Re: [-empyre-] Computational Poetics

I suppose it's worth making it clear that we are artists exploring processes of art production, not anthropologists. In that role I've been spending some twenty years (more than half my adult life) learning what I could about the art and, by necessity the cultural context (language, social structure, the place of art in the culture) of both Bali and Java. This has entailed spending time living in Indonesia with artists and their families as well as facilitating Indonesian artists to come to our community here in Vancouver to live and teach. The model is one of exchange based on mutual respect and, yes, friendship in a common recognition of what the potential of art is in both creating and maintaining community.

On innovation... Dirk suggests that this term may not be appropriate to describing the way change occurs in the context of a largely oral tradition such as one finds in Bali (or Java for that matter, although the use of musical notation in the academies there is surely transforming the improvisatory nature of the art form). I think it's worth respecting the way these practitioners describe the way change occurs. The term used for conscious change in any art or performance form, in both Bali and Java, since at least the 1980s, is "kreasi baru", or simply "kreasi". Kreasi translates as creation, baru as new... hence "new creation". Sounds like innovation to me. In the academies of art a conscious effort is made to encourage student-practitioners to engage in experiments in altering existing and archaic forms to create new variations. Some of these experiments have resulted in whole new popular genres coming into existence.

I think that what Aleksandra may have meant by "unbroken tradition" is in relation to a kind of continuity and pace that has occurred in the Balinese milieu (at least in the last 100 years), not in the sense of anthropology's characterization of the other or "primitive" as occurring out of history, but rather in comparison with the ever accelerating pace of revolutionary, technologically driven, change characteristic of the modernism of the 20th century avante-garde. I think this latter could fairly be referred to as "broken tradition" by comparison with the more considered pace of change of the former. But... as always, one does violence to the process of change by making such binary characterizations. The emergence, dare I say innovation, of the "revolutionary" style of Kebyar music in Bali in the early years of the 20th century saw a rapid change in local values with "old" gamelan orchestras being quickly melted down and re-forged into the new ensembles appropriate to playing the modern style. One wonders if there might be a sense here of the "reverse anthroplogy" of Guillermo Gomez-Peña, although the Javanese and Balinese innovators typically resist any suggestion that their new work is influenced or derived by the modernism or post-modernism of the Euro-American culture but is rather an authentic emergence of novelty from extant indigenous practices.

Danny, your question on the relationship of the braided performances that Schechner describes (he *does* refer to particular cultures BTW, India, Japan), and the experimental practices coming out of the post-Cage post-Happening post-Fluxus art activites is right on! It's the similarities that are of interest not the differences. The differences might be indicative of a critique of the place of art in the respective cultures. While the avante-garde of Euro-American culture stage their activities on the fringes of the dominant culture and remain largely ignored by most of the inhabitants of that culture, the braided performances of the Ram Lila that Schechner describes, or the Wayang of Bali and Java are central to their communities.

The relevance of looking at any other artistic practice that differs from one's own, particularly with respect to differences in its relation to other aspects of the culture it's embedded in is the possibility of seeing one's own practice and cultural context in a new light. It's not about defining the other but re-defining oneself. The troublesome aspect of engaging in another culture from the perspective of a dominant culture is a real concern, but I've never been clear as to what the alternative is beyond a kind of cultural quietism. In contrast to the European artists of the early 20th century you refer to and their appropriation of the art of the "other" into their own practice as innovation, I took seriously the methodology of Mantle Hood as he defined the nascent field of ethnomusicology. Here the requirement is that one become bi-musical, or perhaps even poly-musical, through learning to embody a cultural practice one encounters. So any form of interpretation, which seems to me to be inevitable, is at least done from an informed, and I would argue deeper, place of practice.

A quote Toru Takemitsu on the state of culture and the perspective of the artist in the contemporary milieu might help as well: "A mirror is being broken and in each shattered piece different faces are reflected. No longer can you view your image in a single mirror. And a shattered mirror cannot be reassembled. The idea of integration and of the wholeness of human aspiration is not directed at creating an innocuous, neutral state but at finding oneself among those countless conflicting and irregular shapes." (From Isamu Noguchi -- Traveler, in Confronting Silence: Selected Writings).

Jody Diamond summed up a useful attitude towards intercultural collaboration in her piece in Musicworks: There is no they there! http://www.gamelan.org/jodydiamond/writings/theythere.html

Shifting the conversation away from the cultural-poetic to the computational, there's an interesting relationship here to the process of encoding an artistic practice for a process machine. In that gesture one, to paraphrase Otto Laske, makes external (other) something that is internal... that being an embodied, deeply embedded intuitive skill. Laske suggests that this is a "new species of knowledge". I think of this as significant to my practice as the advent of recording sonic and visual images was to artistic practice. The phonograph and cinematograph made sonic and visual images material -- gave us the "sound object" and the "visual object"-- and perhaps most significantly gave us a new relationship to time. The encoding of a media practice -- a compositional or performative process -- makes objective the ineffable internal. This is one of the the core aspects of the computational part of the moniker.

Kenneth.




On 12-Jan-06, at 5:56 AM, Danny Butt wrote:

Aleksandra,

If we start talking about "communities", and in particular if we talk about the relationship between communicative forms and social processes, we're in the terrain of "culture", and anthropology, right? I feel that you opened this question up in you posts mentioning Schechner (and then Tuner and Goffman) - however the anthropological work from this era has been subject to fairly substantive critique within the discipline, and I wonder whether the questions about the ethics of interpretation and cross-cultural engagement after colonisation might have some resonance here, seeing that these are the stock-in-trade of any anthropologist under 40. I know a little about anthropology but much less about performance theory, so maybe I'm finding my own questions in this. But I'm struggling to see the benefits from "models" for computational practice are being developed from the interpretation of a cultural form that has "had thousands of years of unbroken development".

What I don't understand, to draw on a few approaches that come from some of that contemporary anthropological work, is

a) how any "breaks" in the development of Balinese shadow play would be identified and assessed (compared to which broken traditions exactly?) .

b) how Schechner's "Asian performance" (to whom does this grouping make sense?) that "sees narrative as a system of braids of several strands of activities that bring performers and partakers together here and now" can be truly differentiated from the large corpus of post 1970 Euro-US performance work which does exactly this AFAIK.

Mindful of the issues Sally raised about authorities and not wanting to create any, I am wondering what imaginary dialogue could be established between this conversation and the work of Guillermo Gomez-Peña (to choose one example of someone deeply engaged in the triangluation of new technology, anthropology, and performance). Because that would seem to take some of the dead white academic authorities out of the argument and bring us into a set of conversations that are taking place right now, not so far away from us. And maybe also prevent repetition of a few romantic methodologies of early European modernism w.r.t. "the Other" that haven't aged well.

All the best,

x.d

--
http://www.dannybutt.net




On 11/01/2006, at 9:52 PM, Alan Drury wrote:

Aleksandra in her first post has opened up a series of fascinating
discussions, but the chief one is, obviously, to determine what
'computational poetics' offers that no other poetics can; that it is not
just delivering a variant on existing practice by other means. In trying to
define an unknown we are limited in our thinking by the knowns we use to say
what the unkown is not, and the true nature of the beast is often hit upon
by structured serendipity. The totally defined practice is the dead
butterfly pinned to the board.

Central to Aleksandra's first post was the idea that braiding is possible
because the work springs directly out of and responds to a community. Her
later description of current approaches to shadow puppetry suggests this is
a state of prelapsarian bliss, probably suggested by Artaud's solipsistic
romanticism. Although any live theatrical performance has elements of
braiding, (apart from 'Les Miserables'), true braiding as being talked about
here can only result in work springing from a social rather than a purely
commercial context.

In trying to fit 'computational poetics' into a theoretical overview and
quoting authorities, we are putting the cart before the horse. If we accept
'computational poetics' as defined by the example of shadow puppetry, we
should be asking what community it is drawn from and responding to. From
whence can its braiding come? We won't know until it does, and since
community is one of the most devalued current cant terms, I'm not hopeful.
There is certainly no real community in cyberspace per se.

Alan Drury.

PS: This is my first post. I'm a playwright, director and amateur conjuror.
What Svoboda was being quoted as inventing in 1958 was being done in a
simpler form by vaudeville illusionists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. A
less sophisticated form of braiding is happening as I write in pantomimes up
and down the UK, mainly outside of London.
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