emergence.is

Inventing the Raga

emergence — Tue, 08 Dec 2020 10:36:53 +0000

For some concrete (audio) examples of innovation in the classical form (as mentioned in this post), together with some contextualising discussion, hear the podcast series by Sohan Nilkanth on new ragas by Ali Akbar Khan: part 1, part 2, part 3.

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Everting language

emergence — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 12:47:58 +0000

Kay Rosen‘s most immediate works play with palindromes, graphic alliteration, and homonymy across languages. More complicated pieces fold the lexical, semantic, material and political into each other. Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2012) and The Forest for the Trees (1990). Translate her moves into another medium – same use (sic)? ___ …

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Information and Silence – Anaahata Naad, Cage, Ikeda

emergence — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:19:15 +0000

John Cage’s 4’33’’ could be seen as a kind of footnote to the Indian concept of anaahata naad – the primordial silence that must be struck to bring forth music. In playing, this silence is represented by the (unstruck) sound of the tanpura, whose extended bridge detunes the strings as they vibrate, generating a continuous harmonic flux. White noise also makes a passable impression of silence.

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Categorisation – As Queer as Lichens

emergence — Wed, 23 Sep 2020 00:03:29 +0000

If molluscs present a challenge and inspiration for queer theory, then lichens do it alt.better. In ‘Queer Theory for Lichens’, David Andrew Griffiths elaborates a symbiotic view of life that tacks away from the idea of heterosexual reproduction and inheritance as the dominant mechanisms for reproducing life, and starkly questions the concept of the individual that we generally understand as…

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Rhizomatic politics, from a mycophile

emergence — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:36:26 +0000

More from the fun guy: The politics of symbiosis have always been fraught. Is nature fundamentally competitive or co-operative? A lot turns on this question. For many, it changes the way we understand ourselves. The dominant narrative in the United States and western Europe since the development of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century was one of conflict and competition…

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Oblique Strategies, Retrospectively

emergence — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 23:32:06 +0000

From fun guy Merlin Sheldrake’s new book, Entangled Life: Among the biggest implications of [Lynn Margulis’] endosymbiotic theory is that whole suites of abilities have been acquired in a flash, in evolutionary terms, ready-evolved, from organisms that are no one’s parents, nor one’s species, kingdom or even domain. [Joshua] Lederberg demonstrated that bacteria can horizontally acquire genes.

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Five Sidelong Glances

emergence — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:58:37 +0000

A Future Too Late At Bill McAlister’s house, entering the kitchen: a moment at the gateway is marked by the Greenwich Time Signal. Synchronised to an atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory, the pips reach out from the past: an analog radio in the bedroom. Ahead, a digital receiver by the stove repeats the […]

Categorisation – Naming Things

emergence — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:56:56 +0000

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. – Henri Poincaré … whereas poetry lives through finding different names for the same thing. A whole lot of trouble is stirred up when we assume that our categories are ‘natural’ (substitute: eternal, universal, god-given…). Even the mathematical choices that we make (e.g. the choice of valuation, see this presentation) need not…

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Now boarding… Parallelism in a time of Pandemic

emergence — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:46:13 +0000

In a time of ‘social’ (i.e. physical) distancing, frustration with the inefficiency of a typical serial scheme (one-dimensional queueing) relative to a parallel scheme (arrays) threatens to tip over into disorder. Now’s the perfect time to reconsider the prejudices that govern aircraft boarding, for example. Several years ago, Jason Steffen showed that both a parallelised scheme, and a ‘free-for…

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Arts in Time – Photography, Cinema & Lies

emergence — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 19:24:06 +0000

Music Dance Theatre Video and Film are arts in time. Artists in those fields who keep this in mind seem to go further than those mainly concerned with psychology or personality. – Steve Reich, ‘Statement about Time’ in Dance Ink magazine, 1993. Music Dance Theatre Video and Film… and Photography and Sculpture, we might also add. Paul Virilio’s The Vision Machine (1988, trans. Julie Rose 1994) )…

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