White Noise & Death Chords
If you are guided by the principle of less is more, then this initiative must be generated out of an interest in silence, ephemerality and emptiness - at the crux of whichever 'thing' or concept you approach. Intentionally spare, attempts to find a balance between emptiness and form.
What we're doing is anything but. I think it's important to address this approach and be more critical of it (for both our personal sakes). I've been thinking a lot about what you deliberate on as compactness.
I don't know if I shared this with you earlier but glitch, white noise and drone are three sonic patterns that have emerged so far, elliptically.
I think White Noise makes for a great rhetorical precipice for what we've begun working on.
White Noise refers to a purely theoretical sound concept that imagines an infinite-bandwidth, a flat and dense noise signal that has equal power at any frequency. Because the total power of such a signal would be infinite, it is therefore impossible to generate.
It infers a drone, an unparalleled existence in the acoustic realm and it functions as a formless contradiction. It's a kind of formulated chaos being experienced when heard. This is very close to my philosophy of approaching work or my artistic sensibilities. The eclipsing of an idealized healthy human existence (whatever that may be) torn by shattered fragments resulting in the contradiction of social existence. It is a state of cognitive dissonance. It indicates the failure of function, equilibrium and organization.
I've always been concerned with materials, excess, not-knowing and the absurd. And strangely, the radio play is taking a vital and similarly dynamic shape; recuperating material, transforming, agglomerating and de-forming in order to bring about that which is unforeseen.
It sounds like a large mutating beast alongside small clustering sculptures, as if they are caught in a stage of arrested development.
The other word that comes to mind when I hear our first rough cut is Qualia;
Qualia (pron.: /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/; singular form: quale (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]) is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience. The term derives from aLatin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind." Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, or the perceived redness of an evening sky.
Daniel Dennett (b.1942), American philosopher and cognitive scientist, writes that qualia is "an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us."[1]
Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961), the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take:
"The sensation of color cannot be accounted for by the physicist's objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so."[2]
The importance of qualia in philosophy of mind comes largely from the fact that it is seen as posing a fundamental problem for materialist explanations of the mind-body problem. Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term that is used, as various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. As such, the nature and existence of qualia are controversial.
Daniel Dennett identifies four properties that are commonly ascribed to qualia. According to these, qualia are:
ineffable; that is, they cannot be communicated, or apprehended by any other means than direct experience.
intrinsic; that is, they are non-relational properties, which do not change depending on the experience's relation to other things.
private; that is, all interpersonal comparisons of qualia are systematically impossible.
directly or immediately apprehensible in consciousness; that is, to experience a quale is to know one experiences a quale, and to know all there is to know about that quale.
If qualia of this sort exist, then a normally sighted person who sees red would be unable to describe the experience of this perception in such a way that a listener who has never experienced color will be able to know everything there is to know about that experience. Though it is possible to make an analogy, such as "red looks hot," or to provide a description of the conditions under which the experience occurs, such as "it's the color you see when light of 700-nm wavelength is directed at you," supporters of this kind of qualia contend that such a description is incapable of providing a complete description of the experience.
Another way of defining qualia is as "raw feels." A raw feel is a perception in and of itself, considered entirely in isolation from any effect it might have on behavior and behavioral disposition. In contrast, a "cooked feel" is that perception seen as existing in terms of its effects. For example, the perception of the taste of wine is an ineffable raw feel, while the experience of warmth or bitterness caused by that taste of wine would be a cooked feel.
I'm constantly deliberating over what I'm wanting to express in those exact words.
That's the way I think, function and feel. This is probably the best analogy I have to date.
So coming back to what you said about compactness, I'm interested in this perception of what is exactly being compact. I know the play has overwhelming details and embellishments but the underlying theme (or even themes) synchronize themselves as a disharmonious monster that hinges on very base questions and feelings. I'm still curious to know how you feel about the plot/narrative/story. What exactly about it bothers you? What do you think is the essence of the story? What has changed for you since we first spoke about this story up till now?
These were a few questions nagging me and I didn't know how or when to ask you specifically But it's become really important for me to know what you think in all honesty. Maybe we should talk about it face to face or you can email back.
This is segueing into a conversation separate form what's happening with the play so I hope it doesn't throw you off but I'm curious to know
Todesakkord (death chord) from the opera Lulu by Alban Berg.
The chord, which contains all twelve notes is frozen to an infinite duration.
The sound is "deadly“ not just in regard to the content of the opera, it also means the end of the
perception of time in music as well as the death of music as a whole – a sort of unformed formation
without harmony or disharmony, the end of musical dynamics and progression.
I want to steal this somehow - I think we already are working around such territory. Are we?