This website is the home-base for part three of the Digital Media for the Artist course. In this part of the course we focus on composition studies in the contemporary digital age. We will explore the terrain or world of digital composition within a conceptual, procedural, and technical framework we have been building the foundations of the entire term. The framework goes like this: digital media electrifies, dissolves, atomizes, distributes, and embodies creativity, enabling individuals to use the entire world as palette. Normally composition is kind of cubby-holed into categories like musical composition, visual composition, and so forth, but in the current/present digital context composition can involve and include just about everything and, as such, the compositional process is raised to a higher level. The following quote speaks directly to what I am saying here: "The art of remixing and
sampling...points to ways of
working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling
together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential
whole which is much more than the sum of its parts." So we'll be working within the above type of conceptual landscape. The process we'll use is sample-and-remix. The technologies we'll use include digital image, audio, and video. My view is that the above combination of concept, process, and technologies can play in new combinations like haiku-hip-hop (just to provide one examle) in an endless stream of snapshots and snippets, captured-but-not-captured, like fleeting glances or shimmers on water, ongoing, with ever-present potential for collaborative, phase-changing sonic booms and areas of quiescent beauty created by movements across boundaries between intellect and creativity, poetry and prose, art and life, human and technology, quantum, Newtonian, and complexity realities. As I see it, something like this is the HUGE potential of the world-as-palette which is the McLuhanesque "message" embedded in digital "media". I think we are just beginning to see the outlines of what will come of this. BTW just for fun the following haiku was 'written' by Peter's Haiku Generator: Clouds melt yet smoke walks. Touching, cold waits or truth works. A flower burns snow. Okay, so standard
definitions of 'composition' go something like this: The
act
or art of composing, or forming a whole or integral, by placing
together and uniting different things, parts, or ingredients.
I'm obviously seeking to expand just a bit on the above definition in FOUR ways: First as mentioned above I want to make sure the definition encompasses the variants of composition across the mediums of writing, designing, music-making, film, dance, and drama. I am very intrigued by the possible overlaps between a design composition, for example, and a music composition, and I want the definition (and our work) to capture the overlaps. Second I want to emphasize the universality and pervasiveness of compositional activities. We are composing all of the time, just like we are thinking all of the time. Thinking is a creative act. It is a form of composition. Making sense of the world = composition. We compose ourselves, our rooms, our look, the food we put on a plate, etc. It's just what we do! Third I want an expanded definition to encompass decomposition and recomposition as parts of the grand scheme of things in composition. Decomposition has some good resonances that can be explored. It resonates with deconstruction for example, one of the key intellectual movements of late 20th century, and it also resonates with the use of natural processes in composition (decomposition or disaggregation is a natural process, allied to entropy). Fourth: IN PART THREE OF THE COURSE I want DMA to ROLL-UP IN FINE KATAMARI-STYLE HIPHOP and REMIX CULTURE For me, REMIX and recomposition is the big one in the digital age of hacked-and-reassembled, socially-produced artworks, etc. It's the one that ramps us up to higher ground. In this regard I'm proposing we define composition as CompositionDecompositionRecomposition to signify the above expansions. Kind of like C P R --except in this case we are reviving A R T. Our study of composition includes project-assignments as well as readings that build on the study of the Liberal Arts (i.e., the merging, combining, and re-combining of creativity and intellect exemplified by W.B. Macomber) that we completed in part one of the course, and on our study of important figures in Media Studies completed in part two of the course (e.g., McLuhan's point about the externalization of the central nervous system that electric media enacts for us, along with his already-mentioned formulation that asks us to see mediums themselves as having messages). In the radically distributed world we live in, compositional activity --which meaningfully groups or unifies things-- becomes particularly important. Recall that in the first era of industrialization, in which everything was standardized (i.e., think "the age of mass-media" such as TV), individuation was the sought-after and quite difficult-to-realize condition. Mass-produced, standardized content was everywhere, right next to mass-produced, standardized clothes and so forth. Then recall that in the second era of industrialization (i.e, think "the age of the computer") everything became hyper-individualized and customizable. In this milieu or environment individuation or divergence is everywhere, while convergence or unity is difficult to realize. We saw this for example in the Frontline "Persuaders" video, in which marketers and advertisers were seen expending tremendous effort to establish anything like a group! THIS IS WHY COMPOSITION MATTERS: IT SIGNIFIES THE ACT OF PULLING THINGS TOGETHER. Okay, so in the chaotic electrified soup such as the one we now live in, composing oneself, maintaining one's composure, composing one's dorm room or apartment or plate, and composing relevant meaning are extremely important activities. Again this is why composition studies is highlighted in the DMA course by being accorded its own stage in part three of the course. We're in an era wherein art and life can be combined in new ways. In approaching any task, it is crucial to gather information and knowledge as well as proper tools (and please read that line with a proper British accent :) The task of making sense of the contemporary world --composing meaning-- is no exception. REMIX IS SIMPLY ONE OF THOSE PROPER TOOLS, VERY USEFUL FOR MAKING SENSE IN THE DIGITAL AGE.  Hence we are focusing on these sorts of compositional because they are situated somewhere between viewfinders and kaleidoscopes; they are neither overly prescriptive/narrative tools, nor utterly random/nonsensical tools. In this sense they combine random and non-random elements stochastically (to echo an important term used earlier in our course). PLEASE READ THE FOLLOWING QUOTES FROM WIKIPEDIA TEXTS TO COMPLETE THE ABOVE THOUGHTS AND THIS OVERVIEW OF COMPOSITION STUDIES First this quote from a Wikipedia article on deconstruction (the full text of the article available online) Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of undoing the oppositions on which it is apparently founded, and to the point of showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible. It is an approach that may be deployed in philosophy, in literary analysis, in other fields, or in a way that transcends the boundaries of such fields. Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point. Derrida refers to this point as an aporia in the text, and terms deconstructive reading "aporetic." J. Hillis Miller has described deconstruction this way: “Deconstruction is not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it has already dismantled itself. Its apparently-solid ground is no rock, but thin air."[1] Then this quote from a Wikipedia article on remix (a snippet of this was quoted above, and the full text of the article is available online) John Von Seggern of the ethnomusicology department at the University of California, Riverside says that the remix "is a major conceptual leap: making music on a meta-structural level, drawing together and making sense of a much larger body of information by threading a continuous narrative through it. This is what begins to emerge very early in the hip-hop tradition in works such as Grandmaster Flash's pioneering mix recording Adventures on the Wheels of Steel. The importance of this cannot be overstated: in an era of information overload, the art of remixing and sampling as practiced by hip-hop DJs and producers points to ways of working with information on higher levels of organization, pulling together the efforts of others into a multilayered multireferential whole which is much more than the sum of its parts." A remix may also refer to a non-linear re-interpretation of a given work or media other than audio. Such as a hybridizing process combining fragments of various works. The process of combining and re-contextualizing will often produce unique results independent of the intentions and vision of the original designer/artist. Thus the concept of a remix can be applied to visual or video arts, and even things farther afield. Mark Z. Danielewski's disjointed novel House of Leaves has been compared by some to the remix concept Deconstruction (from the world of Liberal Arts) and Remix (from the world of Fine Arts) together again for the first time, rolled-up in the same Katamari. ONWARD!\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ ////////////////////////// \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ //////////////////////////// |
|
|
Overview |
