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Category: performance

Dialogues In The Floating World

Published November 3, 2008 by cgerrish

Hopper\'s Nighthawks at the Diner

The locus of the conversation is the place/time where something new was revealed through a coming to terms by a group of people sitting around a table. The spatio-temporal coordinates of those tables have caused me to long for some method of time travel, a way to sit at those tables and engage in those conversations. Literature has provided me with a portal to some of those locations: the table of Gerald and Sara Murphy; the Algonquin roundtable; a late night at the carnegie deli; or in a car driving across the country with a lost battalion of platonic conversationalists.

Algonquin Round Table

The Network has changed some of the essential requirements for a conversation. A place at the table is no longer necessary– only time remains as a primary home for conversation. It’s time that now calls the tune, conversation unfolds in sequence, through the river of time across multiple real time media streams.

Remember ‘that time.’ I don’t remember all the words, or how they were strung together into sentences– or even the order of the sentences. I remember I spoke first, or was it you? But I remember ‘that time,’ I remember the ride we took. I remember the big ideas we passed by– they really made an impression. They changed the way I think about things, and therefore changed my world.

Detached from place, the conversation unfolds in a virtual space. It’s the place we all call in to. Somehow, I imagine that space without light- only sound echoing in the darkness. Without visual cues, it’s a building up another kind of give and take. It’s almost impossible for me to anticipate when you are about to speak. But after we’ve talked in that darkness a few times, we develop a sense for the music of it. The rhythms, the melodies and themes provide the pocket of the groove for the next solo to blend into.

An augmentation of the conversation occurs for the speakers when the darkness lifts and they open their eyes and view the live Network. Place returns, and it’s the Network’s space that we have in common. The visual space of the virtual conversation is an undiscovered country. We use that space to verify facts, to remember names, find support in statistics, and point to a location for later reference. As we speak, we browse and co-browse, we hunt and gather fuel for the conversation.

What of the fuel? What ignites a conversation and keeps it going? From what source does it draw its energy? There’s a point at which you can stand and watch as the future comes into being. It comes, not out of nothingness, but rather from the re-combining and re-describing of the things around us. The moment when you stop watching silently and begin to bring language into the frame, you start to understand the real usefulness of the new. The new wants explaining, it seeks language.

Nautilus Spiral

Sometimes it seems as though we’re talking in circles, never getting closer to the center of the matter. But conversations are never perfect circles, they’re always spirals. Or perhaps a circle in the sense of a hermeneutic circle:

The hermeneutic circle describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one’s understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one’s understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text, rather, it stresses that the meaning of text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

Our dialogues and monologues have entered a kind of floating world, detached from physical space and reattached to place within the Network. While the shape of the conversation is much the same, it is augmented by an extended access to memory. When I refer to my notes, they are infinitely deep. The danger is that we may end up simply reading to each other and lose our voice in favor of a chorus of quotation. It’s only when we color outside the lines that we uncover the new. For a truly exploratory dialogue failure isn’t an option, it’s a requirement.

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Micro-Objects: I have no mouth and I must scream

Published August 19, 2008 by cgerrish

I have no mouth and I must scream

The analogy to Harlan Ellison’s classic story isn’t there at all. But somehow the phrase fits anyway. As I think about Jessie Stay’s post about the implementation of the “in_reply_to_status_id” parameter in Twitter, and the matching of the metadata element by Identi.ca, I keep coming back to J.L. Austin’s idea of the speech act. This new parameter is a connector that enables a network of conversation. The elements of a conversation are not objects, but rather speech acts of the subject.

“What does it matter who is speaking,” someone said. “What does it matter who is speaking.”

Samuel Beckett
Stories and Texts for Nothing

The 140 character limit of the Tweet and the Dent ties the form to the SMS. The SMS is tied to the phone and the transmission of voice. It’s the writing that’s closest to speech and the performative utterance. The Tweet/Dent is the combination of the speaker and the spoken. Identity is implied. When a micro-object speaks, does it remain an object like any other object?

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Live Web’s Point of Contact: The 5th Guy in the Room

Published August 7, 2008 by cgerrish

Walter Benjamin

There’s a sense in which the digital is a copy at its origin. It has no uniqueness, no originality. The difference between the first copy and subsequent copies is just a time stamp in the file system.

In 1936, Walter Benjamin was thinking about the digital before it existed:

That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the ‘aura’ of the work of art. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition and substitutes plurality of copies for a unique existence.

– Walter Benjamin

The digital seems like a black hole, a format that is non-auratic at its core. While digital files can be very amusing, can they ever have the ‘aura’ and unique presence of the original work of art? As we look at the digital objects surrounding us, it seems as though we could be having one of Phillip K. Dick’s nightmares.

Layering the digital on top of the digital, mashing up a new media venue reveals a real time moment that has an originality at the point of contact. Live radio broadcast over the real time web creates a moment of danger, imperfection and improvisation. I’m not talking about commercial radio stuffed down another channel, but the kind of stuff that is emerging from micro-communities within the social web. While these files can be consumed on a digital delay, at the present moment of their creation they show every sign of having an ‘aura.’ You can see it happen sometimes with live music, and in rare cases with comedy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of spark or electricity that happens when you can actually hear people listening to each other. The members of the Firesign Theater are eloquent on this point:

“There was no leader,” Bergman says. “Everything was communally written, and if one person didn’t agree about something, no matter how strongly the other three felt about it, it didn’t go in.” This principle was to hold true with each subsequent Firesign effort because, as Bergman explains, “If one of us doesn’t get it then something’s wrong. But if we get it, then it doesn’t matter who else does.” All the Firesigns agree, however, that a mysterious synergy took place whenever the four of them got together. “It’s like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing,” Austin says. “We all vaguely sort of know him, and a lot of the time take credit for him.”

– Phil Austin

The real time web has the potential to offer redemption to the digital, the return of the detached aura in that moment of creation. While the digital has proven itself as a bread winner, it’s only just now learning how to dance.

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The Guitar Makes Dreams Weep

Published July 27, 2008 by cgerrish

Steinway Piano

Joan Nagano at the Piano

Joan Nagano and Kay Stern after the performance

It’s a distinct pleasure to see a musical performance of a very high level in the comfort of a home. Joan Nagano, piano, and Kay Stern, violin,  wanted to run through their program in front of an audience before performing at a chamber music festival in Tahoe. There were about 15 of us in this small preview audience. The program featured pieces by Boccherini, Paganini, Beethoven, Poulenc, Ben-Haim and Zarzycki.

The entire program was engaging and beautiful, but I want to focus on the Sonata for Violin and Piano by Poulenc. Before each piece, Kay Stern, who also serves as Concertmaster for the San Francisco Opera Orchestra, provided some context for the music. Here’s the text she read:

Several of Poulenc’s earlier attempts at writing violin sonatas and string quartets ended in the sewers of Paris, and the only string music of this nature which finally passed the composer’s fastidious scrutiny were the Sonata for violin and piano, and the Sonata for cello and piano (1948). The violin sonata was the result of pressures from the young violinist Ginette Neveu to write a violin piece.

Written during the German occupation of France, this work was boldly dedicated to the memory of Federico García Lorca – a Spanish poet murdered by fascist troops because of his liberal opinions and homosexuality. Poulenc had set three Lorca poems as songs in 1937. The violin sonata was intended as a personal statement on the poet’s senseless death. The middle movement was meant to be “vaguely Spanish” – evoking the distant guitars and Moorish cantilena of Lorca’s Spain. The concluding Presto tragico is as violent and brusque as Lorca’s death.

The chamber music of Poulenc is known for its melody and accessibility, this piece was challenging both in its construction and its emotional territory. The three movements take you on a emotional journey through darkness and violence. Perhaps there’s something about witnessing music like this in a domestic setting that sharpens the connections. For the duration of the performance there was crystal clear visibility into the haunting, tragic story of the murder of the poet and the tumultuous landscape of war. It was only as the last note rang out that the double parlor of a flat somewhere in San Francisco slowly came back into focus, and the audience was returned to their seats.

The Guitar
makes dreams weep.
The sobbing of lost souls
escapes from its round mouth.
 And like the tarantula
it weaves a giant star
to capture sighs
that float in its black
cistern of wood. 

Federico García Lorca

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