Planar Refrains

My practice explores phenomenal poetic truths that exist in fissures between the sensual and physical qualities of material constructs. Magnifying this confounding interspace, my work activates specific instruments within mutable, relational systems of installation, movement, and documentation. The tools I fabricate function within variable orientations and are implemented as both physical barriers and thresholds into alternate, virtual domains. Intersecting fragments of sound and moving image build a nexus of superimposed spatialities, while material constructions are enveloped in ephemeral intensities. Within this compounded environment, both mind and body are charged as active sites through which durational, contemplative experiences can pass. Reverberation, the ghostly refrain of a sound calling back to our ears from a distant plane, can intensify our emotional experience of place. My project Planar Refrains utilizes four electro-mechanical reverb plates, analog audio filters designed to simulate expansive acoustic arenas. Historically these devices have provided emotive voicings to popular studio recordings, dislocating the performer from the commercial studio and into a simulated reverberant territory of mythic proportions. The material resonance of steel is used to filter a recorded signal, shaping the sound of a human performance into something more transformative, a sound embodying otherworldly dynamics. In subverting the designed utility of reverb plates, I am exploring their value as active surfaces extending across different spatial realities. The background of ephemeral sonic residue is collapsed into the foreground, a filter becomes sculpture, and this sculpture becomes an instrument in an evolving soundscape

Resonances: The sound of performance

It is a hot summer night in August 2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Germany). The sun has set, and there is only the gray light of dusk in the performance space inside, streaming through the large glass façade, falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the floor. Additional light from a video projector streams over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard, it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space with her flute

The anxiety of the lonely listener

Text on listening originally featured in /seconds. peer reviewed online journal. The radio is not one thing it is multitudes. Radio is not innately anything, but is everything it is, dependent on who is listening. In this sense any radio transmission is truly contingent on the temporal, spatial and psychological (understood as an inner dimension) circumstance of the listener. The radio broadcast, emitting from its unsighted box, gives the room it enters different colours; working with the tones that are already there, stretching them in every direction. Sure, this idea of contingency could be applied to other media too, but nowhere is the multiplicity of production and perception more profuse than in the darkness of radio, where no image preserves our hold an on authentic sense of reality, and thus no sense of non-reality limits the imagination of the listener. The temporal flow of radio is a blind stream, emanating from a faceless, boundary-less place. The association of this transitory stream with a visual actuality is produced in a fleeting action of listening. Radio does not produce a certain object, but incites figments of individual imagination. It does not affirm the surety of a location or object but produces its own reality as a perceptual and individual uncertainty

Talk to Text

This thesis seeks to both examine and embrace the lack of concrete language available regarding what actually happens with students during face-to-face conversations about their wr iting. The context of “conversations” covers a broad spectrum of participants - teacher and student, student and student, student and tutor, as well as student with self - and domains - cognitive, affective, psychological and creative - that are particularly vexing to capture in words. Attempts by authors to weave together such disparate, dynamic forces breed tension. Such tension is good, and, quite often, purposeful. My research seeks to explore how such constructive tension is created in particular by Donald Murray and Peter Elbow, and how each author uses language to challenge the reader to experience a similar type of tension that one or both participants feels during the “conversations” concerning student texts. Furthermore, by closely reading each author’s work through Jacque Derrida’s lens of Differance - a theory that presumes a perpetual gap between author’s word and reader’s understanding - 1 seek to argue how the reader’s interpretive tension experientially brings her uniquely inside the uncertain substance of the “conversation” itself. Furthermore, I seek to reposition Differance as a hermeneutic — an essential skill of talk - for the teacher or tutor to effectively use in speaking with students about their work. By embracing the inherent mutability of ideas, texts, and meaning, and talking through such, instability with students, I propose a more particular kind of talk that empowers student’s metalinguistic skills. Rather than contemplating misunderstandings between participants in “conversations” as stylistic failures, my thesis considers Derrida’s theory as a pedagogy that can stimulate awareness in students as to how such instability creates rhetorical possibilities. Such heightened talk promotes enduring metalinguistic and metacognitive consciousness in the student, which endures well beyond the “conversation” itself

Psappha by Iannis Xenakis: Developing Multiple Percussion Literacy

Psappha by Iannis Xenakis was written for a solo percussionist in 1975, and since then has been performed almost exclusively by elite musicians. The work suffers from broad neglect by students and professionals alike, because the structure and notation are difficult to access. Through Psappha, Xenakis created an alternative approach to serialist and chance compositional techniques that enabled him to communicate what he believed was rhythm in its purest form. The notation is unconventional and challenges the performer to approach Psappha in a similar manner. The main thrust of this project was to re-imagine the work in a more traditional notation system, making it accessible to a new generation of performers. Understanding the difficulties and breaking them down in a systematic way empowers the performer to approach the work with confidence that the wealth of musical information contained is successfully conveyed to an audience. Also, by partitioning Psappha into 16 sections, presented as etudes of progressive difficulty, the work is useful for the development of basic multiple percussion technique. The skills acquired by learning the material of Psappha are ones needed to perform the subsequent repertoire for solo multiple percussion

Deleuze, Concepts, and Ideas about Film as Philosophy: A Critical and Speculative Re-Examination

This article explores the idea of film as a possible means for articulating original philosophical concepts, in Gilles Deleuze’s sense of concepts. The first of two parts, critically re-examines current ideas about film as philosophy in relation to Deleuze’s ideas on philosophy and cinema/art. It is common within the field of film-philosophy to trace back its central argument that film/cinema is capable of expressing original philosophy, to Deleuze’s cinema books. In and around these books, however, Deleuze did not express such an idea and rather underlined sharp formal differences between cinematic thinking and philosophy (however much he also described and implied proximities and similarities). Cinematic thinking takes the form, he argues, of blocks of movement/duration whereas philosophy is defined as the art of creating concepts. Still, could a close critical scrutiny of and some creativity with Deleuze’s thought allow for taking a step he did not take? The second part of the article takes on the speculative question of whether it is possible to create a notion from within Deleuze’s thought as a whole, that allows for at least the theoretical possibility of articulating original philosophical concepts – as Deleuze defines them (as a particular kind of multiplicity) – in and through film, and what this would mean for our understanding of the concrete form of concepts. The article examines Deleuze’s concept of concepts (how he defines their internal logic and by which formal means he implies that they can be articulated), his descriptions of complicating intersections between philosophy and art, some partly conflicting statements on Godard over the years, aspects of his analyses of filmic thinking in Cinema 2 that can be seen to provide preliminary components for articulating concepts in and through film, and it discusses the place and function of words and texts in such filmic articulations. If the aim of the first part is to clarify Deleuze’s positions on film and philosophy (often muddled in current film-philosophical writings) the aim of the second part resonates with the Deleuzian/Nietzschean quest for formal renewal of philosophy. The overall aim is to re-problematize and provide subtle new means for conceiving of and discussing the notion of film as philosophy

The how of literature

A critical discussion of the concept of 'performance literature' as applied to the cross-cultural and comparative analysis of literature, with special but not exclusive reference to the literatures of Asia and Afric

Using a Head-Mounted Video Camera to Understand Social Worlds and Experiences

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The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal