less signs, more symbols

A sign is less.
A symbol is more.

Less is more.
A sign is a symbol.

They are signs and symbols of each other.

Preexisting Formats and the New Format: Compositional Poetry

Following on from Formats and Genres being Rituals I’m now reading David Byrne in How Music Works, where he states, in contrast to the lone genius coming up with some expressive creative outpouring, that:

I believe that we unconsciously and instinctively make work to fit preexisting formats.

He then begins to support this claim with a description of how the context of a performance influences how it is listened too, or rather, if it cannot be heard, if it doesn’t work acoustically, then it will not get performed. (This is basically the opening of the book and it’s all I’ve read so far).

I.E. that the formats we instinctively write for are determined by the contexts in which the formats are themselves created (as socially and economically constructed in other words).

That the acoustic environment of the places where we choose to attend to music influences the style, the format of the music, which we then subsequently associate with a particular type of music. (No doubt this attention to the acoustic environment is just the opening of what ‘context’ means in this book.)

This means that what is perceived as religious music will depend on the environment in which we attend religious rites and services. Complex rhythmic spirituals developed when dancing and chanting in a forest clearing will not work in cavernous cathedrals, but simple slower changing music will cope with, if not incorporate, the reverb.

Now having attempted to create a couple of formats (Compositional Poetry and the Unnsonnet) it occurs to me that to get them work I have to find or make the right space fo them. Or find an unused space and adapt my multi-voice pieces to them.

Everything leads back to marketing, as the context of context, the meta-context of both our creative and ritualistic impulses. I don’t think it possible for a lone genius to ever do that alone.

I’ll just have to wait to be picked up after I’m dead. Even if I had the natural skills to be a marketeer, I do not have the interest. So I’ll just put it out there on the internet and see what happens.

If something really is a new format it is very hard to describe. (Let alone promote. If it was about cats or pets generally of course it would meme-ify and promote itself.)

Compositional Poetry
Compositional Poetry is a form of read-together poetry written in a number of voices and is performed much like a musical score, where the voices speak their lines according to their responsibilities, not in chorus, not in soliloquy, not taking turns, but all of these and none. Each voice is thus not a character as a role in a play or opera, though characters may appear of their own volition. Stories may emerge of their own inclination.

Currently I am writing a new compositional poem. Working title “MAKE”. I do one every ten years or so.

#Formats & #genres are #rituals.

Over the last week I’ve been tweeting notes and implications on reading What is Art For? by Ellen Dissanayake. It’s all about ‘making special’.

A year ago I starting working on a performance piece libretto [I dare not call it opera as I detest that format...] dealing with our making of things, like baskets, knifes, houses and operas, and thus our specialness as a species, which may not lie in the making of things, so much as in the specialness we make.

Here is a crude mind map of that twitter stream.

Mind map of a twitter stream as I read What is Art For? By Ellen Dissanayake

The thought “Formats and genres are rituals” occured at the end of mapping out the tweets.

I am using a very simple mind mapper that doesn’t even use arrows, thus it is a very unstructured mind map. However as a first draft of an ontology of making, if not an ontogeny of special, I like it.

Twitter & Re-Tweet Resources

As FORMeika started as a how to write twitter stories blog, I’d better mentioned a couple of twitter and tweet resources for people engaging with various communities through twitter.com.

• Retweet Glossary, Syntax and Punctuation
• What does MT mean on Twitter?
• What does HT mean on Twitter?

These have all grown since I started on twitter, and this blog. Recently there is also a very simple guide on How To Write A Twitter Story. Must have been a gap in the market.

 

What was ‘Of Grammatology’ about?

What was Of Grammatology about? When Madeleine, the heroine of Jeffrey Eugenides’s campus novel The Marriage Plot, asks a young theory-head this question, she is immediately set straight: ‘If it was “about” anything, then it was about the need to stop thinking of books as being about things.’

That’s not so far off. In all three books, Derrida’s argument was that Western thought from Plato to Rousseau to Lévi-Strauss had been hopelessly entangled in the illusion that language might provide us with access to a reality beyond language, beyond metaphor: an unmediated experience of truth and being which he called ‘presence’. Even Heidegger, a radical critic of metaphysics, had failed to escape its snares. This illusion, according to Derrida, was the corollary of a long history of ‘logocentrism’: a privileging of the spoken word as the repository of ‘presence’, at the expense of writing, which had been denigrated as a ‘dangerous supplement’, alienated from the voice, secondary, parasitic, even deceitful.

via Adam Shatz reviews ‘Derrida’ by Benoît Peeters, translated by Andrew Brown · LRB 22 November 2012 [paywall].

Concrete Names: Foundation Stone Mimicry evolving into Year of Birth ID

Commuting home I cycle by a recently re-formed footpath near my home. It’s at a particularly steep little section and when tired I often push my bike up it. Doing so the other day I noticed the graffiti scratched into the then wet cement surface had captured a turning point, a shift in how we use dates, particularly the year, in relation to our names.

Foundation stones provide information about when a building or bridge is built. They may be more or less formal. The more grand and formal the building the more formal, and more informing to the reader, the foundation stone becomes. Particularly if someone very important lays a foundation stone at a ceremony. Like, say, the visiting Duke of Edinburgh, in Hobart, Tasmania in 1868.

(American usage dominates the web still, and wikipedia, so their term “cornerstone” is to be found online with the sense I am using “Foundation Stone”, while “Foundation Stone” is restricted in the USA usage to refer to a particular ethnic or religious site in the Middle East.)(God knows why.)

(And North American usage uses Sidewalk for Footpath while in Britain they just say Pavement.)

St David’s Park Foundation Stone, Hobart, 1868

When people graffiti their name alongside a year, they often use the very year the graffiti is made, much like when a foundation stone is laid. I’d argue they are copying this formal ceremonial practice in a street style. Doing so, they are claiming the concrete in their own name, even though, like a foundation stone, the structure was actually someone else’s work. (No doubt the habit of painting the road on New Year’s Eve with the new year’s year supports this practice.)

Above you can see the name scrawlers SAPPHIRE, TYLAR, COREY & CRYStAL, have used the traditional Foundation Stone approach claiming the concrete as their work in 2012. (It is possible they are all by he same hand.) Right next to it on the same concrete pour is the following.

This SLiPKNOT Matt has not used the year of the concrete’s pour, but, most likely, the year of their birth, 2001. This follows the recent habit of distinguishing, somewhat, an email username or internet handle by year of birth from all the other Matts, all the other SLiPKNOT Matts, or, at least, from those born in other years. Otherwise you are just WarriorWomanNumber2314567@email.com and this works against the very idea of naming at all.

So this is a transitional piece and in the years to come the foundational style of scrawling one’s name in freshly poured concrete will fade away. It will just be an opportunity tag, and not a foundational, or cornerstone, mimicry.

View Larger Map

(Pull the lower image of the map down to get the exact location in Marlyn Rd, Tasmania, 7004, Australia)

Coding Poetry

In between the machine and the comparison lies a little bit of me, and you, that mirroring delusion; powerful, leveraged, reciprocal.

Our chatty recursion bootstrapped doggerel into consciousness with a smile, though too often we call the namespace ‘intelligence’,  a diversion in order to avoid a close chambered elephantiasis— too often we’d rather be casting aspersions of intension on domesticating taxoplasmotic parasited hosts— sorry, sorry, I really mean co-evolving partner…

For if the robot is our child, the infantry of our immortality, then our zombie ancestors whispered algorithms in chinese rooms until we came to hear our names in the signals for the first time, patterns in the noise indicating some love, some trespass, some forward looking hope.

Otherwise the mystery still stings, a cypher in the snarling hole.