Feeling a tremendous rush of energy from the satisfaction of being able to do something that had seemed completely mysterious or impossible.
Have now finally got pretty well under my fingers the sthai of a gat in raga Bhairav. It's a complex dancing pattern of intricate movement. It's a fractal process. Now that I have (after much effort) the skeletal infrastructure of it, bends and slides, expressive movements around and between, are beginning to reveal themselves. The process of learning has a beginning but no end.
After a period of intense concentration when I get up for a loo break I examine the quality of mind in which I'm suffused. It is taught and sharp - like a steel string. And, like a string, it is a line with no breaks. If a space appears, of cloudiness or haziness, there is no string, no tightness. Just a flapping, flabby, floating meander.
Interesting that right concentration - samadhi - is often described as a laser. A string of light. Pointed, focused, sharp. And ordinary, untrained awareness is a generalised, diffuse, dim light. I wonder if there is a universality about this experience. And if so, does that imply some physiological structuring? Is there a material line being drawn somewhere in my body? Thinking in terms of neurons, what is the difference between the electrical activity in the body when it is in an ordinary lax state, and that when it is focussed, as in musical performance.
But I have played lots of kinds of music and this feeling is rare. There is something very particular about the quality of mind cultivated through this particular technology. The sarod requires a tremendous amount of concentration because of its fretlesness. There is a lot of rhythmic complexity in the right hand picking. And the gat I am learning, because it is a single melodic line within a raga, has a very clear structure but also tremendous openness to expansion and contraction. New twists and turns and weaves grow in response to this particular moment of perception. It combines structure and improvisation.
Yoga is to yoke. The spirit hitched to something fixed. Freedom by itself is amorphous, indistinct, ultimately without content. The structure of a technology gives a form to consciousness. The asana acts as a lens to focus the mind. The instrument is an asana.
So is the core use of technology. It's a yoke for the oxen of one's will. Not a means to an end but a hitching post, a marker, a medium. Of course ends inevitably result. They are indeed the catalyst. Eg, I want to practice yoga asanas in order to look fit on the beach, or to achieve immortality, or to feel comfortable. Of course a laser can be pointed in any direction - by a surgeon or a soldier. Technology is inherently dangerous. So it must have an ethical basis.
Even a musical instrument can be mastered with a view to winning applause or wealth. The long term viability, the sustainability of any technology rests on it's ethical foundation. WHY is it?
A sarod is relatively inactive in the world - in comparison with a plough, say, or a spear. So it has many of the benefits of a technology to which to yoke consciousness, while avoiding many of the dangers. But still the motivation behind it's mastery needs to be constantly examined. This is vipassana - the binding together of concentration and detachment, awareness and equanimity.
Tuesday 20 February 2007
Language consists of grunts, tics, gestures, tones, melodies, flourishes, as much as discrete words.
Sounds are fuzzy haloes of meaning rather than fixed objects. Writing obscures this fact.
I'd like to make a landscape of words. A text somehow melded with a junglescape. Huge scale, sumptuous like a book. A lightbox?
Perhaps a series, some using non-Roman script. Or a palimpsest.
Some in which the text is readable, poetic even.
Sounds are fuzzy haloes of meaning rather than fixed objects. Writing obscures this fact.
I'd like to make a landscape of words. A text somehow melded with a junglescape. Huge scale, sumptuous like a book. A lightbox?
Perhaps a series, some using non-Roman script. Or a palimpsest.
Some in which the text is readable, poetic even.
Monday 19 February 2007
Sarod
January 11th. That's when the wind got knocked out of this blog. That was my first sarod lesson.
It was like discovering a whole landscape to explore. I felt I was running into the hills.
A rollercoaster I'm building as I go. Hammering like crazy, pulling rails out of a back pocket. A cartoon figure. Building a path through the air, suspended amongst the forest so as not to disturb it. No footprints. The rail is invented in space.
That's what it's like, learning something.
The laying down of keratin at the roots of my fingernails echoes the construction of neuronal pathways as I build my knowledge of the sarod at the level of bodily practice. And absorb the body of knowledge embodied by the instrument.
Watch a plant grow in this light.
A tree of learning.
Interesting bloke...
'Atau Tanaka is researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories (CSL) Paris, spanning cultures and encompassing domains of artistic expression, scientific research, and industry. He holds degrees in science and music from Harvard University and Stanford University's CCRMA. He has conducted research at IRCAM in Paris and was Artistic Ambassador for Apple Computer Europe. In Japan he has been in residency at NTT/ICC and taught Media Art at Keio University. He is known for his work with sensor instruments and network music installations, in artistic exhibition as well as scientific publications. His current work is focused on harnessing collective musical creativity on mobile devices, seeking the continuing place of the artist in democratized digital forms. He has received support from the Fraunhofer Institute, Japanese Telecommunications Ministry, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation. He has served on committees of the Audio Engineering Society (AES), New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), and ISEA.'
Websites:
http://www.xmira.com/atau/
http://www.csl.sony.fr/~atau
http://crossfade.walkerart.org/jujikan
Brief
As a time-based art, music occupies time and composers manipulate temporal structures. Sound art, meanwhile, represents a movement where audio is treated as a plastic medium. As sound is by nature a temporal medium, it will always traverse time. Acoustical sound is also physical, and is able to fill volumetric space. Ultimately time and space are not independent domains, but are endpoints in a spectrum in which audio works of various forms can be situated. Concert performances are temporo-centric, taking place at a specific time and for a certain duration. Installations are more spatio-centric, on exhibition and available to the spectator to explore at volition, free of time constraints.
Time and space, then, map out a continuum within which performance and installation can by considered. With this as a basis, we retrace examples of the author's work over the last decade in musical compositions created with interactive technologies. This spans a body of work starting with sensor systems as musical instruments, through networked performances and installations, looking on towards musical artworks conceived for communities of mobile devices.
Websites:
http://www.xmira.com/atau/
http://www.csl.sony.fr/~atau
http://crossfade.walkerart.org/jujikan
Brief
As a time-based art, music occupies time and composers manipulate temporal structures. Sound art, meanwhile, represents a movement where audio is treated as a plastic medium. As sound is by nature a temporal medium, it will always traverse time. Acoustical sound is also physical, and is able to fill volumetric space. Ultimately time and space are not independent domains, but are endpoints in a spectrum in which audio works of various forms can be situated. Concert performances are temporo-centric, taking place at a specific time and for a certain duration. Installations are more spatio-centric, on exhibition and available to the spectator to explore at volition, free of time constraints.
Time and space, then, map out a continuum within which performance and installation can by considered. With this as a basis, we retrace examples of the author's work over the last decade in musical compositions created with interactive technologies. This spans a body of work starting with sensor systems as musical instruments, through networked performances and installations, looking on towards musical artworks conceived for communities of mobile devices.
Sunday 18 February 2007
The Roots of Writing
(from Dene Grigar's course blog on 'Language, Text and Technology')
This image of a horse, from the Caves of Lascaux located in Southern France, is believed to have been created around 1400 BCE. The caves are filled with such images. Some scholars argue that the images represent pictorial stories of hunting expeditions humans undertook. Others argue that they represent rituals humans engaged in to guarantee successful hunts. The truth be told, the silence of the images tells us little. Hence, when we think about the notion that texts speak, we are more apt to think about texts whose writing technologies offer more exacting information.
Below are images of various writing technologies or artifacts that recall them.
Boustrophedon
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/boustrophedon.jpg
Communication Models
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/communication_model.jpg
Cuneiform
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/cuneiform_details.jpg
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/cuneiform.jpg
Hieroglyphics
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/hieroglyphics.jpg
Mayan Hieroglyphics
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/mayan_hieroglyphs.jpg
Phaistos Disk
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/phaistos_disk.jpg
Rosetta Stone
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/rosetta_stone.jpg
Stoichedon
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/stoichedon.jpg
Printer's Mark
http://www.nouspace.net/dene/5273/printers_mark.jpg
---------------------
Essential readings:
The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present
By Eric A. Havelock
Yale UP, 1988, Paper $17.00
ISBN: 0300043821
The History of Writing
By Steven Roger Fischer
Reaktion Books, 2003, Paper, £9.95
ISBN: 978 1 861 89167 9
Writing Machines
By N. Katherine Hayles
The MIT Press, 2002, Paper, $19.95
ISBN: 0-262-58215-5
Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness
Edited and with an Essay by Edward A. Shanken
By Roy Ascott
University of California Press, 2003
Downloadable eBook version available:
Adobe E-Reader at ebooks.com, $15.95
Saturday 17 February 2007
Inside-out and upside-down
My last post was on Makar Sankranti. This is on Maha Shivaratri. The long night which belongs to ascetics, tantrics, fakirs, all those who are willing to plunge, fully awake, into the darkness.
Apologies for having been absent for a month. Once again now the blog reveals itself as an inversion, an upside-down, inside-out thing. You read it backwards, starting at the end of a sequence of thoughts. It is an exposure of interiority, a display of private musings. And now in its pattern of entry and absence it shows the negative space of my life. It is when there is most going on that this blog becomes empty. And it is when I disappear from the immediate world of firends, colleagues, family, students, that this blog swells and writhes into life.
So let me now try to stay close to the boundary between the two worlds. Between the positive and negative, at the flat plane of the looking glass itself, I'll try to trace some of the thoughts and events that have filled my absence.
Of course many things are jotted in my notebooks. Pen and paper have often been faithful companions when a portal to the internet, or even a portable computer, has been remote. So I'll give you a few snippets from those...
Apologies for having been absent for a month. Once again now the blog reveals itself as an inversion, an upside-down, inside-out thing. You read it backwards, starting at the end of a sequence of thoughts. It is an exposure of interiority, a display of private musings. And now in its pattern of entry and absence it shows the negative space of my life. It is when there is most going on that this blog becomes empty. And it is when I disappear from the immediate world of firends, colleagues, family, students, that this blog swells and writhes into life.
So let me now try to stay close to the boundary between the two worlds. Between the positive and negative, at the flat plane of the looking glass itself, I'll try to trace some of the thoughts and events that have filled my absence.
Of course many things are jotted in my notebooks. Pen and paper have often been faithful companions when a portal to the internet, or even a portable computer, has been remote. So I'll give you a few snippets from those...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)