant-garde: for specialists only," to demystify it if you will, I had become a publisher of a small press, Something Else Press (1964-1974), which brought out editions of many primary sources and materials in the new arts (as well as reissuing works of the past which seemed to merit new attention--works by Gertrude Stein, the dadaists, the composer Henry Cowell, etc.). It seemed foolish simply to publish my little essay in some existing magazine, where it could be shelved or forgotten. So it was printed as the first Something Else Newsletter and sent to our customers, to all the people on our mailing list, to people to whom I felt the idea would be useful (for example, to artists doing what seemed to me to be intermedial work and to critics who might be in a position to discuss such work). All in all, I gave away some 10,000 copies of the essay, as many as I could afford; and I encouraged its republication by anyone who asked for permission to do so. It was reprinted seven or eight times that I knew of, and it still lives on in print in various books, not just of mine, but where it has been anthologized along with other texts of the time or as part of surveys.
- The term shortly acquired a life of its own, as I had hoped. In no way was it my private property. It was picked up; used and misused, often by confusion with the term "mixed media." This last is a venerable term from art criticism, which covers works executed in more than one medium, such as oil color and guache. But by extension it is also appropriate to such forms as the opera, where the music, the libretto, and the mise-en-scene are quite separate: at no time is the operagoer in doubt as to whether he is seeing the mise-en-scene, the stage spectacle, hearing the music, etc. Many fine works are being done in mixed media: paintings which incorporate poems within their visual fields, for instance. But one knows which is which.
- In intermedia, on the other hand, the visual element (painting) is fused conceptually with the words. We may have abstract calligraphy, concrete poetry, "visual poetry" (not any poem with a strong visual element, but the term is sometimes used to cover visual works in which some poem appears, often as a photography, or in which the photographed visual material is presented as a sequence with a grammar of its own, as if each visual element were a word of a sentence, as in certain works by Jean-François Bory or Duane Michaels).
Giovanni Battista Martini (1706-86)
Wikipedia link
Source material found online:
Of interest here is the Sonata score, created from a series of 5 short dances, and "arranged" by Alexandre Guilmant, as it fits in with the running theme of "meta-characters": Sterne as Yorick, Cello as Viol de Gamba, sax as Le Fleur etc (spurious at the moment but will bolster)
Sounds mentioned in ASJ
- Like music in an Italian Street
- A silence of a single moment
- A silence of some moments
- You look for ten minutes in one another's faces without saying a word
- his silence upon it becomes tormenting
- the own clock strikes four
- beat a drum, and play a march or two upon the fife
- you hired a drummer to attend you in this tour of yours
- play a little upon a fiddle - bravo
- 'Andromeda' of Euripides being represented at Abdera, the whole orchestra
- Tender strokes of nature which had wrought upon in that athletic speech of Persues, :O Cupid! Prince of God and men &e"
- The very sound was within the money
- clattering like a thousand devils
- in less than five minutes, had pulled out his fife, and leading a dance himself with the first note
- like time to eternity
- best pulses of any woman in the world
- Martini's Concert at Milan
- St Cecilia (patron saint of church music)
- The end of the orchestra
- 'I can't get out - I can;t get out', said the starling
- I heard his chains upon his legs
- Didi and Aeneas
- The cock Sparrow interrupted me
- A note too high or too ow
- in the upper or under part
- fill up the system of harmony
- jingling and rubbing
- a cold key with a flat third
- echoed it back to my ear
- a journey through each step of which music beats time to labour
- all the children rejoicing
- a small brook ran at the feet of a tree
- evening song upon thy pipe
- performed upon the vielle
- second dance
- beheld Religion mixing with dance
- the tempest of the night
- not speak one single word the wilde night
Wednesday 5 May 2010
On the subject of Montage
Many years ago Eato and I lived around the corner from each other in Lewisham, SE13. One evening we watched Le Weekend by Goddard, several times. That film, its choppy editing techniques, the absurd presence of a drummer in the woods, the non-linear narrative, has remained with me and has influenced my work ever since (listen "Poaching with Nellie (2003)). If I am to understand my approach to form then I must understand the discourse on montage.
All quotes from 'Montage' Sam Rohdie, Manchester University press
On Sergei Eisenstein:
"The third is a binding. This is achieved by association. Associations can be distant in time and distant spatially" (pp31)
"the shot is often ruptured by the successive one, a close-up held too long, or a distant association suddenly evoked, or an action that has no logical precedent, or an action that is beyond the frame), its lack of finish, sustains it, like a held note or a memory that never completely fades from the film, and when it is met agina in an echo, it is never quite the same. The echo does not conclude any shot, but reopens it, causes it to reverberate. It is a resurrection." (pp34)
On David Wark Griffith:
DWG's great achievement "was not this or that narrative technique of editing or shooting but his realisation (conscious or not) that the image had first to be detached from what it represented enabling it to attain autonomy and independence as an image" (p 43)
"No perception is without memories ... (Henri Bergson)*
"Intolerance consists of four stories separated historically in time and space. the gaps between the stories are considerable. ... Each story was a story of intolerance through the ages. Rather than telling the stories consequtively ... Griffith intercut each story with the other such that an incident in one time and space would be related to (answered) by another incident in another time and space ... a resonance and a memory" (p48)
"Parallelism in the film is essentially between separate places in simultaneous times and between symmetrical themes of remembering and forgetting" (p53)
On Eric Rohmer:
"The image is not for signifying, but to show ... for signifying, there si an excellent tool, spoken language" (fn p60)
On Jean Renoir:
"I do not think that the only way to make films is to begin at the beginning and end at the end as if is one huge scene. Personally, I prefer a method that conceives each scene as a small film in itself" (p95)
On Alain Resnais:
Discussing 'La Guerre est finie'
"That voice is, like that of the narrator, exterior to the car (it has no face), but unlike the narrator, it turns out to be interior to the fiction, being the voice of the driver describing his thoughts earlier in the journey." (p122)
"Multiple identities, voices from elsewhere, voices without faces, false voices." (p122)
"Interior with exterior, past with present, narrating and narrated." (pp 123)
"What is presented by the film are fragments, not f a whole or of continuities later to be reconstituted, but by kernels, nuclei of disparate, shifting, inconsistent elements that can generate others, or atomise and proliferate. Each term is like an exile, like Carlos, a refugee in a foreign land where nothing is clear and nothing what it appears to be. The lack of settlement and certainty of direction, time, place makes each shot a living thing, not tied and shackled by needs of succession, drama, sense or definiteness, 'held' in place. Instead shots are open to association, allusion, interlacing and the imaginary.
Wherever Carlos is, he is simultaneously elsewhere ... Every detail resonates with others or receives echoes from afar that transform it." (p123)
>>> cv- transplant the word tourist for exile; Yorick for Carlos; music phrase/ section for shot.
"With Resnais, the shot is affirmed by its discontinuity, thereby liberated to join other shots without losing itself, as in a collage. The classic film, in erasing the join between its fragments, for the sake of succession and action gains a fiction (the fiction of continuity), but loses the reality of itself (the reality of discontinuity)" (p124)
"Distinctions of real and imaginary, present and absent, past and present, are not secure because the images of the film are not secure" (p 131)
Conclusion: "Resnais's montage is not an operation of finding accords in relation to a succession, a logic or a continuity, but of the opening out of images towards others that they seem to call to or beckon, not a link, nor a binding, but affinities." (p132)
On Jean-Luc Goddard online LINK :
"In the Histoire(s), Godard is on a journey to the past of the cinema, to a vast underworld of images and scenes. As he proceeds, figures from the past emerge liberated from the film emulsion that contains them. Each of the encounters seems involuntary, as unheralded as Marcel's madeleine, and when they occur, Godard, like Marcel, refashions them, accepting them and refusing them in the gesture of making them his own and making the past of the cinema its future. (Is it not like the gesture of Wayne in The searchers when he takes Debbie in his arms? Debbie is real and a memory. Wayne wants to obliterate the memory, the image, but reality, the person, forces him back to accept. )
*Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason (wikipedia)
All quotes from 'Montage' Sam Rohdie, Manchester University press
On Sergei Eisenstein:
"The third is a binding. This is achieved by association. Associations can be distant in time and distant spatially" (pp31)
"the shot is often ruptured by the successive one, a close-up held too long, or a distant association suddenly evoked, or an action that has no logical precedent, or an action that is beyond the frame), its lack of finish, sustains it, like a held note or a memory that never completely fades from the film, and when it is met agina in an echo, it is never quite the same. The echo does not conclude any shot, but reopens it, causes it to reverberate. It is a resurrection." (pp34)
On David Wark Griffith:
DWG's great achievement "was not this or that narrative technique of editing or shooting but his realisation (conscious or not) that the image had first to be detached from what it represented enabling it to attain autonomy and independence as an image" (p 43)
"No perception is without memories ... (Henri Bergson)*
"Intolerance consists of four stories separated historically in time and space. the gaps between the stories are considerable. ... Each story was a story of intolerance through the ages. Rather than telling the stories consequtively ... Griffith intercut each story with the other such that an incident in one time and space would be related to (answered) by another incident in another time and space ... a resonance and a memory" (p48)
"Parallelism in the film is essentially between separate places in simultaneous times and between symmetrical themes of remembering and forgetting" (p53)
On Eric Rohmer:
"The image is not for signifying, but to show ... for signifying, there si an excellent tool, spoken language" (fn p60)
On Jean Renoir:
"I do not think that the only way to make films is to begin at the beginning and end at the end as if is one huge scene. Personally, I prefer a method that conceives each scene as a small film in itself" (p95)
On Alain Resnais:
Discussing 'La Guerre est finie'
"That voice is, like that of the narrator, exterior to the car (it has no face), but unlike the narrator, it turns out to be interior to the fiction, being the voice of the driver describing his thoughts earlier in the journey." (p122)
"Multiple identities, voices from elsewhere, voices without faces, false voices." (p122)
"Interior with exterior, past with present, narrating and narrated." (pp 123)
"What is presented by the film are fragments, not f a whole or of continuities later to be reconstituted, but by kernels, nuclei of disparate, shifting, inconsistent elements that can generate others, or atomise and proliferate. Each term is like an exile, like Carlos, a refugee in a foreign land where nothing is clear and nothing what it appears to be. The lack of settlement and certainty of direction, time, place makes each shot a living thing, not tied and shackled by needs of succession, drama, sense or definiteness, 'held' in place. Instead shots are open to association, allusion, interlacing and the imaginary.
Wherever Carlos is, he is simultaneously elsewhere ... Every detail resonates with others or receives echoes from afar that transform it." (p123)
>>> cv- transplant the word tourist for exile; Yorick for Carlos; music phrase/ section for shot.
"With Resnais, the shot is affirmed by its discontinuity, thereby liberated to join other shots without losing itself, as in a collage. The classic film, in erasing the join between its fragments, for the sake of succession and action gains a fiction (the fiction of continuity), but loses the reality of itself (the reality of discontinuity)" (p124)
"Distinctions of real and imaginary, present and absent, past and present, are not secure because the images of the film are not secure" (p 131)
Conclusion: "Resnais's montage is not an operation of finding accords in relation to a succession, a logic or a continuity, but of the opening out of images towards others that they seem to call to or beckon, not a link, nor a binding, but affinities." (p132)
On Jean-Luc Goddard online LINK :
"In the Histoire(s), Godard is on a journey to the past of the cinema, to a vast underworld of images and scenes. As he proceeds, figures from the past emerge liberated from the film emulsion that contains them. Each of the encounters seems involuntary, as unheralded as Marcel's madeleine, and when they occur, Godard, like Marcel, refashions them, accepting them and refusing them in the gesture of making them his own and making the past of the cinema its future. (Is it not like the gesture of Wayne in The searchers when he takes Debbie in his arms? Debbie is real and a memory. Wayne wants to obliterate the memory, the image, but reality, the person, forces him back to accept. )
None of Godard's memories or citations are ever unmediated. They come to him as what they are and, at the moment they arrive, are different than they are, recalled from the dead, shadows and traces of themselves. And they are unmoored, taken from the film they once were part of, disconnected from their origins to be reconnected into another beginning, into other cloths, other films, other sequences"
*Bergson considers the appearance of novelty as a result of pure undetermined creation, instead of as the predetermined result of mechanistic forces. His philosophy emphasises pure mobility, unforeseeable novelty, creativity and freedom; thus one can characterize his system as a process philosophy. It touches upon such topics as time and identity, free will, perception, change, memory, consciousness, language, the foundation of mathematics and the limits of reason (wikipedia)
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