phenomenology of media sounds

• the theremin
• paul lansky with leon theremin

• imaginary landscape #1 – john cage
  • cymbal and string piano
  • made for recording
  • proto-music concrete

• pierre scheaffer – etude pathetic
  • proto-music concrete
• aton weiber – 12 tone
• cologne studio
  • clangestudio sound study #2
  • completely synthetically composed
• contacte – 4 channel – stokausen – 1961
• reponse – Boulez
  • relationship between the one and the many
  • simple musical idea – alternating and proliferation of a single idea
  • links to renaissance practices of having choruses on balconies
• collage
  • orchestral works – borrowed material
  • three plcaes in new england – dream scenario – 1914
• gustav mahler
• berlio – the entire 3rd movement of mahler’s symphony qith quotations from 100 other musical works
• heiner gergitz
• working with language
• bill fontana – cologne sanfrancisco
• john cage – james joyce (1979)
• 19 Questions – John Cage
  • John Cage / Richard Friedman
  • “one prefers to live”
• Michael Nyman – Experimental Music
  • indeterminate open systems (chance…)
  • determinate closed systems (serialism…)
  • Music as indistinguishable
• Glenn Gould – The Alchemist
  • sending out the particles of one’s work so others can bring them up according to their will
  • comparison of music (bringing a fresh view) and theological film
  • there are certain kinds of music that cry out for technology
  • spatial treatment of – Scriabin

• minimalism
  • openly seeking greater accessibility – modal, tonal (modernism is aperiodic and fragmented)
  • Steve Reich – Three Tales (2002)
    • hindenburg
    • bikini
    • cloning – dolly
      • story of Jeremiah the Prophet
  • “one of the things that came to mind was that the 20th century had been more driven by technology than any other human endeavour”

ideas coming out of session

• cage’s use of the folk music in finnegan’s wake – folk music!? freedom of sounds

philosophers and music

• “philosophy is a music to seduce young men”
• schaupenhaugher
• chopin was neitsche’s favorite musician (copernicus his favorite scientist)
• adorno’s dream – betraying the french spirits for the german spirits
• barthes was left handed -

discussion of chloe screening (from last night)

• critical response to Chloe – develop
• steve larson – swedish crime writers
• immigrant story

• docu-drama – NFB – series… reacting against naturalism
  • milieux vs lumiere brothers
  • NFB – Lonely Boy
• “we probably dream in master coverage” – recreating ourselves in technologies
• 8 1/5 – Fellini
• Kaufman – Synectedy
• Belle du Jour
• Skylark’s Farm
• Arrarat
• Tehran
• Agamben – Debord, cinema tv news

un jour a toronto

• Persona
• Famille je vous filme
• Speaking Parts
• The Adjuster
• The Curious Case of Atom Egoyan
• Passolini

Krapp’s Last Tape

• The Conversation
• “Box 3 spool 5…”
• “39 today – sound as a bell…”

Stein Beckett – installation

• Steinbeck machines
• Physicality of the media…
• Coming to Manchester

Hey Jo

• Live projection of Beckett’s Hey Jo
• Problems of transferring the ‘liveness’
• e.g.: William Forsythe – Kammer/Kammer

Portrait of Arshile Gorky

• you are named after a man…

America America

• Bienalle – 1997
• The film projection – the looping mechanisms

• graven-nature of non-digital technologies – the silver oxide, etc.

Close

• Juliao Sarmento
• Erotic scene of people eating toe-nails – close viewing / large screen

Reel-to-Reel

• 20 meters of celluloid -

State of Watching Films

• Vivre sa vie
• The passion of Joan of Arc

Double Bill

adoration

• simon, rachel (mother), sabine, sami,
• narrative versus story
• trust – innocence
• the manger – theatricizing

• “has it come to this” (why is that phrase funny?)

• what is apprehensible with peoples’ histories
• using the internet to help exacerbate and continue the story – weird de-materialisation of the story
  • ‘back from the dead’ – embodying the
  • technology as distancing -
• j.g. ballard – near future
• the film is about – appropriation of stories / narratives… Sabine, all the online characters – people using a story to enforce politics

• transgressions
  • installation version of the Passengers
  • plays / drama – 1.5 – 2 hrs – expectations
  • bruce naumann – psychodrama
• knowing what a film can and should do – drama…

live commentary w/ class

• atom’s problem with the film – the character Sabine is not sympathetic enough
• we end up hating her – where Atom wanted her to be more believable

• complexity – the reason that The Sweet Hereafter broke through… perhaps that a lot of people didn’t understand it (reading it as the young girl sticking up for her community)
• george garret

Laurence Rickels

Heinz Emigholz – @ pym

Maillarts Brucken (Maillart’s Bridges) – architecture as autobiography

• Robert Maillart
• Maillart’s Bridges
• What is the film – and what is the not-film?

notes

• atom egoyan (wikipedia)
• brecht
  • dramatic vs epic theatre
• Margueritte Dura and Alain Renee
  • disengaging the feature film
• Before the Rain
• L’annee dernier a marrienbad
• interview

exotica (1994)

• Francis, Christina, Thomas (Don McKellar), Eric,  Zoe, Harold, Tracy (baby sitter)
• “hardy… i wouldn’t think that they weren’t hardy – it’s a jungle out there
• some themes…
  • therapy – violence as therapy
  • openness and allowing elliptical language
  • protection – perversion – obsession
    • the “real” reason for two way mirros being a perversion – not a protection
    • the border
    • the hallway with mirrors in the club

• rousseau – painting
• opening
  • club openin – rouseau painter – african lang
  • theme – shenai – indian instrument
  • shells – something that protects
  • minor character we’re never going to see again
  • voice over begins – and then the voiceover is defeated by
    • talking to the viewer – what’s brought you here…
  • cuts and what ‘folds over’ has a really strong subconscious effect
• e.g.: flashbacks
  • scenes where the person before and the person after the flashbacks – they are likely thinking about that moment, from a different point of view
• borders and thresholds
  • freudian explanation: egypt, etc.
• handing off money
  • settling the account
  • exchange of value
  • the businessman goes to Exotica
• first strip joint shots
  • real dancers – story of Toronto and strippers
• liberation – belly eggs
• early music – no ego, lack the assertion of identity
• armenian musician – link to leonard cohen – 2 minutes only used
• Berlin – sister – philharmonic – free tickets at the Berlin philharmonic – inspiration for the first ballet ticket / pickup strategy
• cell / space of interrogation / bath
• the field of people
• camera as the spirit of something
• mother – baby – kids taking over their parents roles (the strip joint, the pet store) – Zoe and the strip joint
• pet store – staging of Thomas and Francis
• the field – camera as non-viewpoint – cut back to Christina – sound washes over
• Chekov – there’s a gun in the first scene it must go off in the third
• Brothers – Francis and Harold – the parrot doesn’t talk

• Tracy – Francis in car talking about friendship
  • rather than addressing her as a real person – he’s kind of more delighted over the construction of an exchange
  • “your dad doesn’t like himself when he’s around me”
• in the field – cut back to the present – meeting of Christiana and Eric (original song was Pearl Jam – Black – as he clicks the light on and off)
• Christina and Zoe – discussing the hallway of two-way mirrors
  • sound design – dolby A – left right center (surround info is in mono)
  • when you have true surround the ambient effects becamse way too detailed and distracting
• in the apartment with Thomas and the black guy (Hyacinth Macaw)
• long bathroom discussion between Thomas / Eric – convincing him to touch Christina
• getting thrown out against / rain / car driving (studio shot) / Tracy and Francis
  • Continuous sound throughout
  • Alan Splet sound designer for David Lynch

intro

• pre-copernican
• the state of emergency
• water benjamin – awakening as a technique

sunsets

• awakening – resent and past together
• the entire cycle of night and day – the sun goes down … maybe for ever
• the later afternoon – shadows lengthening – story of mic’s mother
• Proust – diurnal rhythms – variations in mood

• circadian rythms

• before the sun – inca’s – twilight – when all animals, people were the same
• inca + white = sun + christian god
• fusion of god with the sun
• continuous twilight – homogeneity – weather – homogenous climates versus living in climates with extreme changes
• Bernard Cohen – Hyde Park Chicago

• industrious northerners / lazy southern
• inform our moods – sense of being alive

• fireflies and the graceful heterogeneity
• ian summerville, brian gison and burroughs – flicker machine

• the sun gives without receive

• copernicus – the elightenment – heliocentrism – burnt Bruno – copernicus
• twilight – the interconnectedness of things – latent pre-copernican, earth centered sense of things
• dan torrop – fireflies – late twilight, full moon (10-15 minutes exposure)

• super-abundant style
• pre-empting sadness of happy hour (homeopathic)
• why do we like the sunset – get off on the set – we are meant to gaze

• ritual about ritual – fire island watching the sunset – sun worship
• taganga – sun worship

• alice springs – clinic of the aboriginal health service – indigenous

• Heart of Darkness – malon – went down into the sun into the heart of darkness
• the roman invasion to the
• we have grown short of threshold experiences – falling sleep and waking up (the two threshold experiences left in modern life)
• also threshold – conversation gaps
• phillip otorunge – goethe – transparent colors (transparent colors play like spirits around the opaque colours)

• The dialectical image is a threshold – in such times, the dreams (victor turner – threshold period of initiations)
• twilight is not only sad – but an opportunity to do battle with sadness – crowding bars and being super-social

• appealing to the mother – the appeal to mothers (who are not so much remembered as RE-called – as a ghost)

• half-waking mind – dream diaries – her daytime self envies the writing that occurs

• just as Proust opens his book with a description of falling asleep (as does Benjamin’s) – first sleep, then awakening
• Laura Bohanon – broken sleep in Nigeria – the bush considered frightening on account of witches
  • i found myself unique in my assumption of a number of uninterrupted hours of sleep
• Pre-industiral households in western europe and north america – with broken sleep
• Siesta – compensation

so much of thought is based on the dialectical of night and day

thoughts coming out of session

• the

i swear i saw this & afterthoughts

• to “swear” i saw this – as a prayer
  • swearing as solemn (court of law)
  • swearing as curse (fuck)
  • swearing as promise

• opposing editing – adding afterthoughts
• appreciate the writings in a notebook – as a wrong
• “as long as there is one beggar – there will be magic”
• magic to horror and the negative sacred

• the abnormal of the normal – primo levi
• negative theology – a way of getting around monotheistic god

• Bataille – medieval historian – extreme forms of christianity

• The College of Sociology
  • The College of Sociology (book)
• Michel Leiris – Sacred in Everyday Life
• Attraction and Repulsion – religion / church – ambiguity
  • text that has a sorcery-like effect

• The Abject – child taken off the breast too early – Powers of Horror
• POWERS OF HORROR – An Essay on Abjection

• Taussig’s drawing and the Pieta  
• Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (ca. 1558) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder

• 1920′s Frank Speck anthropologist – story of animals
• The drawing is a form of the negative sacred – deaths cannot be appeased

• Anthropology of the Wittgenstein idea of mythologies in our language

• espanto – night terrors -
  • measuring the body of the witness – secret prayer – using a model of
  • we all have forms of espanto – prior to language

• Hegel (Thesis antithesis synthesis) the symphonic rythms of contraditions in the 18th century, moving into Marx, for whom capitalism would dissolve and synthesis
• “Religion gives you heart in the heartless world”
• Bataille as a proto-poststructuralist

• Primo Levy – Faber – synthetic rubber and oil – writing as
• Brian Gison – finding the cigarette packet with mythological/sorcery

• Radical Imperialism – fieldnotes and drawing
• Freud – The Mystic Writing Pad
• Multiple Realities -

• Walter Benjamin – Critique of Violence – in democracy the presence of police is mystical…
• Siv of de-realisation – in the guise of a drawing – refuses to give the nervous system its fix

ideas coming out of session

• the availability of negative sacred – readings of the access of the marvellous
• the talisman as a kind of confusion of the evil spirit – writing that operates in this way – and the confusion or lack of desire to push out the functionalist descriptions of things…
  • taussig’s description of espanto – not rationalised (reasons not given)
  • vs. the explanation of the Newfoundland-native american sitting with a dead animal
• normalising the abnormal – through rationalisation (“it’s warm in there”)
• finding ways of writing that maintain or appeal to the magical qualities of both the act of reading
• art as fieldwork – sabotage

welcomes / intro

• The Telephone Book; Technology, Schizophrenia, Electric Speech
• What is Called Thinking – eventfulness of that which withdraws (Derridian sense – what leaves traces, what leaves us in mourning)
• Derrida – The Politics of Friendship

• something about the remembering that swings over into the future, offers the greeting
• topos / undenkem
• pedagogical – etapedagogical
  • the master vs. the teacher in Blanchot
  • Neitsche – animal trainer

• gymnasium – Kittler asks when it was detached from the university

• why Fynsk is awesome: mitzein in Heidegger, singularity is our great problem, the voice of the friend / hero (holderlin, nietsche)

• institutional friendship? “very rare”
• Alan Carr – The Chatty Man -

the question concerning technology – 1953

fynsk / avital

• the origin of the work of art – as a deconstruction of form-matter (production
• the act of the dasein is production (praxis, poesis, techkne) - Herstellung
  • e.g.: marx – the agent of production (proletariat)

• Rilke – uncanny dasein in his unbearable, nausiating presence – standing
• the notion of production blocks access to things as a thing

• what does it mean for Heidegger to invoke Rilke’s description of the wall
  • is Rilke an alibi, an incorporation, a disturbance, an invitation
  • am i bailing on Rilke – let him say something and
  • calling the poet in as ‘state witness’ for thinking
  • Heidegger is a poet-beater
  • do we need the authority of the poet – as a guarantor (is it a mark of a
  • the need for poetry to say the unsayable (stammer, struggle, muteness -
  • abbreviation itself is a default technology – EGS as a reduction
  • the addict – blocked access to the understanding of something as you only look for what is available
  • Holderlin – “would you like to see my wound”
• H.’s criticism of Rilke is that he got it wrong in life – the metaphysical  

• autobiography / reading the work
  • H on Aristotle – “he was born, he lived and he died”
  • H on Neitsche – “the shyest and most common of men, understood the importance of screaming”
• Sorge – care
  • how devoid of a pulse – or neutralised is anxiety?
  • Levinas / Blanchot
    • Derrida surprised everyone rethinking his relationship to Paul Demann
• Blanchot
  • passions -
  • this essential suffering / malheure communicates with the everyday suffering (toothaches, etc.)
  • “you’re not going to avoid suffering – carry it with you
  • Blanchot – can’t

• The question of the Human
  • The question of art – a rethinking of production – thinkings of art as technology
  • Usage – the use of the earth
    • the emmerging of physis – the use of nature – by which
    • earth denies itself to any appropriation, any grasp
  • In art – the ‘matter’ that you use – is a use, but does not use it up – it brings forth the earth
  • We need to understand how “truth needs and uses human kind”
  • If we can understand this relation – the usage of the human by truth – we can re-engage the saving power of technology
  • Perhaps art is a way to find a relation to our modern destiny – whereby something of the human essence can be recovered
  • Heidegger’s Human – the essence of art is a gestell (schell, schtall)
  • “a distressing difficulty” – 1952 – H never really got the idea of the being and the human being (as a specific form of being)
  • perhaps this human essence can be found if we go to art
    • sounds here like an oscillation between types of production

• inscribing in the text of how to do something – has in it the very failure of the thing itself (the german word for doing/making?)
• the gestell – the enframing that technology does

the kick

• the poet kicked out of Greece – returning in Heidegger
• we have the call to courage in Heidegger
• every psycho is on a mission – every call is receptive to psychotic – a call to

• our relation to technology – this is where we are in our time – being gives itself to be lived
• p. 313 – The Question Concerning Technology
  • The correct versus the true
  • Trying to think the act of creation – from the event of truth
  • moves throught something that is ready to hand -  
• Blanchot – the suffering of suffering – the neutral of suffering
• Heidegger, Lacan, Deleuze, Lyotard – constantly sold out, constantly inside something – suffering a relation – seeking a way into technology not a way out
• “The industrialised production of corpses”
  • jews didn’t have a chance to die – technologies killing
  • celan – talks about going to death

• something that considers itself to be free is still technologized
  • reaches for something
  • nothing is spared the technological incursion (incursion into what?)
  • “turning me on” “turning me off”

• the machinery of sending
  • the autonomous self – “Zarathustra befell me”
  • the lack of ‘responsibility’ in Heidegger -
  • Aretha Franklin – You Send me
  • sending and destiny – a new thought about
• p.335
  • revealing is that destiny – apportions itself into the revealing that brings forth (poesis in art) and the revealing that challenges
  • poesis here is the more originary form
  • poesis is in itself a more original technology
  • technology allows us to see this (metaphorics of vision)
  • Goethe is invoked prove out the importance of granting over sending

• sam weber
  • there are machines because we are in the age of technology

ideas coming out of session

• the fall of language – the technology of language
  

• if the usage of language uses up thought, or things, is this the root of

• the use of language as a technology in The Question Concerning Technology – the essence of technology is not technological – it is “techne”

  • not that this move is essentially A TRANSLATION?
  • note that examples in this text of the relations of technology and art – are OF POETS, and POWER PLANTS
• “Let us”
• “recognise the impossibility of all of our tasks”