<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Thanks for the introduction Renate! <br><br></span></div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">There have been some great discussions on boredom, and while I did not reply to some of the other threads, I was engaged and meditating on my own experiences with boredom.<br><br></span></div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">I clearly remember how bored I was when confronted with some of the most iconic sonic art created. Lets be clear, the boredom that I was experiencing was a good thing. I was a graduate student at Alfred University and Andrew Deutsch was having us listen to a small section of LaMonte Young's "The Well Tuned Piano". For those of you who are not familiar with this work, a "small" section of this piece meant that our session lasted over 2 hours. I remember attempting to concentrate on the arrangement of notes for the first 20 minutes only to find my mind wandering. The repetitive nature of the score caused me to think about what I was working on, which was a database narrative video installation that was in absolute disarray because I could not get any of the programmatic arrangements right. Then I thought about my daughter and arranging playdates for the weekend, and that I was graduating in 2 months and needed to figure out the next steps of my life. <br><br></span></div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">As these thoughts flowed through my consciousness, LaMonte Young's score kept wafting in and out of my waking mind. I began to tire but not fall fully asleep. The minimalist structure of the work was turning my sense of time on its head, had I heard these notes before? Eventually, after the first hour my mind stopped wandering towards all of the pressing issues that demanded immediate consideration in my life and I became intensely aware of all of the sound around me. While I had studied a lot about the concepts and methods driving the work of Pauline Oliveros, this 2 hour listening session of "The Well Tuned Piano" was the first moment that I experienced what she terms "Deep Listening".<br><br></span></div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">According to the Deep Listening Institute, this method "<span style="font-size:small">explores
the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the
voluntary, selective nature – exclusive and inclusive -- of listening." These methods are deeply rooted in Buddhist tradition, but it is also an inherently post-structural form of engaging sonic works where the variability of how one listens determines the tone of the work. Rather than thinking of boredom as emptiness and a void, think about the presence of absence. Difference is such a powerful tool, imagine five minutes of white noise: an irritating, sharp and prickly sound. Then over a minute a warm, low frequency begins a slow attack and washes away the white noise. Without that juxtaposition, the pleasurable stimuli of the warm tone would not be as effective.<br><br></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:small">This certainly comes into play in terms of the trajectory of how my work has evolved through research and development. The first time I attempted to create a database narrative video installation, I had so many assumptions about how it would work. However, the first 6 or 7 programs that I created to drive this system left me completely stranded conceptually. The language of the self-directing system was contrived and pretentious. I had to struggle through it, reviewing the same arrangements over and over again until the moment the work finally clicked. The boredom and tedium of rewriting small amounts of code over and over again was not what I wanted to focus on as an artist, I had to produce! I was convincing myself that I was not a programmer, that artists needs to sit at the crossroads of various disciplines and mold passing ideas into culturally relevant statements or objects.<br><br></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:small">Yet I had to understand the tool that was letting my ideas flow. If I did not build the tool, would it be articulate when "speaking" the media I am putting through it? Without boredom, can I actually reflect on incompletion? Can you equate drive to boredom? Or is the problem the word itself, do we need to wrestle this concept to the ground along with "truth" and "originality", all words that are unhelpful in accurately describing how things work in our world. Listening deeply to LaMonte Young that next weekend for 6 hours was a long, sometimes boring, yet rewarding task, and helped lead my inquiry into new expressive forms.<br></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:small"></span></span></div><div class="gmail_extra"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">On Sun, May 24, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Renate Ferro <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:renateferro@gmail.com" target="_blank">renateferro@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br></span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br></span><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Murat you have assimilated both Simon's and Ana's posts in a way that makes so much sense though I'm wondering if you would say a bit more about the negative value of nothingness. How is it possible to give value to absence? . Perhaps our resident philosophers can chime in here? </span><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">This might be a great segue into Week 4. While we say thank you to Simon Biggs and Ana Valdes,</span><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">We welcome Erin Obodiac and Jason Bernagozzi to our final week on Boredom. Their biographies are below. </span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Week 4:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Erin
Obodiac (US) received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University
of</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">California,
Irvine and has held teaching and research appointments at UC Irvine, the</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">University
of Leeds, SUNY Albany, and Cornell University. Her writings assemble</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">residual
questions from the deconstructive legacy with emergent discourses on technics</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">and
animality, robotics, and biomedia. She is currently a Mellon postdoctoral
fellow at</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Cornell
University, teaching a series of Comparative Media seminars and completing a</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">book
called The Transhuman Interface, which repositions critical theory and</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">deconstruction
within the history of cybernetics and machinic life. The Transhuman</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Interface
is a result of the research project “Robots at Risk: Transgenic Art and</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Corporate
Personhood,” which Obodiac began as a Fellow at Cornell’s Society for the</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">Humanities.
The project and the accompanying book manuscript examine contemporary</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">theories
of machinic life and robotics as well as the philosophical traditions that
underpin them. This summer, Obodiac will finish a cinematic version of her
Ph.D. dissertation, Technics and the Sublime.</span></p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">J<span>ason</span><span> </span><span>Bernagozzi</span><span> (US) </span>is a video, sound and new media artist living and working
in upstate New York and is the co-founder and chair of the board of directors
of the experimental media arts non-profit Signal Culture. His work has been
featured nationally and internationally at venues such as the European Media
Arts Festival in Osnabruk, Germany, the LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona,
Spain, the Beyond/In Western NY Biennial in Buffalo, NY, and the Yan Gerber
International Arts Festival in Hebei Province, China. His work has received
several awards including grants from the New York State Council for the Arts,
Wavefarm and the ARTS Council for the Southern Finger Lakes. He is an Assistant
Professor in Digital Media and Animation at Alfred State College.</span></p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9.5pt"><span><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)"><a href="http://seeinginvideo.com/" target="_blank">http://seeinginvideo.com/</a></span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="background-image:initial;background-repeat:initial"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="font-size:9.5pt"><span><span style="color:rgb(17,85,204)"><a href="http://www.signalculture.org" target="_blank">http://www.signalculture.org</a></span></span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"> </span></p>
</div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div><div><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex"><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></blockquote></div></div></div></div></div>
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br>______________________________</span><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif">_________________<br>
empyre forum<br></span>
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="mailto:empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au">empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au</a><br></span>
<span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a><br></span></blockquote></div><span style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><br></span></div></div>