Seeing and being seen (was laptop ethics)

[Gregory Taylor <gtaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since we've mentioned the notion of audience
expectation before, perhaps we might also give
some notice to traditions in which a person
sitting at a desk with a laptop *would* be 
sufficient. To some extent, I'm sure it's possible
to imagine stuff from the auld "computer music
as cultural/audio research" paradigm that might
be a completely valid way to think of public appearance,
though not necessarily one to everyone's liking. It
might be true that that whole thing went down with
the rusted hulk of the good ship High Modernism, but
somehow I don't think so. At any rate, the "output"
is what's at question, not the performative skills of
the person in question.

We might also consider some more Cageian influences,
in which the performance is an entirely internal
experience shared by each person present in their own
particular way. From that point of view, the performer
at some pains to efface their presence might want to
foreground the stuff that's being produced. Again,
perhaps this and other Conceptualist ways of thinking
about and presenting work might be somewhat passe,
though I'd hope not.

A final thought which occurs to me is that some of
the difficulties we perceive might be reactive - that
is, the arrival of postMTV-era rave spectacles may
implicitly or explicitly change the expectation on the
part of what audience we may imagine - an audience which
uncritically *expects* to be visually and aurally
stimulated. Since some number of the people here are,
I suspect, engaged themselves in attempting to move
that visual engagement away from one contolled entirely
by the discourse of popular culture, there's bound to
be some overlap between that uncritical set of audience
expectations (and the closer the work we do approaches
the popular sphere, the greater this pressure becomes)
and folks who've made the personal choice to explore the
visual and audio together (Messrs deKam and Singer some
to mind here), and thus up the ante for the rest of us.

_
knowledge is not enough/science is not enough/love is dreaming/this equation
Gregory Taylor/WORT-FM 89.9/ http://www.msn.fullfeed.com/~gtaylor