Resource-Control

Here is another “cover” of Cage’s 4′33″

Instruments: KEYWORDS (pulled randomly from Cynthia Selfe’s “Toward New Media Texts”); listener’s available sound/space; KEYWORD/tag generated YouTube offerings

This performance hopes to (begin to) speculate on what Cage’s “minimal compositional frame” makes possible (and perhaps consequently what the concept of “minimal compositional frame(s)” in connection with digital media might make possible for English Composition). One premise: Cage’s turn to language posits words as instruments. Subsequent premise: English Composition’s turn to “new media” begins to posit writing as action.

(I have posted Cage’s score to 4′33″ elsewhere in the blog; if you haven’t yet read it, you might, but not necessarily, go there first.)

Notes on my “transfer of responsibility for the experience”:

you could listen to the composition as is, simply push play for each movement, a contact of KEYWORDS and emergent sounds will occur if you listen…

another option…foreground your space as instrument by changing the space (turn up your speakers and move into another room, for example)…or don’t move, but alter the available sounds in your space…generally, invite new sound…

another option…foreground the YouTube instrument (via each movement’s KEYWORDS) by advancing the KEYWORD video to its end and experience each movement via the other textual/video options YouTube offers you in response to the KEYWORDS tagged to the original image…

…generally, extend this performance…

I: 33″

[youtube]8PmTLqqAzmg[/youtube]

II: 2′40″

[youtube]AjOmIhIT0J0[/youtube]

III: 1′20″

[youtube]JMU3yG1BjWE[/youtube]

What did you hear?

Opening Shot:

(pulled from Liz Kotz’s Word to Be Looked At. No permission)

This post will attempt to both respond to recent reading and to make an initial (vague/tentative) proposal for a larger project. The project has two tentative names at this moment: “Writing Indeterminacy” or “John Cage and English Composition.” I imagine “Writing Indeterminacy” to take, at some point, the form of a writing course (first-year/any year). An alternate name (or subtitle) for this course might be ‘Wide Open (Public) Spaces.” What might such a course look like?

(sketch)

In her recent book Words To Be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art (2007), Liz Kotz argues that the event scores of the 1960s (by such artists/composers as George Brecht and La Monte Young) “reflect the strange duality of language that is both autonomous text and an instruction to do something” (9)

I argue that “digital” in English Composition contexts allows for a full-on undertaking of this duality – autonomy and action. “Writing Indeterminacy” would explore how more questions could be generated from the questions: How are Composition classrooms spaces of “autonomy” – spaces performing and rehearsing “reading” and “writing” relatively free from, but in relation to, the everyday? How are Composition classrooms spaces of “action” – spaces performing and enacting the experiences of “reading” and “writing” the everyday?

(Liz Kotz is awesome.)

We’ve recently read Gunther Kress (”Multimodality, Multimedia, and Genre” – 2003). I would like to explore how the composer John Cage (as early as 1952 with his composition 4′33″) anticipated the “great [and productive] simplification of syntax for writing” that Kress asserts emerges with multimodal composing. Such a “simplification of syntax” might be something to fear, but what compositional possibilities does it open?

For Cage, a silent composition such as his 4′33″ “provid[ed] a minimal compositional frame that would open up the performance to unanticipated environmental sounds and transfer responsibility for the experience on to the perceptual capacities of the audience members” (Kotz 15).

Within this space, visit the page 4′33″ (Covers) for performance(s) of 4′33″…

In the context of our course the tag “listening event” is appropriate for Neimeyer’s webcasts.

What we tend to label as the “problematic” elements of our experience with Neimeyer’s webcasts – the disembodied voice, etc. – made, I think, the text incredibly rich, although in ways that wouldn’t meet a standard “distance learning” criteria. I think our experiences of such a “listening event” invite some speculation about the kinds of readers/listeners, and consequently writers, that ‘new media’ deployments challenge us to be. How do we design learning spaces that encourage people to be generous “readers” of the ambient?

As some colleagues have commented, this listening event – the webcast lecture – invites some difficulty. We can’t see Neimeyer or the class. The peak of such difficulty might be in last third/quarter of the second lecture when the class screens films and as listeners to the webcasts we are (at least) doubly removed – we have only the film soundtrack de/re-contextualized by Neimeyer for his lecture; we may have no memory reference of the (total) film itself. Have we all seen Tron or Ghost in the Shell?

I would suggest that these webcasts/listening events are in many ways suited for the ‘new media’ label as defined by Wysocki – that new media texts are those that foreground materiality. And I would argue that these “texts” can even fit this definition without a high degree of intent/purpose because of a high ambient capacity.

While maybe Neimeyer hasn’t produced the webcast version of these lectures to “make as overtly visible as possible the values they embody” (Wysocki), they do, in not accounting for the “vision” of the listener, make the listener aware, to varying degrees, of “the range of materialities of texts” (ex. sound, apparatus, finding a way to ask a question in 50-person lecture class, etc.) and the ever present possibilities/limits of both literal and virtual classroom space.

I wonder about the ideas of purpose and intention in working with new media texts. Maybe the possibilities of material awareness become radically possible in digital ‘new media’ because, in working digitally, materiality can be foregrounded simultaneously (in- and un -) intentionally via the presence of large spaces of “textual” ambience. Even “failed” texts, then, seem ripe with space and possibility for reading and further invention.

Or at least we have to be careful in how we define “failed” new media texts.

(My mind wanders here to how much advertising has come to understand the possibilities of ambience – to simultaneously foreground/vanish the product, or maybe better said – to foreground the product (and its infinite “possibilities”) by utilizing ambience as a site for invention.)

Ambience as site of invention.

I found myself mesmerized by the ambience of Neimeyer’s lectures. Voices creeping in to offer suggestions for troubleshooting the DVD player.

Just a word about links form here. At the moment I have two basic categories:
“658 Muster Roll” – these are blogs of students in the 658 course
“Others Outside” – these are links to sites and blogs “outside” the class.

“Others Outside” is a mix at this point, but as I tend to cast the ‘what’s relevent’ to the work of this space (or composition) pretty wide and I think all could offer contexts; however, I should note that I am beginning to link to writers who are very specifically working in English Composition – welcome to the roll Jeff Rice (U of Missouri, Columbia) and Mike McGinnis (Wayne State U) – and these might be of more explicit interest to folks in the 658 scene. So I anticipate a revised link scheme soon.

I’m not clear if there is really an etiquette for posting links in the sidebar, so I’ll air that I do not necessarily have any affiliation with the creators of all the spaces linked to, but instead might have what we could call some form of (real/desired) affinity. If I’ve put a link to you, and you’d rather not be, just give word and I’ll make revisions.

thanks.