Saturday, November 9, 2019
Dematerialisation is in process. Relinquish the earth-suit. No more Schuman the Human. Show's cancelled people.
consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.
Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information than the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.
The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)
Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.
The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).
When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)
One interesting thing to note here is that while this is primarily conceived of as a process of becoming-inorganic (the organic being characterised as textured, grained, warm, irregular) digital tends not to take on the forms of solids but to emulate the liquid, or the emulsion or molten. This future was inaugurated by The Abyss (1989) and more importantly and definitively, by Terminator 2 (1991) You move from the heavy-metal, solid-state Terminator 1, (Arnold Schwarzenegger, the embodiment of strength and rigidity) to the quicksilver, protean T2, able to adopt any form at all, able to pass through solid walls or to let a bullet travel straight through the body without damage (and played by the relatively slight Robert Patrick)
The process of dematerialisation is also a process of becoming weightless which is why we move from the solid to liquid. Think of the curves of 30 St. Mary Axe ('The Gherkin') and the new buildings clustered around it. Think too of the 'blobs' Simon Reynolds talks about in his piece on autotune
"The program captures the characteristics of a vocal or instrumental performance and displays them graphically, with each note appearing as what Celemony calls a “blob.” Sound becomes Play-Doh to be sculpted or tinted by a huge range of effects. The blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor."
Think of the move away from rapping in blocks (bars), as heard in its most sophisticated and developed form with Young Thug, where both the line becomes fluid (overrunning or falling short of the bar-limits), and the individual word is made fluid, also able to be stretched and squished, morphing in pitch, volume and duration.
We are no longer confined to grids and boxes and straight-lines. If we think back to grime, and 8-bar in particular, it is all grids and boxes and cubes, reflecting the visual interface of the software programs. Now these rigid, structural supports and dividing walls begin to melt away (albeit still implicit and implied.).
Or, finally, consider another quality, the quality of speed. Not straight line speed which can only ever end in the unbroken note, drone or blur but as event-density. As information feed - and this is where (one reason) hardcore and jungle are so prophetic, arriving from the future- the BPM is not the important measure of speed, it is the amount of information within the bar, (and this is why the return to linearity post 95 was so regressive) different timbres and textures, sheer amount and variety of individual sounds.
consider smoothness, which, as I have explained previously, is experienced as both the absence of friction and resistance and as the inability to gain purchase, to hold on or climb out.
Smoothness is a tactile quality, we encounter it through touch (even if touch is abstracted to eye, or ear) but, in keeping with the process of dematerialisation, it offers less tactile information than the rough. It is homogeneous, exactly the same at point a as at point b.
The screen (the screen you are reading this on for instance) is smooth. The virtual space the screen is window and doorway to is likewise smooth. (although take a moment to consider the nature of the screen- both as noun and as verb, and consider also the root - from Proto-Indo-European (s)ker “to cut, divide.” The screen is, or opens out onto, an environment, but it is as much a window as it is a door, it allows access for the eye but not for the rest of the body, eyes enter where feet cannot follow- therefore the key image is of the child outside the sweet-shop window.)
Contemporary architecture, and particularly the major monuments of capitalism, the headquarters of banks and insurance brokers that compete for air in the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, is likewise smooth. Mirrored tinted glass. Buildings which reflect their digital origins in the same inescapable and crashingly obvious way as computer music reflects its origins and the parameters of its creative programs. Buildings which aspire to the condition of the virtual.
The more high-resolution the image, the smoother it is (no more pixellation.). The better the connection, the higher the bit-rate, the smoother the moving image is (no more buffering).
When the process of music making becomes purely digital, it too takes on the quality of smoothness and you no longer have a physical, embodied referent for any given sound. (dematerialisation.)
One interesting thing to note here is that while this is primarily conceived of as a process of becoming-inorganic (the organic being characterised as textured, grained, warm, irregular) digital tends not to take on the forms of solids but to emulate the liquid, or the emulsion or molten. This future was inaugurated by The Abyss (1989) and more importantly and definitively, by Terminator 2 (1991) You move from the heavy-metal, solid-state Terminator 1, (Arnold Schwarzenegger, the embodiment of strength and rigidity) to the quicksilver, protean T2, able to adopt any form at all, able to pass through solid walls or to let a bullet travel straight through the body without damage (and played by the relatively slight Robert Patrick)
The process of dematerialisation is also a process of becoming weightless which is why we move from the solid to liquid. Think of the curves of 30 St. Mary Axe ('The Gherkin') and the new buildings clustered around it. Think too of the 'blobs' Simon Reynolds talks about in his piece on autotune
"The program captures the characteristics of a vocal or instrumental performance and displays them graphically, with each note appearing as what Celemony calls a “blob.” Sound becomes Play-Doh to be sculpted or tinted by a huge range of effects. The blobs can be stretched or squished by dragging the cursor."
Think of the move away from rapping in blocks (bars), as heard in its most sophisticated and developed form with Young Thug, where both the line becomes fluid (overrunning or falling short of the bar-limits), and the individual word is made fluid, also able to be stretched and squished, morphing in pitch, volume and duration.
We are no longer confined to grids and boxes and straight-lines. If we think back to grime, and 8-bar in particular, it is all grids and boxes and cubes, reflecting the visual interface of the software programs. Now these rigid, structural supports and dividing walls begin to melt away (albeit still implicit and implied.).
Or, finally, consider another quality, the quality of speed. Not straight line speed which can only ever end in the unbroken note, drone or blur but as event-density. As information feed - and this is where (one reason) hardcore and jungle are so prophetic, arriving from the future- the BPM is not the important measure of speed, it is the amount of information within the bar, (and this is why the return to linearity post 95 was so regressive) different timbres and textures, sheer amount and variety of individual sounds.
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