Re: [microsound] [ot?] re: droplifting -- Bicker Bicker, Ye NeverendingBots

["tobias c. van Veen" <tobias@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>> Let potential unfold itself
>> then move on 
> 
> ha! ya just got a big smile outta this one, Tobias.
> i enjoyed your reaction to that whole thread.
> 
> do you think the bickering is also a potential unfolding, though? i'm not
> just trying to be clever or something by saying that, i'm actually curious
> what you think. i was thinking about it during the last big bicker battle
> that i tuned into, and actually kida started playing with/in it a little,
> just to sort of experience it............i dunno, but what do you think?
> alot of people are drawn to battle lines. i can see how powerful it is when
> people use that urge to generate creative energy. gafitti being one good
> example of this. is there some way that the Droplifters could, or do, use
> their processes to generate this kind of thing? where they are competing
> with each other and the store to always be generating new mutations of the
> droplift experience? i don't think that this would fuck up capitalism
> though, as i see/experience it, usually when a battle line is drawn both
> sides end up becoming stronger (or maybe more entrenched?) through it.
> but i don't know, i sort of see the whole microsound list that way too, i
> guess......like, do other people here alter how, what, when, where,  why,
> and whith/for whom they make their produce because of thinks
> said/critiqued/bickered on this list? i sure hope so.
> 
> and also, didn't W.S.Burroughs say something like "talking about music is
> like dancing about architecture" ? or maybe it was "talking about art..."
> i'm kind of rambling, ha, i have no point either. but i think i want to
> dance about arcitecture someday.

"...new mutations of the droplift experience..."

These are wonderful thoughts, funny to hear you say you participate in
discussions to try it out, this for me is the identity-advantage of the net,
being able to flow with debates, test out the waters, and so on.

You hit it, really, all is unfolding, really -- unfolding has its
philosophical reasoning & so forth but forget this for a second..--
unfolding is just another way to express wonder & bewilderment at the ways
in which all aspects of life connect, like a fractal, like not directly, not
X to Y or cause-effect, but the ways in which things emerge & happen,
fantastical moments, unpredictability, thus potential (situations, events)
not possibilities. Possibilities are handy of course, for example
battlelines are also possibilities, territories one can occupy, that one
always occupies, to an extent, whether one likes it or not or knows it or
not (privilege, identity, position and so on).

So: everything unfolds, then, but battlelines like you describe, although
they are unfolding too, although they can help clarify in much needed
sitations (here's a serious one: rape, murder.. you're either ethically
against or not; there is a decision here which cannot be avoided, etc), most
of the time they, as you mention, entrench positions. Solidify things. I'm
not of the opinion that competition yields the best result-- competition can
kill off valuable players, competition can wear you down & make you bitter,
competition implies winners & losers, rightness & wrongness, victors and
slaves, masters, a game with rules, clear & definable goal, a podium--1st,
2nd, 3rd--judgment, the advent of numerology, of quantification..

Thus potential, the ways in which one can catalyse an event, play with the
parameters of a context to redefine its potential (but you will never be
able to predict potential). Radical, active, social quantum physics, really,
and if it's any type of music that owes a debt to the quantum, its
microsound -- both in theory (granular synthesis!) & in practice (much of
microsound even sounds quantum: threshholds, Kim's random pools of sonic
data, the mark of barely audible tones wavering somewhere between presence &
absence).

Yet competition can be attuned to a GAME, to play, and thus to potential, a
kind of embracing of a situation, friendly fire that really is friendly, &
here we could enumerate all the ways in which droplifting could occur & say:
go do it! and bring back evidence, documents, photos.. (or keep it secret;
but if the game is Experiment & Research, R & D, then yes, document) & let's
look at it as an experiment in the Great Laboratory of Sound and People
Called Earth, & see what arrives back from the day's adventures.

So, bickering -- ach that last email was a remix of Marinetti if anything, I
wasn't really trying to end the bickering, I was simply trying to refocus
our energies -- so quickly we can waste ourselves on saying: This Will Work,
This Won't -- each claim an imperative (will, won't) demanding the
satisfaction of truth, & of course if one desires something to work, it
Will, & if one doesn't, it Won't, especially in the realm of "art," of
producing dreams for people, "out there in the Zone."

Why argue over outcomes before trying? That's what I'm saying: if X doesn't
work, try Y. And so on. Grasp the potential of droplifting, not its obvious
shortcomings, which are clear enough. As for capitalism, actually I do think
any gift-system fucks The System (look at the shit open source is stirring)
but certainly we're not taking anything Down here, we're just adding a
little more chaos to The Man. (Sample Hakim Bey .. Chaos Never Died). But
who knows what straw will break the camel's back, eh?

Well .. I think I've been altered significantly by many comments here, I try
to think & process the ideas, & whether one likes it or not, all input
alters your chemical thoughts, your actions, behaviours, although I get the
feeling--especially with this discussion and seeing some very interesting
lurkers pop out (hallo..)--that .microsound could attune itself to becoming
conscious as itself as an entity that expands beyond "microsound" as a genre
to a set of practices. Several of us here publish & write & so forth & have
lives in this, really invest it all, give it all over to it, & I think to an
extent there's a growing threshold in the digital arts which is being
reached that will eventually significantly reconfigure the ways in which we
engage "art," the art institution, music, sound, knowledge, information, the
political, the whole caboodle. But maybe I'm just in art mode, right now,
letting it all hang out.

Talking about Music is Like Dancing About Architecture-- but Making Art is
Also Dancing Like Fishing, and Fishing is Like Bathing About Eating.

The point of Dancing About Architecture is NOT--as it is oft
misunderstood--to disqualify discussion of that which exceeds a domain (and
who ever said SOUND exceeded thought & writing? ..of course it doesn't.
Speech IS sound..writing is speech..but we'll just leave it @ that except to
note that between writing & speech and in-between writing AND speech is
difference). I.e. the point is not to say: Oh but this is useless, Dude,
because Talking About Music Is Like Dancing About Architecture. What a
Futile endeavour, fellow Cynic. No, Fuck That! The point is: we are always
dancing, then! Always! Always talking, then, which is music! Therefore, etc,
everything IS already art .. Zip, there's Duchamp + Cage at hyperspeed...
which comes to mean, for me: how do we produce dancing buildings, and
architectures of dance? That's some crazy shit -- that's where we're trying
to catalyse, potentialise, make madness happen in the mundane & boring lives
we all, for the most part, undoubtedly lead in the unpredictable march
towards Death.

Yours, 

UnSigned

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