Re: <eyebeam><blast> swaying rhythms

["Paul D. Miller" <anansi@interport.net>]

There's an old essay that Theodor Adorno wrote back in 1928 in Vienna
called "The Curve of the Needle", in which he wrote about consciousness
and "mechanical music", and how 20th century reality had been configured
by the mechanical interfaces that have somehow become part and parcel of
how people create cultural artifacts in a world where commodication of
all aspects of human creativity has become a norm. Adorno wrote of this
"mechanical music" as a kind of milieu where the conditions linking
cultural production had been totally transformed and abstracted by the
processes of modernization. "This grows" he would write "out of the
conviction that the mechanical presentation of music today is of
contemporary relevance in a deeper sense than merely being currently
available as a new technological means... the availability of the means
corresponds to an availibilty of consciousness." I write about such a
crusty of Frankfurt school theorist because the last couple of posts
have focused on how being immersed in a complete hypertextual
environment has been such a huge creative crucible for on-line culturre:
but people always tend to skip the idea that culture moves in waves:
there are so many other areas where this kind of psychological
environment has existed for a while, and its values have migrated into
the creative matrix of the web and on-line creative communities. I dj
under the name "Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid" as a conceptual project
involving culture as a kind of hypertext where ideas can move between a
youth culture that takes almost everything this symposium has been
discussing for granted, and an artworld that is still based in a kind of
late 19th century take on things. It's a large gap indeed. There's an
even later essay that a theorist named Freidrich Kittler wrote called
"Discourse Networks 1800/1900" that analyzes how writing and reading
changed over the course of two centuries of hyper-stimulation: this is
the environment that youth culture, in one form or another (I feel
globally) has inherited, and that the on-line community could check out
a bit more in-depth. Kittler wrote about mechanical technologies and
human expression within the flow of information between a Europe
burdened with centuries of medieval traditions and an America that fully
engaged the pluralism of the mechanized age: from mechanical piano's
playing the saloons of the wild west to the full implementation of
telephony - Kittler's words on the topic seem really prescient: such
technologies are not mere instruments with which 'man' produces his
meanings... rather they set the framework within which 'meaning' indeed
something like 'man' become possible at all." I know that this is
relatively old news for symposiums members (from what I've read about
perception and identity from the various postings, people could check
out a bit more non-jargony texts), but I thought it might add some spice
to the proceedings. Think about how kids would view the dialogue we have
put together, and you'll see why I'm writing this. There's alot more I
could write on this topic, but I wanted to keep it short.




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