Re: [-empyre-] boundaries, or not

["Trace Reddell" <treddell@du.edu>]

Fizzion:
> The natural world exists on many different sensory planes, all integrated
> for/by our senses. Technology allows us to listen to the stars and to the
> sounds of electrons. So many possibilities, so many stories to tell.

I would say, all integrated by our imagination. It's important to
distinguish the sensory gathering of experience from the imaginative process
of mixing/remixing experience before filtering that mix to us. You describe
technology here in terms of the macro and micro cosms, and indeed it's
technology materializing what William Blake called the chief power of the
imagination, the ability to engineer massive shifts in scale, and to expand
or contract the senses at will.

Arguably, the history of technology has been more involved with issues of
scale, and therefore extension of sensory apparatus. Technology that
foregrounds the act of imaginative mixing is now more visible, however, and
more a part of routine everyday life; and as individual artists, we have
more technological facilitators for spinning data from the multiple sensory
tracks into complex involutes. Now that we're involved with technology that
more directly works at the level of imaginative mixing -- that extends the
power of the imagination the way McLuhan attritubes media to extend
senses -- what we've experiencing as academics and practitioners is a need
for curriculum to mix as well.

Keith:
> I wonder if the guest could talk a bit about their
> participation in different but perhaps intersecting
> sound making communities and how these intersections
> affect their practice.

Also viewing the social construct (the sound-making community, the theater
community, the academic dept., etc) as a mix, an entity inhabiting
imagination, we come to live at intersections. Recognizing that departmental
or practical boundaries of discipline inhibit the willful
expansion/contraction of senses, we want to work in an environment that
crosses genres, that encourages the strategic crossing of genres. It's
interesting to experience this similar, repeating, imaginal synaesthesia
(anticipating Glenn's email) taking shape across the cognitive,
technological, art-producing, community, global regions.

This isn't just abstract to me. I teach and direct graduate studies in a
program built across disciplines: in our case, school of communication;
computer science; art and design (with its own mixed/electronic media area,
as well). In these cases, the curriculum of the program, rather than
department -- and program in the sense of a script to be run through much of
your own dataset -- fosters a skill in mixing. That's beginning to sound
cliche, but it still seems true of the historical moment we currently
occupy. I mean, we still don't even have an adequate curriculum for Blake in
a lot of institutions, whose proto-graphic novels need to be taught, at the
very least, by faculty of English lit, art, design, and book making.

-=trace