Dissonance Day Seven: In which we end up sitting around and talking about Futurism

We started with a group exercise based on one by the Oulipo group. Homoconsonantism: The sequence of consonants in a source text is kept while all its vowels are replaced. I had made up sheets with a sentence from Marinetti’s Manifesto.  This is the original sentence:  “Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.” Here is the sentence with vowels removed: C  r g  ,   d  c  ty  nd r  v  lt w  ll b   ss  nt  l   l  m  nts  f   r p  try. I will post the results once I double-check on them – I can’t read all the handwriting. This was the first real group activity of the term – that is in smaller groups than the full 30. There are more group activities set for Thursday. The energy of the group work was great and the sentences quite a bit of fun. There have to be ways to develop this exercise for images and for sounds also. So – perhaps at some future class we will come back to this idea.

After the time projects and the Bergson conversation and the Oulipo stuff having the students simply sit down so we could have a conversation seems a bit contained, a bit anti-climactic. It is inevitable that certain classes feel that way, especially since the projects come first and the talking after. The Gen Art class had a similar rhythm. But it does make me look forward to the next projects. This class was bringing us to the end of the Futurist stuff – so at this point we hit it head on with Marinetti’s manifesto and Russolo’s essay. A good conversation about the use and abuse of history – which can be seen as an inspiration or as an anchor. Lots of good points on why to keep the past rather than blow it up. It is also sort of humbling to think about how much the world has changed in the last 100 or so years. It is humbling to think about how the world has changed in the last 10 years. Part of the point I was trying to make is that our “traditional” art forms don’t always acknowledge these changes. If our world is radically different then it was 100 year ago why do we still perform the same plays, listen to the same music, read the same books as people from that era? Mostly rhetorical questions, but some good discussion.

We turned to Russolo’s Art of Noise next. Some excellent points by the students about intention and sound  - how noise can be shaped into music, but that some things just exist as noise. I still feel that the continuum idea is the best way to approach this. Something will not be completely noise or music, but somewhere between the two. We talked a bit about static. After class Emma told me that Skrillex uses static a lot – great example – I need to bring it in. It is a good point about how sound and music have changed in the past few decades. I really should have played more examples in class – Russolo’s sounds we on as they entered the class. But I did point them to the sound files on Bb. Next class starts Dada.