MondaysMarch 07, 2005Monday Night 03.07.05 Sound16 -- o.blaat +Jacob RobinetteMonday Night 03.07.05 Sound16 -- o.blaat +Jacob Robinette 1. About this Monday night
i'm scared:::: _________________________________________ What: sound 16 w/ o.blaat +Jacob Robinette We are happy to start our new series Sound16 with o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) and Jacob Robinette. o.blaat will attempt to do either with electric fan(s) or hair dryer(s) or both;) expect great failure. (what she wrote!!!!) Jacob has prepared a three part presentation/discussion Part 1 "A retreat to old Japan" Is a 12 minute composition made with a traditional japanese bamboo flute (shakuhachi) and Logic Audio Software. We will use some text from Slavoj Zizek's "On Belief" to explore what he refers to as the "ultimate post modern irony". Part 2 "How is music related to language, anyway?"...is music recently made with/for the Choreographer Saeko Miyake in Japan. We will also examine the dynamic of collaborating with people that speak a different language than you do. Part 3 "And how is all this related to Politics" is a short experimental satire. _________________________________________ o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi) - Sound Artist/Interactive Environment She has collaborated with DJ Olive, Toshio Kajiwara, Ikue Mori, Marina Rosenfeld, Kaffe Matthews, Ralph Steinbrüchel, Miguel Frasconi, Klaus Filip, Miya Masaoka, Sachiko M, Ryuichi Sakamoto, 242.pilots, among many others. Upcoming concerts in nyc: More info available at http://obla.at " i think weather forecasting is the most exciting all the time."
Born in Washington DC in 1973, Jacob Robinette lives and works in New York City. He is currently generating events called Poly Arts Projects and has just begun translating Felix Guattari's Cartographies Schizoanalytiques. Recently he performed at the New National Theatre in Japan as a dance theatre composer at the Tokyo Metropolitan Dance Festival. He has made music for dance theatre for the last ten years and is now beginning to incorporate visuals and language. After studying John Cage's work and adopting many of his sensibilities but not his techniques, he uses what he calls asyncronous harmony and irrational mathematics to create a sound that the New York Times called "atmospheric". Collaboration is an important part of his activities as an artist. Henri Bergson writes about putting sugar into water and that the way they go about blending is the "intuitive method". Collaboration, for Jacob, is the same...you put a choreographer and a composer in a space/time continuum with the idea of a future performance/event and then you communicate(verbally/non-verbally) until the piece resonates with both of your sensibilities.
...excerpt from a casual email Keiko wrote lastly, i should mention about 'share' ( http://share.dj ). we lost our home (where we used to do weekly) recently. have we stopped then? no curation is necessary.
(pages 12-15) The ultimate postmodern irony is thus the strange exchange between Europe and Asia: at the very moment when, at the level of the "economic infrastructure," the Judeo-Christian legacy is threatened in the European space itself by the onslaught of the New Age "Asiatic" thought, which, in its different guises, from the "Western Buddhism"(today's counterpoint to Western Marxism, as opposed to the Asiatic" Marxism-Leninism) to different "Taos," is establishing itself as the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism. Therin resides the highest speculative identity of the opposites in today's global civilization: although "Western Buddhism" presents itself as the remedy against the stressful tension of capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. One should mention here the well-known topic of "future shock,"i.e. of how, today, people are no longer psychologically able to cope with the dazzling rhythm of technologic development and the social changes that accompany it - things simply move to fast. Before one can accustom oneself to an invention, it is already supplanted by a new one, so the that more and more one lacks the most "elementary mapping." The recourse to Taoism or Buddhism offers a way out of this predicament which definately works better than the desperate escape into old traditions: instead of trying to cope with the accelerating rhythm of technological progress and social changes, one should rather renounce the very endeavor to retain control over what goes on, rejecting it as the expression of the modern logic of domination - one should, instead, " let oneself go," drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference towards the mad dance of this accelerated process, a distance based on the insight that all this social and technological upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances which do not really concern the innermost kernel of our being ...One is almost tempted to resusicate the old infamous cliche of religion as the "opium of the people," as the imaginary supplement of the terrestial misery: the "Western "Western Buddhism" thus perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly "post-ideological" era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua "returns of the repressed," cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. Fetish is effectively a kind of inverse of the symptom. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while the fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which eneables us to sustain the unbearable truth. Let us take the case of the death of a beloved person: in the case of a symptom, I "repress" this death, I try not to think about it, but the repressed trauma returns in the symptom ; in the case of a fetish, on the contrary, I "rationally" fully accept this death, and yet i cling to the fetish, to some feature that embodies it for me the disavowal of this death. In this sense, a fetish can play a very constructive role in allowing us to cope with the harsh reality: fetishists are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly "realists" able to accept the way things effectively are - since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality. In Nevil Shute's World War II melodramatic novel Requiem For a WREN, the heroine survives her lover's death without any visible traumas, she goes on with her life and is even able to talk rationally about the lover's death - because she still has the dog who was the lover's favorite pet. When, some time after, the dog is accidentally run over by a truck, she collapses and her entire world disentigrates...In this precise sense, money is for Marx a fetish: I pretend to be a rational; utilitarian subject, well aware of how things truly stand- but I embody my disenvowed belief in the money fetish...Sometimes the line between the two is almost indiscernible: an object can function as the symptom(of a repressed desire) and almost simultaneously as a fetish(embodying the belief we officially renounce). For instance, a relic of the dead person, a piece of his/her clothing, can function as a fetish(in it, the dead person magically continues to live) and as a symptom (the disturbing detail that brings to mind his/her death). Is this ambiguous tension not homologous to that between the phobic and the fetishist object? The structural role is in both cases the sames: if this exceptional element is disturbed, the whole system collapses. Not only does the the subject's false universe collapse if he is forced to confront the meaning of his symptom; the opposite also holds, i.e. the subject's "rational" acceptance of the ay things are dissolves when his fetish is taken way from him. So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality "the way it is"? "Western Buddhism is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are really not in it, that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is - what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw...(In a further specification, one should note that fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconcious - as in the case of shute's heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog- or you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the "truth" of his existence is the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game.) |
