Dissonance Day Nineteen: Scattered with too many things to share:

Its funny, whenever I go to talk about something in class that I love or have taught a class on ideas pile up and come out in a jumble. Today’s topic “generative art” comes pre-digested after more than a year’s worth of conversations with Bob, a ten-week class, and now research and thoughts leading toward an article on Cage, Reich, and Eno. Too many observations, too many examples, and not enough time to digest them. So – In class today: The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka – playing as the students came into the room, Reich’s “Come out,” Reich’s “Pendulum Music” – performed by one live mic, moiré patterns, Eno’s Trope for iPad, Thicket for iPad, abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz for ipad, Conway’s Life, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, and Eno’s 77 Million Paintings. I also made reference to Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” – played in the first few minutes of class earlier in the term. The process of spending 13 minutes listening to “Come out” proved to be the most useful. Students had great comments about this piece in terms of what demands it does or doesn’t place on the listener and how one might listen to the piece. So this was another day where I struggle with either going back to my notes to hit on a few key points or letting the conversation develop any way it goes. I think part of why I keep coming back to this is that generally I don’t have such a large collection of students interested in talking about this stuff. So it’s a good dilemma to have.

I do want to come back to the process/product question as well as the notion of things developing over time. For me, the visibility of the process is such a contemporary, postmodern thing. That doesn’t mean that the process was invisible throughout the history of art, performance, theatre, etc, but that more and more the process has become a large part of the product to the point where they are indistinguishable. It seems to be the same tings as the whole life/art divide. 20^th century art really does work to collapse this – especially in the last 50 years or so.  That was really the point I wanted to make. But I do find it odd that quite often this term I have been frustrated by my need to sort of summarize everything after the fact. These “wrap up” days – while yielding some great conversations – are often not my most favorite classes in the sequence of project, discussion, analysis/history. Hmmm. I wonder if there is another way into this. Something to think about.