Foucault (seducing Werner Schroeter): "You get lost in your life,
in your writing, in the film you're making, precisely because you want
to explore the nature of something's identity. And then you lose it,
because you get into classifications. The thing is to create something
that happens between the ideas so that it's impossible to give it a
name, and it's up to each instant to lend it a coloration, a form and an
intensity which never say what it is. That's the art of living."
(18)
Rhythmic analysis of
repetition
The metamachine functions as a membrane that vibrates
over the megamachine. It is possible to know the metamachine by tuning
into the frequency and magnitude of its oscillations. Tuning into its
rhythmic presence.(19)
Cyclic Array Mapping
J. Becker
has used a cyclic array to map a traditional Javanese gamelan piece, as
the cyclic array more accurately represents the concepts of time
described by the gamelan musicians themselves than do the linear models
and notations used by western musicologist. Becker shows how repeating
musical forms generate temporal symmetries and balance in accordance
with Hindu and Buddhist beliefs.
Cyclic arrays, such as clock
faces, have advantages over linear arrays for conceptualizing repetitive
rhythmic structures.When used to refer to sound as a time-based
phenomenon, the word 'repetition' implies that a sound can but be
repeated when it has passed in a temporal sense (20).
Steve Reich phase shifting
He explored the
different ways in which a rhythmic figure can move out of phase with
itself. A typical Reich piece will commence with two or more musicians
playing a rhythmic pattern in unison. Gradually, they move out of phase
with each other – initially by, say, a quarter note – and
secondary rhythms are generated by the way in which the off-parallel
rhythms intermesh. The process is continued until the players are again
in unison – a cyclical rather than a developmental form.
Alternatively, a piece may involve a process of expansion which is
theoretically limitless, as is the case with Reich's Four Organs where a
single chord is gradually stretched out to a duration of several minutes
(21).
Prior to composing four organs Reich had built an
electronic musical device with the aid of an engineer friend. This
device, the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate, could gradually alter the phase
positions between a number of continously pulsing tones. If all tones
were in phase a repeating chord would be heard. If the tones were
slightly out of phase, a repeating rippling broken chord would be heard,
and if moved further out of phase, a repeating melodic pattern would
result.
Expectancy patterns
P. Desain (1992) has
described a connectionist model for rhythmic perception. This model
derives relations of events expectancies mathematically from a rhythmic
information stream. This relations are projected into the future and
past to evaluate the level of agreement of new data with past events and
so decide on the rhythmic significance of variations in the information
stream in real time.In Desain's model past relationships are projected
into the future as expectations.(21.5)
Sound and production of space
What exactly is the mode of existance of social
relationships? Are they substancial? natural? or formally abstract? The
study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations
of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a
spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming
inscribed there, and in the process of producing that space itself.
If we map the environment by recording it with sound devices, let's say
a store, a crowded megastore on a weekend of sales. We obtain a series
of repetitions, sound of repeated practices, and also cycles and
patterns.
Lefebrve, questioning if is possible to read the space:
Rather than signs, what one encounters here are directions, multifarious
and overlapping instructions (22) If not
textually is it possible to read the space through a series of rhythmic
sound patterns?.
Venturi (1966) sees space as a field of force full
of tensions and distortions (23)
The repetition of
practices inside the space generates an architecture that shares the
space with the building.
The spatial and productive quality of
sound is mentioned in contemporary sound theory:
It is
described how monadic sound even though tonal relations are usually
represented by means of linear shapes -melodic ones in a horizontal
direction and harmonic ones in a vertical direction -, certain situation
may call for combinations of these two directions. We are then
talking about graphic 2d circles or spatial 3d configurations you can
rotate as though they were musical "monads," project and cross
in much the same way as rebuses, magic squares, tropical systems,
palindromes and tone bells.(24)
http://w1.570.telia.com/%7Eu57011259/pics/bells3.mp3
In the paper, "A spatial Theory of Rhythmic
resolution," (25) Neil McLachlan proposed that
rythmic structures may operate to de-segregate auditory streams –
that is, to create ordered structures between musical parts that
contradict the segregation of these parts according to physical
location. The effect of this despatialization is to place musical
experiences outside of the range of normal physical experiences of
sound.
Auditory streams, a psychoacustic concept that explain
people's natural ability to differentiate sound sources occuring in the
worlds about them. The complex mixtures of spectral envelopes that are
commonly sensed by the ear are grouped into auditory streams relating to
individual sources through the analysis of similarities, continuities
and discontinuities in spectral, temporal and binaural sensory data.
These spacialzed auditory streams generate an auditory scene or field,
described by D. Ihde (1976) as a specific form of opening into the
physical world with its own center and horizon, independent but related
to other sensory fields.(26)
As the auditory space between
discrete sounding objects in the physical world appears less defined, so
may the space between discrete sounding objects and the listening self.
Under this conditions, music, musicians and the acoustic sense of self
may appear to cohabit the same abstract space, a space that is not
entirely interior or exterior to the listening individual. Such
dissolution of the individual self could be expected to produce powerful
emotional responses as sometime occur when playing or listening to music
(op cit p.67)
The rotating cubic hexaeders as used by Iannis xenakis
in Nomos Alpha (1965) , a kind of octophonic structuring of space in
Karlheinz Stockhausen's Dienstag (1991) and the so called Ton-Raum
manipulations by Walter O'Connell in 1962.
And finnally Boulez's principle
of horizontal arpeggios' in his work "Répons." His
understanding of arpeggio refers to the fan-like 'plucking' of space by
means of point-shaped, auto-reproductive sound germs that generate
themselves.
Conclusion
I have exposed in this
paper a whole array of ideas related to a particular vision of the
machine. The attempt has been to observe it taking inspiration from
examples of technology that escape war or consumption models. I focused
on one application of second-order cybernetics, Cybersyn experiment in
Chile in the 1970's.
Second-order cybernetics is centered in
autopoietic machines.
My central question is related to the
mapping of social processes considering them as selfregulated. The map
im thinking of would be a metaimage and a complex machine where
subjectivity and society meet. I have described this system: the
megamachine coupled with the metamachine. There is a vibration of one on
top of the other. This vibration and rhythmic presence has consequences
in the psychogeography of cities in the sense described by Appadurai
when talking about colliding landscapes.
I have set a parallel between
coupled machines, sound linked to practice, rhythm and production of
space. I have found that contemporary sound theory offers an important
language and description of subtle processes that could be used to talk
about this coupling of abstract machines (metamachine and megamachine
for instance).
In the first place this set of ideas starts giving the
basis for a series of mappings to be made in public spaces, specially in
places of consumption, control and deterioration.
The map then is
thought as a system of interfaces.
The map is a machine of language, a
metamachine, a machine of systemics and finally an autopoietic machine.
A map thought as a plane (a sheed populated by intensities) of infinite
posibilities.
Thanks to the experimentation on composition techniques in
contemporary music i have posed the subject of production of space
through sound. This is what is realised by Xenakis, Boulez, Stockhausen
and Walter O'Connell.
The use of repetition as a way of discovering the
patterns contained in daily life sounds as the phase shifting technique
developed by Steve Reich has lead me to the idea of mapping the space in
the process of being produced by practices. The map is populated by
rythmic oscillations of repeated practices.
Then the use of Cyclic arrays as designed by J. Becker would be a way to visualise this rythmic patterns and to map the geometries that rise. If we think of this topography and we introduce the ideas proposed by Desain's connectionist model about expectancy patterns (a correspondance of geometries affecting perception) we have also some ideas about how to predict actions and behaviors, that could be of consumption for example when applied to the abstract space of capitalism.
A step further would
be to program a series of interventions in which theory about patterns
and repetition should be put in practice in order to alter the rhythm of
a defined plane: a control space, a consumption space, a dead space.
This is thought as the design of machinic dispositives that articulate
or dissagregate the plane of posibilities (in the sense of the
disagregation of auditory streams explained by Mac Lahan) .
This ideas
have made me draw a horizon of experimentation that i have chosen to
drive toward the linguistic realm (from architecture of space to the
architecture of language and meaning). I have named it as the semantic
playgrounds and i am thinking of the repetition of linguistic
arrangements at different scales, about planes of possibilities and
about the design of machinic dispositives as linguistic dispositives
acting inside semantic matrixes.
The aim of this rythmanalytical
mapping is to define the zones where to generate perturbations,
experimenting in semiotic realms, this is what will be described as
splitting interventions and the questions behind are about homeostatic
laws, wether they exist in conversations and what are the contours of
conversational flows.
The inclusion of a score of performance has
been made as an action to draw lines of possibilities. Its a conceptual
map in the sense Tudor and Ogielska use their visual maps. The score can
be read as a map for conceptual research and a map to operate the
performance.
Maps, models, contours, obtaining a mold of social
structures, of moving relations, of social change. A Sheet populated by
concentrations, flows, recursions. We are working developing non
productive machines, desire machines. [score]