4.

Butch

How much was Brambu Drezi a technology driven poem?

Jake

Technology affects the work initially to the extent that any medium shapes a work. With Brambu the medium is the page and sound mediums, usually recorded sound mediums. Most people so far have experienced it as a book, a few as sound also, and a fewer still as a three dimensional performance that uses eye, ear, tongue and nose. We performed part of it once in Tuscaloosa in a small theater at the University of Alabama. Two of us read excerpts from the poem, glyphs from the poem hung on the stage behind us, three screens of video images running simultaneously, music played by musicians on the stage, dancers, incense and a cigar I smoked briefly during the performance. We used every bit of technology we could lay our hands on. I think that comes closest to a full experience of the poem. A friend suggested afterward that it should have had moments of audience participation. She was right. That would have made it more available. Maybe we can do that when Brambu is published as a single volume including Book Three and revised versions of Books One and Two by Barrytown/Station Hill.

I also have an idea for Brambu as an installation. It would be composed of a series of tall round obelisks that are equipped with motion sensors. Whenever someone walked near one of them the obelisk would project moving images and make sounds. The sounds would consist of myself and others reading the poem with musical accompaniment and sometimes it would be sound only. The images would sometimes be images of parts of the poem, words or images, and sometimes it would be video that could not be contained in a book.

So technology figures into Brambu as a limitation and as a stream of possibilities limited only by space and what I can afford.

There are a few words in Brambu: Book 2 that were generated by recording some of the Brambu langage, the glossolalia of the work, into a sampling keyboard, reversing the words then spelling those reversed sounds. Those words would have been impossible without that technology. There are also a few images in Book 2 and Book 3 that were augmented by computer imaging programs. Those images would be impossible without the technology.

Butch

The bulk of Brambu Drezi was written during the web's infancy. Any thoughts on the Internet now that it is maturing as a medium? Google sculpting, that sort of thing.

Jake

I wouldn't totally disagree with McCluhan when he says the medium is the message, but the medium was created by humans and is a manifestation of human activity. I suppose what happens is that we create a technology then it overwhelms us then we adapt and create another technology. People fear television, but I think we are quickly adapting to video saturation, and TV in particular. The result is that the medium changes, it either expands or it falls out of use. It's another feedback loop.

Butch

I'll agree with that. Though I think with the net it will be a long time before any full adaptation/assimilation happens. And a lot of sorting out in the future as to what artwork, etc. is unique to the medium and what will get carried over and thrive from other mediums.

Take maybe the Dadaist roots in some of the Flarf stuff I've read while usually on the same day hearing or seeing some new political rhetoric from wherever I come across it (mostly on the net). Unlike Dadaism's response to WWI, say, we have a response to a political Dadism. Whereas the WWI and II ethos saw a menace presenting itself as an adult menace, an evil that knew what it was, we now have a domestic menace in our President presenting itself as a sort of well-meaning, blundering father figure (I often think of the footage of the awkward door exit Bush gave us in his visit to China). So Flarf reacting to this political context. The images and rhythms and absurdities given to us by Flarf seem less harsh, less honestly dark, more tongue in cheek, when compared to the bulk of its Dadaist predecessors. And more of a slippery surface. Not a psychological manifestation. Appropriation from technology rather than direct assimilation. And sure we can chalk that up to the medium and its changes in how we appropriate and “read” reality. And sure O'Hara. Great. I mean, if that was the artist's question in the first place. Rambling speculations here.

Jake

These shamanistic tendencies or psychological manifestations or whatever you want to call them will use whatever medium is at hand. The more available the medium the easier it is to use until it may become the medium of choice until something else comes along. It seems, however, that the result is the same. Whether I alter my consciousness by video, written word, spoken word, by drugs, physical exertion, or if it happens in a spontaneous dream or vision doesn't matter. It's an aspect of our biology rising to the surface. It will appear regardless of context.

Butch

I love that concept of biological imperative. Slower than the growth of technology, for sure. The two growths, one outpacing the other, hand in hand very deadly.

Another speculation: That google could be (is) used as a shamanic tool as easily as it is used for those flarfy surfaces. But then you get into those questions of simulation. And maybe reach a point that thinks what is in vogue is taking credit for an entire medium when actually what is in vogue just sort of dropped several lines of previous inquiry. In the name of context, sure.

Jake

I find the notion of google sculpting and google or any search engine as a shamanistic tool very interesting, especially since it would be available to anyone who had access to a computer and the internet. The work would be the result of what everyone did together. I'm not sure what kind of parameters you should set up though. Perhaps the idea would be to use the search engine in completely random ways initially and then the result of that randomness could be fed back into the search engine and that result fed back for as long as you wanted to continue doing it. That would be interesting.

I think this might be a playful way to reflect the way tools effect us in ways we never intended. The Chinese used gunpowder to make fireworks and continued to wage war with swords. Europeans used gunpowder as a tool of war. The idea of incendiary device as weapon continued until we had enough bombs to annihilate ourselves and most other species at the push of a button. All those politicians, generals and artists that rushed headlong into WWI had no idea what they were getting into and the result has shaped everything that has happened since that time. It made WWII inevitable and by carving up the old Ottoman Empire arbitrarily and colonizing it for oil it set up resentments that are the source of middle-eastern animosity toward the west today. For the past 25 years American neo-conservative foreign policy has only validated that animosity. We have to be careful with technology. If we use it to play, generate, or create we do much less damage than if we use it for "defense" or another deadly serious purpose.

Political power, on whatever scale, tends to take itself so seriously that it becomes completely exclusive and is threatened by anything that is "other." Play, art, and so on tends to go in search of the other in order to embrace it. This doesn't mean that many artists don't take themselves too seriously. Maybe even most of us do. But if we have spats over the internet usually the most damage we do is hurt one another's feelings in some small corner of the world that is really of no consequence to the world as a whole.

 

 

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