Taken from Auslander 'Liveness'
'An importance consequence of thinking about live and mediatized performance as belonging to the same mediatic system is the inscription of live performance within he historical logic of media identified by Marshall McLuhan (1964:158): "A new medium is never an addition to an old one, nor does it leave the old one in peace. It never ceases to oppress he older media until it finds new shapes and positions for them." p6
'Linda Dusman, a composer, has suggested that the dominance of recording as the normative experience of music has made it almost impossible for audiences to hear a live musical performance as something actually occurring in the moment rather than a reproduction of a recording." p38
'Benjamen's notion of a mass desire for proximity, and its alliance with a desire for reproduced objects, provides a useful matrix for understanding the interrelation of live and mediatized forms [...] headphones clapped on their ears are trying to achieve a kind of aural intimacy that can be obtained only from the reproduction of sound" p39
'Evan Eisenberg distinguishes the experince of monphonic and stereophonic recordings by saying that: "Stereo [...] arrays the musicians before an empty space ... The introduction of stereo ... changed the phenomenology of the phonograph by adding a spatial, and hence visual aspect" (Eisenberg 1987: 64-5, my emphasis). Eisenberg's point is an imposrtant one: when sound is divorced from sight by virtue of technological mediation, the aural experience nevertheless evokes a visual one: "every mode of record listening leaves us with a need for something, if not someone, to see and touch" (ibid. :65). p85
Monday 7 February 2011
phenomenology of music
PHENOMENOLOGY OF MUSIC
Study Day, 18 February 2011
Room ST274/5 Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, WC1B 5DN
Institute of musical research
Music, Phenomenology and Time Consciousness:
Reflections after Husserl
David Clarke
Professor of Music, Newcastle University
As the founding father of modern phenomenology Edmund Husserl remains an important reference point for the field; even the most trenchant critiques of his work do not cancel it out. Husserl has especial salience for music studies, since he treats music as paradigmatic for our understanding of temporality, in turn the essence of consciousness and hence of our lived experience of the world. Thus Husserl’s corpus of writings on time consciousness – published in translation as On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917) – represents as significant a starting point as any for an inquiry into music and phenomenology. Key to Husserl’s account of temporality is the concept of retention: a form of immediate memory, which simultaneously explains and problematises how the present is apprehended subjectively (as opposed to modeled mathematically as a durationless point on a line). The concept is defined differentially, being distinguished from (among other concepts) recollection, a more enactive kind of remembering or recalling. Much is at stake in the opposition between these terms, since Husserl attributes aprimordiality to retention that he associates with an irreducible transcendental subjectivity. It is this privileging and its attendant ‘metaphysics of presence’ that Derrida was famously keen to deconstruct and insert in its place the linguistically founded notion of différance. What might the study of music have to contribute to such debates (and vice-versa)? For one thing, it might investigate the role of recollection in a way that is missing in Husserl’s account, and show how this relates to a signifying dimension of music that he left insufficiently acknowledged. However, rather than necessarily corroborating Derrida’s notion of the differential movement of the signifier as the ultra-transcendental principle, this line of reasoning might instead underscore the distinction between retention and recollection, and with it the need to acknowledge the significance of a phenomenological dimension in musical experience that remains distinct from, even though intimately bound up with, the semiological. This, then, would point to phenomenology as a necessary element in the study of musical meaning.
Dyson - Sounding New media
Interesting quote from Immersion and Embodiment in the arts and culture
"The use of narrative is important for a number of reasons. First, it attaches to a sense of causality; second, it allows for sounds to be deployed in time; third, and most important, it creates "space" within the piece - allowing different sounds their difference, a degree of identity, a certain differentiation.
"The use of narrative is important for a number of reasons. First, it attaches to a sense of causality; second, it allows for sounds to be deployed in time; third, and most important, it creates "space" within the piece - allowing different sounds their difference, a degree of identity, a certain differentiation.
Monday 11 October 2010
Postdramatic theatre Lehmann
With the end of the 'Gutenberg galaxy' and the advent of new technologies the written text and the book are being called into question. The mode of perception is shifting: a simultaneous and multi-perspectival form of perceiving is replacing the linear-successive. p16
In the emergence of a new paradigm, the 'future' structures and stylistic traits almost unavoidbaly appear mixed in with the conventional. p24
certainly, even throughout the modern era, the modern theatre for its devotees was an event in which dramatic text played only one part - and often not the most important - of experiences sought. Yet despite all the individual entertaining effects of the staging, the textual elements of plot, character (or at least dramatic personae) and a moving story predominately told in dialogue remained the structuring components. They were associated with the keyword 'drama' and informed not only its theory but also the expectations of theatre. p31
Lehman can show that theatre and drama as such have drifted apart in the second half of the twentieth century. Intro p3
Artaud and Adorno also insists, however, that the spasm (Zuckung) organises itself into a sign or - as Adorno says - tha mimesis is realized through a process of aesthetic rationality and 'construction'. It gains its logic, as much as its sound material, through a musical organisation. It would not represent a logic (for example a ploy) given prior to the theatrical signs. p38
Gorki himself, he wrote [Peter Stein], had not called his piece a 'drama', 'play', tragedy' or 'comedy' but 'scenes'. The theatre here showed 'less a succession, a development of a story. more an involvement of inner and outer states'. p68
According to Richard Schechner, the plot of a drama can easily be summer up by compiling a list of the changes that occur to the dramatis personae between the beginning and the end of the dramatioc process. p77
cv>>> so if there is a plot in DO it is the list of changes that occur within each individual audient.
---
The impact of media onstage on performance manifests itself not only in the use of high-tech 'multimedia' onstage. [...] Given that the new thetare in this way is much more immediately informed by cultural practices other than traditional drama (from visual art and live art, to movies, TV channel hopping, pop music and the internet), the question may be asked why it would still be necessary or even appropriate to relate new theatre and performance work to drama at all. intro p 10
Such postdramatic theatre has thus not given up on relating the world but crucially no longer represents the world as a surveyable whole. p12 intro
In the emergence of a new paradigm, the 'future' structures and stylistic traits almost unavoidbaly appear mixed in with the conventional. p24
certainly, even throughout the modern era, the modern theatre for its devotees was an event in which dramatic text played only one part - and often not the most important - of experiences sought. Yet despite all the individual entertaining effects of the staging, the textual elements of plot, character (or at least dramatic personae) and a moving story predominately told in dialogue remained the structuring components. They were associated with the keyword 'drama' and informed not only its theory but also the expectations of theatre. p31
Lehman can show that theatre and drama as such have drifted apart in the second half of the twentieth century. Intro p3
Artaud and Adorno also insists, however, that the spasm (Zuckung) organises itself into a sign or - as Adorno says - tha mimesis is realized through a process of aesthetic rationality and 'construction'. It gains its logic, as much as its sound material, through a musical organisation. It would not represent a logic (for example a ploy) given prior to the theatrical signs. p38
Gorki himself, he wrote [Peter Stein], had not called his piece a 'drama', 'play', tragedy' or 'comedy' but 'scenes'. The theatre here showed 'less a succession, a development of a story. more an involvement of inner and outer states'. p68
According to Richard Schechner, the plot of a drama can easily be summer up by compiling a list of the changes that occur to the dramatis personae between the beginning and the end of the dramatioc process. p77
cv>>> so if there is a plot in DO it is the list of changes that occur within each individual audient.
---
The impact of media onstage on performance manifests itself not only in the use of high-tech 'multimedia' onstage. [...] Given that the new thetare in this way is much more immediately informed by cultural practices other than traditional drama (from visual art and live art, to movies, TV channel hopping, pop music and the internet), the question may be asked why it would still be necessary or even appropriate to relate new theatre and performance work to drama at all. intro p 10
Such postdramatic theatre has thus not given up on relating the world but crucially no longer represents the world as a surveyable whole. p12 intro
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Some words on the live and the lost
Taken from Introduction to 'Edges of Loss' From Modern drama to postmodern theory by Mark Pizzato
'As 'live' performance, theatre exists only for a moment, demonstrating the mortality of both actor and spectator. [...] As Herbert Blau puts it: "The body in performance is dying in front of your eyes. Unceasing process is out there in the flesh. Or hangs, perceptually, on the audience's breath" (Audience 366). Whether the play ios tragic, comic, or melodrama, loss onstage creates a tentative tie between actors and spectators, though each experiences something different while sharing something together. p1
'As 'live' performance, theatre exists only for a moment, demonstrating the mortality of both actor and spectator. [...] As Herbert Blau puts it: "The body in performance is dying in front of your eyes. Unceasing process is out there in the flesh. Or hangs, perceptually, on the audience's breath" (Audience 366). Whether the play ios tragic, comic, or melodrama, loss onstage creates a tentative tie between actors and spectators, though each experiences something different while sharing something together. p1
First creative meeting with DC
9-10-2010
Damian and I are keen to understand the 'where' of this digital opera, especially as we are employing streaming audio. The conversation developed into the individual's experience within a collective event. We talked about the notion of having individuals around the world sharing this event i.e. the performance of the piece streaming over the internet and individuals in hotel lobbies around the world 'listening in'.
A further discussion surrounded the nature of the live element, and appropriateness... perhaps a development of the (narrow band) A-I that is present in cyber-Superfield [Mumbai] could be employed, so that the app access the iPhone clock and it knows what time of day it is thereby adjusting the parameters (of file type selection, length etc) according to the dynamics of the day with which people are listening.
Damian understands this piece - at this point in time, without having entered into a serious R&D process - as about the expectation at the point of departure ... the thoughts and feelings that go through ones mind as we depart for a journey. He mentioned that we could use Eurostar at Waterloo.
Themes that are present:
1: road movie - embarking on a journey
2: Philosophy of pleasure
3: Simultaneity of journies present in the library
4: ever present pain of being apart from Eliza
The composition will take 3 forms:
1: live stream of a performance to people in hotel lobbies, train departure lounges, airport lounge etc at specific times during the day (accommodate world clock). [The individual audio from the instrumentalists will also be put into the ASJ library for part 2 below
2: An app similar to SFM that intelligently streams an individualized performance of the piece from the master library
3: Live performances - with Davy McGuire visual and a live Yorick - that is simultaneously streamed. [This will require stage 2 funding]
Damian and I are keen to understand the 'where' of this digital opera, especially as we are employing streaming audio. The conversation developed into the individual's experience within a collective event. We talked about the notion of having individuals around the world sharing this event i.e. the performance of the piece streaming over the internet and individuals in hotel lobbies around the world 'listening in'.
A further discussion surrounded the nature of the live element, and appropriateness... perhaps a development of the (narrow band) A-I that is present in cyber-Superfield [Mumbai] could be employed, so that the app access the iPhone clock and it knows what time of day it is thereby adjusting the parameters (of file type selection, length etc) according to the dynamics of the day with which people are listening.
Damian understands this piece - at this point in time, without having entered into a serious R&D process - as about the expectation at the point of departure ... the thoughts and feelings that go through ones mind as we depart for a journey. He mentioned that we could use Eurostar at Waterloo.
Themes that are present:
1: road movie - embarking on a journey
2: Philosophy of pleasure
3: Simultaneity of journies present in the library
4: ever present pain of being apart from Eliza
The composition will take 3 forms:
1: live stream of a performance to people in hotel lobbies, train departure lounges, airport lounge etc at specific times during the day (accommodate world clock). [The individual audio from the instrumentalists will also be put into the ASJ library for part 2 below
2: An app similar to SFM that intelligently streams an individualized performance of the piece from the master library
3: Live performances - with Davy McGuire visual and a live Yorick - that is simultaneously streamed. [This will require stage 2 funding]
Thursday 5 August 2010
Rethinking Opera by Christopher Fox (prof)
Finally some sense is being spoken:
Rethinking Opera by Christopher Fox LINK
Quotes:
Opera is, above all, a dramatic form, its defining feature being that its dramas are played out in music by singers
cv - don't like the use of the term singers - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.
everything we see and hear flows from dramatic necessity: the musical idiom, the words, the pace and pitch of the vocal lines.
How many operas of the last 100 years have carried on this tradition of innovation? No more than a handful: Aldan Berg's Wozzeck, Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach ... it's not a list I find easy to extend.
the concept-led 'directors' opera' of Patrice Chéreau, Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellers and others has attempted to cover up the absence of new ideas by shoe-horning old texts into new thearical shapes.
history shows us that dramatic innovation in opera has always been led by composers not institutions.
So many things have changed the ways in which we experience drama - film, amplification, telecommunications - yet most investment in new opera still goes into works in which singers with big voices attempt to project over symphony orchestras.
The singers act out stories with beginnings, middles and endings and articulate their thoughts and feelings through vocal lines whose contours owe more to musical fashion than to the expressive identity of individual characters with the drama.
There is little sense in most new operas that their creators have given any serious consideration to whether or not it is appropriate to use a theatrical apparatus perfected by Wagner in the 1870s and 80s.
As long as new works continue to be created for the existing resources of these imposing venues, the problem will remain
Nor, in most contemporary opera, is there an obvious dramatic reason why these characters should sing rather than talk
Nevertheless I see no intrinsic reason why there can not be a form of theatre involving singers and music which has rather more to do with the experience of people n the twenty-first century and which makes a more sophisticated combination of voices and music than can be found in musical theatre.
I would like to advocate a fundamental reform, a return to first principles, as if Orfeo and all the subsequent history of opera had never happened, an attempt to imagine a form of theatre which entirely depends on live music and singing.
it will probably have something to do with the great theatrical innovators of the last 100 years - Brecht, Beckett, Cunningham, Bausch for example - and it will probably use new spaces and new instrumental media
Imagine a theatre in which music was not just a suggestive soundtrack but the drama itself, in which singers sang not because they happened to be opera-singers but because singing was an essential part of their characters' identities. It would be quite something.
cv - Again I don't like the use of the term singers and I reckon this will impede his progression with his reformed opera - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.
Rethinking Opera by Christopher Fox LINK
Quotes:
Opera is, above all, a dramatic form, its defining feature being that its dramas are played out in music by singers
cv - don't like the use of the term singers - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.
everything we see and hear flows from dramatic necessity: the musical idiom, the words, the pace and pitch of the vocal lines.
How many operas of the last 100 years have carried on this tradition of innovation? No more than a handful: Aldan Berg's Wozzeck, Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach ... it's not a list I find easy to extend.
the concept-led 'directors' opera' of Patrice Chéreau, Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellers and others has attempted to cover up the absence of new ideas by shoe-horning old texts into new thearical shapes.
history shows us that dramatic innovation in opera has always been led by composers not institutions.
So many things have changed the ways in which we experience drama - film, amplification, telecommunications - yet most investment in new opera still goes into works in which singers with big voices attempt to project over symphony orchestras.
The singers act out stories with beginnings, middles and endings and articulate their thoughts and feelings through vocal lines whose contours owe more to musical fashion than to the expressive identity of individual characters with the drama.
There is little sense in most new operas that their creators have given any serious consideration to whether or not it is appropriate to use a theatrical apparatus perfected by Wagner in the 1870s and 80s.
As long as new works continue to be created for the existing resources of these imposing venues, the problem will remain
Nor, in most contemporary opera, is there an obvious dramatic reason why these characters should sing rather than talk
Nevertheless I see no intrinsic reason why there can not be a form of theatre involving singers and music which has rather more to do with the experience of people n the twenty-first century and which makes a more sophisticated combination of voices and music than can be found in musical theatre.
I would like to advocate a fundamental reform, a return to first principles, as if Orfeo and all the subsequent history of opera had never happened, an attempt to imagine a form of theatre which entirely depends on live music and singing.
it will probably have something to do with the great theatrical innovators of the last 100 years - Brecht, Beckett, Cunningham, Bausch for example - and it will probably use new spaces and new instrumental media
Imagine a theatre in which music was not just a suggestive soundtrack but the drama itself, in which singers sang not because they happened to be opera-singers but because singing was an essential part of their characters' identities. It would be quite something.
cv - Again I don't like the use of the term singers and I reckon this will impede his progression with his reformed opera - perhaps the musical voice would be more relevant as it could include musicised treatments of human voice other than 'singing', and would include the instrumentalist voice.
Friday 16 July 2010
A theatre is not the place for these pieces
The theatre space paradigm is wrong for the setting of these pieces. I need to work more with the Palassmaa-ness of staging, finding site-specific spaces that inform the sense of place within the opera; e.g. CJA in an ice rink or meat locker, ASJ in hotel lobbies, Illiad in war cemetery or paintball arena.
Taking these into consideration would free up the individual media to speak their message - the CJA video projection is not, nor was it overdone, but it was trying too hard to be something more than it is.
I am reminded of Infra http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7588062453697698538# by Wayne McGregor and how I perceived the video element to be a projection from the minds of the dancers. In CJA the musicians should be allowed and seen as musicians embodying the material and their instruments and the projection be 'from them' in a way that we percieve it to be so (perhaps projected on a screen above their heads). This is different to CJA @ Shift Happens which tried to immerse the 'characters' in a virtual place - and miscounted the fact that these are simply musicians in a theatre - thus making trying to decieve the audience through visual representation instead of feeding their mind with another vague sign.
The employment of my iPhone streaming will help this site-specificity greatly, and more-so the added media of 'being in a space'. It also brings into the equation the work with Seven Sisters and cyber-SFM.
These decisions still relies on the creative minds of theatre makers, but circumvents the 'old' meanings of the theatre hall and its pros arch.
Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa – Eyes of the Skin:
A walk through the forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities; Bachelard speaks of ‘the polyphony of sense’. The eye collaborates with the body and the other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.
Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue and muscle. Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense off being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self.
The body is not, however, a mere physical entity; our perception is enriched through memory and past experience, of vivid imagination and dream, of the past and the future. There exists an exchange between the intellect and the intrinsic, mediating the senses with the imagined, the existential and the metaphysical.
Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creases an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears.
Pallasmaa J., (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Wiley Academy, Chichester.
Taking these into consideration would free up the individual media to speak their message - the CJA video projection is not, nor was it overdone, but it was trying too hard to be something more than it is.
I am reminded of Infra http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7588062453697698538# by Wayne McGregor and how I perceived the video element to be a projection from the minds of the dancers. In CJA the musicians should be allowed and seen as musicians embodying the material and their instruments and the projection be 'from them' in a way that we percieve it to be so (perhaps projected on a screen above their heads). This is different to CJA @ Shift Happens which tried to immerse the 'characters' in a virtual place - and miscounted the fact that these are simply musicians in a theatre - thus making trying to decieve the audience through visual representation instead of feeding their mind with another vague sign.
The employment of my iPhone streaming will help this site-specificity greatly, and more-so the added media of 'being in a space'. It also brings into the equation the work with Seven Sisters and cyber-SFM.
These decisions still relies on the creative minds of theatre makers, but circumvents the 'old' meanings of the theatre hall and its pros arch.
Prof. Juhani Pallasmaa – Eyes of the Skin:
A walk through the forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities; Bachelard speaks of ‘the polyphony of sense’. The eye collaborates with the body and the other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.
Every touching experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of space, matter and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue and muscle. Architecture strengthens the existential experience, one’s sense off being in the world, and this is essentially a strengthened experience of self.
The body is not, however, a mere physical entity; our perception is enriched through memory and past experience, of vivid imagination and dream, of the past and the future. There exists an exchange between the intellect and the intrinsic, mediating the senses with the imagined, the existential and the metaphysical.
Sight isolates, whereas sound incorporates; vision is directional, whereas sound is omni directional. The sense of sight implies exteriority, but sound creases an experience of interiority. I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives. Buildings do not react to our gaze, but they do return our sounds back to our ears.
Pallasmaa J., (2005) The Eyes of the Skin. Wiley Academy, Chichester.
SWOT analysis with Aine post CJA at Shift H
Overview
- Although I am dealing with issues that can be seen to relate to postdramatic theatre, CJA is very dramatic
- the black footer focused the eyes ion the human NOT the performer
- It obscured the technology and therefore 2 of the performers
- due to pros-arch the audience were forced into their normal role;
- there was no immersion as no surround
- normal density of signs (Lehmann)
STRENGTHS
If we are to pursue this investigatory line with Ciaran as Lighting Designer then he needs the opportunity to explore the meaning of the work and his engagement with it.
Furthermore: if we are going for the 'cinema meets theatre'-ness (Cruden) then we need to employ televisual projection of the je and cv.
The big question here is were is this taking this research project?
Am I satisfying others need to make it visual?
Does this digital performance territory help inform digital opera?
- Although I am dealing with issues that can be seen to relate to postdramatic theatre, CJA is very dramatic
- the black footer focused the eyes ion the human NOT the performer
- It obscured the technology and therefore 2 of the performers
- due to pros-arch the audience were forced into their normal role;
- there was no immersion as no surround
- normal density of signs (Lehmann)
STRENGTHS
- scale
- attractive visuals
- 'slick'
- normal density of signs ~ no confusion with spectators role and engagement
- not handed a pre-digested narrative
- Audience removed from the performers
- framed - lacked immersion
- audience relegated to the normal engagement role
- watching something/ looking at something
- the gaze went through the 4th wall at/upon an event
- recieving the visuals and THEN the aural
- mind and music PRIMARY mediums
- did the lack of visuality give the lighting designer a lack of confidence which forced him to fill the void?
- any visual statement is TOO powerful ... they need to make room for the mind
- IS THEATRE THE RIGHT PLACE FOR THIS?
- more immersion
- What was it about Farruquito at Sadlers Wells in 2004
- The visual void - do not fill it
- Is the black box/ pros arch paradigm the place for this?
If we are to pursue this investigatory line with Ciaran as Lighting Designer then he needs the opportunity to explore the meaning of the work and his engagement with it.
Furthermore: if we are going for the 'cinema meets theatre'-ness (Cruden) then we need to employ televisual projection of the je and cv.
The big question here is were is this taking this research project?
Am I satisfying others need to make it visual?
Does this digital performance territory help inform digital opera?
prelim results from streaming
Yes - its an excellent facility to have "out there" and' in here", complementing the diegesis (or virtual diegesis).
The commercially available technology is not yet reliable to allow a three way relationship but by means of delaying live output to speakers we can get close with opnly 2 of the stratas:
over there and in here. I used nicecast as my server
Results from streaming tests
Software : delay (secs) : reliability of sync
itunes radio : 0.2 : 0-0.01
fstream : 0.23 : -1 – +1.5 secs
Flycast : x
Shoutcast Radio : x
Streamitall : 8 : +-5 secs
iPhone Safari (LAN) : 0.56 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]
iPhone Safari (Internet) : 0.62 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]
REFLECTION
- For ease of participant engagement I will use the Safari LAN option as this avoids download app issues and might work with blueberry devices or other smart phones too. TO BE TESTED
- The Safari option delay is huge compared to fstream but the reliability and ease of use is better
- The delay is compensated for by delaying the output to speakers in MAX - have to test using many devices and distances TO BE TESTED
- Have not found a reliable way of syncing the 2 audio streams (live and iphone) making the 2nd strata - "out there and in here" - difficult to achieve... shame because it works really well.
The commercially available technology is not yet reliable to allow a three way relationship but by means of delaying live output to speakers we can get close with opnly 2 of the stratas:
over there and in here. I used nicecast as my server
Results from streaming tests
Software : delay (secs) : reliability of sync
itunes radio : 0.2 : 0-0.01
fstream : 0.23 : -1 – +1.5 secs
Flycast : x
Shoutcast Radio : x
Streamitall : 8 : +-5 secs
iPhone Safari (LAN) : 0.56 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]
iPhone Safari (Internet) : 0.62 : +-0.1 secs [but not pause the stream but the playback]
REFLECTION
- For ease of participant engagement I will use the Safari LAN option as this avoids download app issues and might work with blueberry devices or other smart phones too. TO BE TESTED
- The Safari option delay is huge compared to fstream but the reliability and ease of use is better
- The delay is compensated for by delaying the output to speakers in MAX - have to test using many devices and distances TO BE TESTED
- Have not found a reliable way of syncing the 2 audio streams (live and iphone) making the 2nd strata - "out there and in here" - difficult to achieve... shame because it works really well.
Tuesday 13 July 2010
Audio streaming to iPhone live - where is Opera.
Now the dust has settled from Shift-Happens, I can reflect free from goal-orientated desire. I suspect that the visual opera paradigm is getting in the way of my research development and have decided to look sideways (and backwards).
There are two projects that are important to this research programme but have yet to be synthesised:
- cyber Superfield [Mumbai]
- Podwalker at NRM
Furthermore, I am beginning to understand that the audio material is also the visual language - through dimensionality- , not the performers (as this would be a bit 'old school'.) I wonder if http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/ would be interesting visual language?
I am hoping to use the mobile phone as a method of communication for the musicians and Yorick.
The importance of Podwalker was about being present in 2 spaces at once: the mind and the NRM, each effecting the experience. As such I am curious to explore the effect of live streaming to iPhones AND the projection of sound through loud speakers. I suspect that there will be a corresponding diegetic phenomonon of sound - and therefore our perceptive understanding of its meaning - coming from
- inside here (solo iPhone stream)
- out there (iPhone and Speakers sync)
- Over there (solo speakers)
These may correspond and relate to stage based diegesis of
- non-diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- meta diegetic sound/ music/ voice
I will implement this into the 'The Unchanging Sea" project and 'Kitchen Sink'
There are two projects that are important to this research programme but have yet to be synthesised:
- cyber Superfield [Mumbai]
- Podwalker at NRM
Furthermore, I am beginning to understand that the audio material is also the visual language - through dimensionality- , not the performers (as this would be a bit 'old school'.) I wonder if http://www.thebuildersassociation.org/ would be interesting visual language?
I am hoping to use the mobile phone as a method of communication for the musicians and Yorick.
The importance of Podwalker was about being present in 2 spaces at once: the mind and the NRM, each effecting the experience. As such I am curious to explore the effect of live streaming to iPhones AND the projection of sound through loud speakers. I suspect that there will be a corresponding diegetic phenomonon of sound - and therefore our perceptive understanding of its meaning - coming from
- inside here (solo iPhone stream)
- out there (iPhone and Speakers sync)
- Over there (solo speakers)
These may correspond and relate to stage based diegesis of
- non-diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- diegetic sound/ music/ voice
- meta diegetic sound/ music/ voice
I will implement this into the 'The Unchanging Sea" project and 'Kitchen Sink'
Friday 9 July 2010
Reaction to Causey's book in relation to above post
"The more interesting work in contemporary performance is concerned with the problems of digital culture, and are in fact not disturbed by the illusions and aesthetics of the virtual, but rather dealing with the material and bio-politics of embeddedness." (p4)
cv>>> I think this applies to me. My overarching focus is not the aesthetics of the music technology but
a book (or report) embedded as a musical score
the music embedded in the musicians horizons of play
the musicians embodying the situation, getting to grips with it
The audience embodying the wholeness of the performance: the wholeness of an idea of the book!
Q: is there room in all of this for a visual element?
"The anamorphic projection of television in freeze-frame, slow motion, fast forward and reverse, through a kind of being in technology with morphing identities that exist within the fragility of digital space, present the technologically triggered uncanniness of technoculture subjectivity. The experience of the uncanny within the space of technology seems easily constructed." (p18)
cv>>> yes it does, so what do we do with it and why? Perhaps there is something here in the 'uncanny' that helps me to understand the performativity and spectator response to my musicians. Does our audience understand the musician-embodiment as 'out-there'; the musicians are already aware of ourselves as 'out there' projecting a voice into the space... in a sens we are already controlling the uncanny.
"Questions: First, how has the ontology of the performance (liveness), which exists before and after mediatization, been altered within the space of technology? Second, how do we understand the processes of performance which converges with mediated technologies of representation? [...] One way to start to answer both questions is by conceiving of theatre as a medium that overlaps and subsumes or is subsumed by other media including television, film, radio, print and computer-aided hyper-media. Such a process will change, considerably, our definition of the boundaries of the theatre and the ontology of performance." (p29)
cv>>> This is my PhD question, only as applied to music and sound within theatre performance.
cv>>> I think this applies to me. My overarching focus is not the aesthetics of the music technology but
a book (or report) embedded as a musical score
the music embedded in the musicians horizons of play
the musicians embodying the situation, getting to grips with it
The audience embodying the wholeness of the performance: the wholeness of an idea of the book!
Q: is there room in all of this for a visual element?
"The anamorphic projection of television in freeze-frame, slow motion, fast forward and reverse, through a kind of being in technology with morphing identities that exist within the fragility of digital space, present the technologically triggered uncanniness of technoculture subjectivity. The experience of the uncanny within the space of technology seems easily constructed." (p18)
cv>>> yes it does, so what do we do with it and why? Perhaps there is something here in the 'uncanny' that helps me to understand the performativity and spectator response to my musicians. Does our audience understand the musician-embodiment as 'out-there'; the musicians are already aware of ourselves as 'out there' projecting a voice into the space... in a sens we are already controlling the uncanny.
"Questions: First, how has the ontology of the performance (liveness), which exists before and after mediatization, been altered within the space of technology? Second, how do we understand the processes of performance which converges with mediated technologies of representation? [...] One way to start to answer both questions is by conceiving of theatre as a medium that overlaps and subsumes or is subsumed by other media including television, film, radio, print and computer-aided hyper-media. Such a process will change, considerably, our definition of the boundaries of the theatre and the ontology of performance." (p29)
cv>>> This is my PhD question, only as applied to music and sound within theatre performance.
Response to CJA at Shift Happens
Monday 5th July 2010
CJA performed at the Shift Happens conference for 'Art Learning and Technology'. This was the first time a visual element had been composed and implemented by visual artists live during the performance: Ciaran Bagnall (lighting designer) and Damian Cruden (director).
Some thoughts from the 'inside'
I suspect that the visual language was too strong to focus the eye on the ear and instead the ocularcentricity of Western audiences understood it from a primarily visual context, placing the aural realm as a 'backing' to this low-key projection. My fear with this scenario is that it would fall into hybrid of no particular focus and, if I witnessed someone else attempt it, I would hate it.
This is not a reflection on the people involved, but it says more about the working process - flying people straight into a gig with no rehearsal.
Furthermore, the musicians were heavily masked allowing their heads to 'float' above a black footer. For me, there is something special about witnessing a musician a) embody an instrument and b) embody a sense of place, the sound theatre. As I understand this - backed up by Nicola LeFanu's statement about the studio performance - there is a double empathy induced in the spectator ... a deep and complex understanding of what 'they are doing' and what 'we are hearing'.
I extend this to all the natural gestures within ev2 as we are double embodied in the wholeness of the music: we are emboying an instrument 'playing' with embedded material, whilst using our ears to make sense of the whole thing ... in MP words we are embodying the perception to get to grips with the phemononology.
Aside from this I experienced a double empathy for the first time recently - watching a run of Railway Children the character Peter gave Schapanski a boy-to-father-figure hug as he said goodbye. I felt myself projecting my own son's empathy on this experience; in a sense it wasn't me who was 'feeling' the hug, but I was seeing through my sons eyes, what it would be like to witness this theatrical act and 'feel' the hug.
I mention this because it is something akin to how I imagine people are experiencing ev2 performing CJA ... so why hide us behind a black footer? The answer is simple "to tidy us up" as Damian joked (no he was serious). There is something really important here:
1) we need to be seen, ev2 ARE the performative element that makes it stand out from an ordinary EA gig with a VJ
2) our gestures are natural and unforced separating from 60's music theatre. It is not a theatre of gesture and spectacle but of embodiment (Mike Kenny knew this)
3) The visual should not be 'around us' but from us, it must work to accentuate these central characters (or meta-characters), extending in ways ev2 can not (as we are not trained actors but something different) our personality and mood.
CJA performed at the Shift Happens conference for 'Art Learning and Technology'. This was the first time a visual element had been composed and implemented by visual artists live during the performance: Ciaran Bagnall (lighting designer) and Damian Cruden (director).
Some thoughts from the 'inside'
I suspect that the visual language was too strong to focus the eye on the ear and instead the ocularcentricity of Western audiences understood it from a primarily visual context, placing the aural realm as a 'backing' to this low-key projection. My fear with this scenario is that it would fall into hybrid of no particular focus and, if I witnessed someone else attempt it, I would hate it.
This is not a reflection on the people involved, but it says more about the working process - flying people straight into a gig with no rehearsal.
Furthermore, the musicians were heavily masked allowing their heads to 'float' above a black footer. For me, there is something special about witnessing a musician a) embody an instrument and b) embody a sense of place, the sound theatre. As I understand this - backed up by Nicola LeFanu's statement about the studio performance - there is a double empathy induced in the spectator ... a deep and complex understanding of what 'they are doing' and what 'we are hearing'.
I extend this to all the natural gestures within ev2 as we are double embodied in the wholeness of the music: we are emboying an instrument 'playing' with embedded material, whilst using our ears to make sense of the whole thing ... in MP words we are embodying the perception to get to grips with the phemononology.
Aside from this I experienced a double empathy for the first time recently - watching a run of Railway Children the character Peter gave Schapanski a boy-to-father-figure hug as he said goodbye. I felt myself projecting my own son's empathy on this experience; in a sense it wasn't me who was 'feeling' the hug, but I was seeing through my sons eyes, what it would be like to witness this theatrical act and 'feel' the hug.
I mention this because it is something akin to how I imagine people are experiencing ev2 performing CJA ... so why hide us behind a black footer? The answer is simple "to tidy us up" as Damian joked (no he was serious). There is something really important here:
1) we need to be seen, ev2 ARE the performative element that makes it stand out from an ordinary EA gig with a VJ
2) our gestures are natural and unforced separating from 60's music theatre. It is not a theatre of gesture and spectacle but of embodiment (Mike Kenny knew this)
3) The visual should not be 'around us' but from us, it must work to accentuate these central characters (or meta-characters), extending in ways ev2 can not (as we are not trained actors but something different) our personality and mood.
Monday 14 June 2010
Relational Aesthetics - Bourriaud
"An overwhelming majority of critics and philosophers are reluctant to come to grips with contemporary practices. So these remain essentially unreadable, as their originality and their relevance cannot be perceived by analysing them on the basis of problems either solved or unresolved by previous generations. The oh-so-painful fact has to be accepted that certain issues are no longer being raised, and it is, by extension, important to identify those that are being raised these days by artists" (p7)
Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task to study this activity in the present. A certain aspect of the programme of modernity has been fairly wound up (and not, let us hasten to emphasize in these bourgeois times, the spirit informing it). This completion has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to of the substance, but we go on applying them to present-day artistic practices. The new is no longer a criterion, except among latter-day detractors of modern art who ... cling solely to the things that their traditionalists culture has taught them to loathe in yesterdays art." (p11)
"The ambition of artists who include their practice within the slipstream of historical modernity is to repeat neither its forms nor its claims, and even less assign to art the same functions as it. Their task is akin t the one that Jean-Fracois Lyotard allocated to post-modern architecture, which 'is condemned to create a series of minor modifications in a space whose modernity it inherits, and abandon an overall reconstruction of that space inhabited by humankind'
...
"learning to inhabit a world in a better way', instead of trying to construct it based n a preconceived idea of historical evolution. Otherwise put, the role of the artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but o actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real." (p13)
"It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the "owner's tour" is akin to the collector's). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening t unlimited discussion. (p15)
"Inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the "encounter" between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning" (p15)
"flags, logos, icons, signs all produce empathy and sharing and all generate bond. Art (practices stemmng from painitng and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) {and sound and music too! ed.} turns out to beparticu;larly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilistaion, because it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV and literature which refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption, and unlike theatre and cinema which bring small groups together before specific, unmistakable images. (pp15-16)
"What do we mean by form? [...] If one of these atoms swerves off course, it "causes an encounter with the next atom and from encounter to encounter a pile-up, and borth of the world" ... This is how forms come into being, from the "deviation" and random encounter between two hitherto parallel elements." (p 19)
"Art keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences, be it Cezanne's apples or Buren's striped structures. The composition of the bonding agent, whereby encountering atoms manage to form a word is, needless to say, dependent on the historical context. What today's informed public understands by "keeping together" is not the same thing that this public imagined back in the 19th century. Today, the "glue" is less obvious, as our visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic unity), enabling us to recognize as a "world" a collection of disparate element (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. (p20)
The Work of Art as Partial Object. "The work of art is only of interest to Guatarri insomuch as it is not a matter of a "passively represented image", otherwise put, a product. The work gives a material quality to existential territories, within which the images takes on the role of subjectivization vector or "shifter", capable of deterring our perception before "hooking it up again" to other possibilities: that of an "operator of junction in subjectivity" (p99)
"... the fluid nature of subjectivity, whose component parts operate, as we have seen, by temporarily clinging to heterogeneous "existential territories". The work of art doesn't halt the eye. It's the spellbinding, para-hypnotic process of the aesthetic way of looking that crystallizes around it the different ingredients of subjectivity, and redistributes them towards new vanishing points" (p100)
"Here, the aesthetic object acquires the status of a "partial enunciator", whose assumption of autonomy makes it possible to "foster new fields of reference". The definition embraces the development of art forms in a very fruitful way: the theory of the aesthetic partial object as "semiotic segment" separate from collective subjective production so as to strt "working on ts own behalf" perfectly describes the most widespread artistic production methods today" sampling of pictures and data, recycling now socialised and historicised forms, invention of collective identities." (p 100)
Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task to study this activity in the present. A certain aspect of the programme of modernity has been fairly wound up (and not, let us hasten to emphasize in these bourgeois times, the spirit informing it). This completion has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to of the substance, but we go on applying them to present-day artistic practices. The new is no longer a criterion, except among latter-day detractors of modern art who ... cling solely to the things that their traditionalists culture has taught them to loathe in yesterdays art." (p11)
"The ambition of artists who include their practice within the slipstream of historical modernity is to repeat neither its forms nor its claims, and even less assign to art the same functions as it. Their task is akin t the one that Jean-Fracois Lyotard allocated to post-modern architecture, which 'is condemned to create a series of minor modifications in a space whose modernity it inherits, and abandon an overall reconstruction of that space inhabited by humankind'
...
"learning to inhabit a world in a better way', instead of trying to construct it based n a preconceived idea of historical evolution. Otherwise put, the role of the artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but o actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real." (p13)
"It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the "owner's tour" is akin to the collector's). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening t unlimited discussion. (p15)
"Inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the "encounter" between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning" (p15)
"flags, logos, icons, signs all produce empathy and sharing and all generate bond. Art (practices stemmng from painitng and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) {and sound and music too! ed.} turns out to beparticu;larly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilistaion, because it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV and literature which refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption, and unlike theatre and cinema which bring small groups together before specific, unmistakable images. (pp15-16)
"What do we mean by form? [...] If one of these atoms swerves off course, it "causes an encounter with the next atom and from encounter to encounter a pile-up, and borth of the world" ... This is how forms come into being, from the "deviation" and random encounter between two hitherto parallel elements." (p 19)
"Art keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences, be it Cezanne's apples or Buren's striped structures. The composition of the bonding agent, whereby encountering atoms manage to form a word is, needless to say, dependent on the historical context. What today's informed public understands by "keeping together" is not the same thing that this public imagined back in the 19th century. Today, the "glue" is less obvious, as our visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic unity), enabling us to recognize as a "world" a collection of disparate element (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. (p20)
The Work of Art as Partial Object. "The work of art is only of interest to Guatarri insomuch as it is not a matter of a "passively represented image", otherwise put, a product. The work gives a material quality to existential territories, within which the images takes on the role of subjectivization vector or "shifter", capable of deterring our perception before "hooking it up again" to other possibilities: that of an "operator of junction in subjectivity" (p99)
"... the fluid nature of subjectivity, whose component parts operate, as we have seen, by temporarily clinging to heterogeneous "existential territories". The work of art doesn't halt the eye. It's the spellbinding, para-hypnotic process of the aesthetic way of looking that crystallizes around it the different ingredients of subjectivity, and redistributes them towards new vanishing points" (p100)
"Here, the aesthetic object acquires the status of a "partial enunciator", whose assumption of autonomy makes it possible to "foster new fields of reference". The definition embraces the development of art forms in a very fruitful way: the theory of the aesthetic partial object as "semiotic segment" separate from collective subjective production so as to strt "working on ts own behalf" perfectly describes the most widespread artistic production methods today" sampling of pictures and data, recycling now socialised and historicised forms, invention of collective identities." (p 100)
Thursday 10 June 2010
Finally the O statement
If this is opera, then it must be defined as digital opera, for the term digital seems to grubby-up the discipline. It also sets it along side digital theatre, which would be its closest cousin (In so much as a projection in a play does not make it digital theatre, a projection in an opera ditto.) For I am not dealing with a reinvention of a form, but allowing the new means and their new meaning an opportunity to create a new way of thinking about the discipline.
Furthermore, the opera already defines the meeting point of music with theatre, and is a much preferred description to 'music theatre' which inevitably comes with a caveat of (not musical theatre, or the West End, or Kagel and gesture based theatrics in the performance of music, but something more immersive), as I deal with professional across the sectors of funding, creative, academia, and need to be clear in its meaning.
Also, Dixon mentioned that Digital Performance is the new Gestamkunstwerk - the new total art - but Causey, Auslander, and Dixon fail to consider the sonic elements within this, instead focussing on the spectacle. There a new term should be used to focus away from the spectacle of performance. Joe Wachs wrote "Re: art: Call it what it is: Voice-Over I.P. - The Immersive Performance Paradigm"
Also, my intention is not to question the 'old way', I am interested in the phenomenological experience of sound and music and theatre and digital technology, and the creative listening this calls for - this is what drives me. However, its creation will ask us to reconsider ways of thinking about opera and its idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we might assume that these ways have exhausted their possibilities or do not represent the culture of 2010. This is not to say that the 'recipe' is obsolete, but if the 21st century digital opera composer is to embrace the form then perhaps CJA and ASJ can point us towards some of the answers for the question "what if?"; for if we want to manipulate our chosen medium then we must understand how it works.
I recently wrote:
The compositional approach is deliberately forward-looking: it draws a line under the traditional 19th/20th century convention of "Opera" and concentrates instead on the meeting point of music, sound, voice, drama and digital technology as it relates to the 21st century; employing the philosophical, technological, theoretical and phenomenological qualities of these forces NOT a traditionally accepted recipe.
Furthermore, the opera already defines the meeting point of music with theatre, and is a much preferred description to 'music theatre' which inevitably comes with a caveat of (not musical theatre, or the West End, or Kagel and gesture based theatrics in the performance of music, but something more immersive), as I deal with professional across the sectors of funding, creative, academia, and need to be clear in its meaning.
Also, Dixon mentioned that Digital Performance is the new Gestamkunstwerk - the new total art - but Causey, Auslander, and Dixon fail to consider the sonic elements within this, instead focussing on the spectacle. There a new term should be used to focus away from the spectacle of performance. Joe Wachs wrote "Re: art: Call it what it is: Voice-Over I.P. - The Immersive Performance Paradigm"
Also, my intention is not to question the 'old way', I am interested in the phenomenological experience of sound and music and theatre and digital technology, and the creative listening this calls for - this is what drives me. However, its creation will ask us to reconsider ways of thinking about opera and its idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we might assume that these ways have exhausted their possibilities or do not represent the culture of 2010. This is not to say that the 'recipe' is obsolete, but if the 21st century digital opera composer is to embrace the form then perhaps CJA and ASJ can point us towards some of the answers for the question "what if?"; for if we want to manipulate our chosen medium then we must understand how it works.
I recently wrote:
The compositional approach is deliberately forward-looking: it draws a line under the traditional 19th/20th century convention of "Opera" and concentrates instead on the meeting point of music, sound, voice, drama and digital technology as it relates to the 21st century; employing the philosophical, technological, theoretical and phenomenological qualities of these forces NOT a traditionally accepted recipe.
Friday 28 May 2010
The Big Deal!!!
'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.
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.
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)
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