Thursday, May 7, 2009
Every Part of a Hologram...
Monday, April 20, 2009
Abstract(ions)
Monday, April 6, 2009
The Authorship has Sailed...
http://thejoycetravesty.hostrator.com/ac_vs_lindsey.mp3
First, let me say how grateful I am to Lindsey for reading the original essay and finding a DJ to “remix” her reading. I think the real magic of this piece comes the process that brought it where it is now; a place that has nearly nothing to do with the original work, and is better because it isn’t burdened with trying to capture the original meaning.
The original piece, which is still in draft form, is a list essay of apologies that I owe, but have not given, to people from my past. So, in its original form, the piece is still an aggregate of smaller pieces that hang together without a larger context. The only connection they have with one another is that they are were all written by me, all come from my life. The original idea behind the essay was to bring persona into the writing through the back door; to show the reader a life told only through unmade apologies.
I chose this piece because it relies so heavily on authorship for it’s coherence, and I wanted to see what would happen if it lost that mooring.
The result surprised me on several levels. The opening was lovely and absurdist… “As I’m sure you guessed halfway through the last sentence, I’m sorry for hiding your favorite box of tampons in the bottom of the grandmother of a friend, but that may have been someone else, but you looked poisonous, and I needed to get into the shower.” The cut-up, in this section, is almost slapstick, and although it’s funny, it didn’t really lend much to my understanding of either the original piece or of the soundscape. Again, I’m grateful to Lindsay and her DJ friend, but the opening felt a little like going for the obvious joke.
Other pieces of the cut-up, though, elevated the original text and showed me where passages had particular power—or failed to deliver. For instance, listening to Lindsay read, “I remember pulling you leg first into the room while you stole panties from the wet pile of leaves…” evokes the tone of the three sections from which those words come, though none of the meaning. Hearing the phrases stripped of meaning, it was possible to hear in them a way that they couldn’t be heard in context.
The same is true of the phrase, “Who would from then on be a piss-soaked dead body in the living room.” Although the piss-soaked person and the dead body are not, in the essay, the same person, in the cut-up they become one… and, since I know the narrative, I am suddenly given a composite—my father and my stepfather, now both implicated and both dead on the floor of the living room—in a way that is unexpectedly lovely.
At the same time, I find myself repelled by the juxtaposition of the phrasing “and raped—with a chicken—almost daily.” The “with a chicken” is the bit pulled from another section, the “raped almost daily” part of an apology to a boy in my elementary school who was the victim of a pedophilic Scout master. There is a way—although I expect it’s a way I should simply get over—in which that one smash-up seems to be a violation of something in the text. Of course, only I would have the context to know that; does that make it unimportant? Forgivable? Is my reaction a holding-on to an outdated sense of authorial right, or is it just the squeamishness of making rape—a bad enough thing to begin with—even more hideous and absurd by mashing it up with a section about feeding chicken soup to a vegetarian? And what would every other listener make of it, since for her this is the piece itself?
It is, of course, impossible for me to imagine how this piece works for someone who does not see the fragments as pieces of a larger hole. There is something compelling about the rhythm of it, and the individual images taken fully out of context, but is it nonsense or has the collaborative process created something new that has value? I can’t tell.
Monday, March 23, 2009
The Death of the Audience...
Monday, March 9, 2009
Ooh... Spooky!
Miller's text is dense in the same way the listenings on the CD are dense... and in this way, I think, pose the same risk that we will designate those elements that signify for us with the properties of "voice," allowing the others to be relegated to the role of "noise." It is with this in mind, and with an awareness that what has signified for me may not be at all the entirety of what Miller intended for me to hear, that I pose these questions.
1. Miller writes, "The basic idea is to use the digital to try and make a bridge between the interior and exterior... (W)e are able to send our visions and ideas in ways our ancestors would have thought were god-like (16)." Given this concept of Dj culture as that which allows interiority to become shared, public experience, I am surprised at Miller's continued insistence through out the book on the ideas of creativity and of some persons, but not all persons, as artists. These words, which are heavily laden with their history of allowing for criticism--for the determining of "good" and "bad" art--seem to me to be in opposition to the idea of the interior exposed. Are we really meant then, in what Miller calls the "current" age, to judge one another's interiority? Does the act of participating in the cultural move toward these "shared hallucinations" require us, then, to begin to craft an alterity that has artistic merit? This seems to me to open the door to a very dangerous kind of elitism in which critics become the gatekeepers, monitoring who may join in the "shared hallucination" and who must simply continue to stand outside of it as a consumer.
2. Miller writes, "To name, to call, to upload, to download... So I'm sitting here and writing -- creating a new time zone out of widely dispersed geographic regions --- reflect and reflecting on the same ideas using the net to focus our attention on a world rapdily moving into what I like to call prosthetic realism. site and sound, sign and signification: The travel at this point becomes mental... it's all about how you play with the variables that creates the art piece (85)." It seems to me that much of Rhythm Science is an act of prognostication, and attempt to guess at the impact of borderless information, as much as it is a work of description or a manifesto. Rhythm Science brings to mind other mixtures of the digital and the musical... Jaron Lanier's interactive dance floors and walls (which never really worked when they were at Click and Drag in New York, but which maybe actually work now), Laurie Anderson's Big Science (which has always worked), and even the eery sound of the Theremin. With the exception of Anderson's ground breaking music, the other two experiments never got much past being cultural curiosities.