Chance Operations

Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images. But as well as creating unprecedented forms of audiovisuality, video work also producedinteractive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. This book explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music.

Cet ouvrage explore les démarches d’artistes qui ne recourent jamais au hasard « par hasard ». Ils le pratiquent et le pensent au contraire à travers des méthodes rigoureuses où l’activité artistique croise la philosophie et les sciences. Le hasard est appréhendé en situation, dans sa dimension opératoire, à travers l’analyse des oeuvres, des méthodes et des textes d’une dizaine d’artistes et de musiciens dont les figures principales sont André
Breton, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Boulez, John Cage et François Morellet. Distinct de l’accident et de l’informe, le hasard comme méthode se définit comme un exercice d’attention, une discipline qui interroge les limites de l’invention, le goût, la mémoire et l’oubli, les conditions de la perception. Comprendre ce qui est en jeu lorsque Cage assimile le hasard au silence,
lorsque Duchamp le met « en conserve » ou que Breton cherche à « l’objectiver » conduit, dans chaque cas, à restituer un champ théorique spécifique qui permet à cette question de se déployer en dehors des oppositions classiques de l’ordre et du désordre, du contrôle et de la déprise, de la forme et de l’accident.

""When writing about Cage, we encounter many difficulties with terminology. How to describe in a summary manner, without misunderstandings a writer, composer, teacher, music and social critic, poet, painter, anarchist, speaker, cultural animator, mycologist and a New Yorker in one person? In relation to musical practice, with which he is most often associated, he preferred to describe himself as an “organizer of sounds” and it seems that it was not only a stylistic manipulation, but the expression of a certain attitude, characterized by a high degree of distrust in relation to the musical tradition (which Cage consistently challenged), inherited from aesthetic components such as composition, work of art, score, harmony, as well as the artistry of composition. A paradoxical and somewhat surprising feature of his artistic practice, which ultimately sought to deny the foundations of matters in which he dabbled, was that it at first glance, the accidental and absurd assumptions were the result of meticulous study and analysis, creating a very coherent and thoughtful whole. Th e conceptual dimension of Cage’s artistic achievements allows to situate his work within the phenomenon that Kosuth describes as “art after philosophy” , in turn Cage himself in a suggestive manner defines the philosophical and conceptual nature of his art, writing that “philosophy for the [contemporary] artist is what the Bible is for the priest”. Certainly, Cage’s artistic achievements should not be put in the same category with the achievements of artists, whose only tangible characteristic is that of a single sweeping gesture to crack down on binding canons, undefining all that is definite. Cage’s artistic and ideological path strongly denies such an image. This book takes a bearings of this path.
The aim of my work is the reconstruction of the philosophical framework that creates the conceptual content of the work of the author of Silence. This analysis is a de facto reconstruction of the foundations of his aesthetic and ideological system . The reconstruction appears to be interesting because it contains the schema of possible references of Cage’s aesthetic to its various philosophical aspects, including those that were oblivious to him. Aspect (Latin appearance) is a frame, from which is considered a given object or phenomenon. “Philosophical” means in this case - a reference to a philosopher or a philosophical position. In Cage’s “paradoxical case” the possibility of such an approach seems to be twofold. On the one hand it presents ideas that deserve, in my opinion, attention, because they seem to me to be the most “adequate” to present the creative path of the author of Music of Change and the most “in his spirit.” They are not only original concepts, their presence in the vicinity of Cage’s aesthetic views is often dictated by the duty to simply repeat what Cage himself considered the conceptual framework of his creative activity. I am first and foremost thinking about the views of D.T. Suzuki, H.D. Thoreau, J. Joyce, B. Fuller and M. McLuhan. Subsequently capturing the aesthetic phenomenon of the works of the author of Four in the light of philosophical and artistic ideas of F. Nietzsche, J. Dewey, S. Beckett, M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, J. Derrida, J.-F. Lyotard, J.-N. Vuarnet and W. Welsch may be a risky treatment, but in my opinion, fully justified. On the other hand, built by Cage for more than half a century, the conceptual edifice of hisart, is not merely the chance result of various influences (conscious or unconscious), but appears in the eyes of the investigator as an independent being, deserving of attention and introduction, which on closer examination carries with it a whole new quality, putting the researcher in the face of unpleasant fact of almost complete incompatibility of the existing conceptual apparatus to describe this unexpected phenomenon. For the researcher, however, there is no other way. A researcher must come from that which is known, to perchance get to what is apparently unknown, or only temporarily inexpressible. He must at the same time give up many of the usual ways and habits, to see the matters from another perspective.
In the opinion of most researchers of the work of the author of Music of Changes a very important element that should be taken into account during the reconstruction of his views, is biography. This is the engine of his aesthetic choices. Spheres of practice and art, everyday experience and aesthetic experience are indeed inextricably linked for Cage, penetrating to the extent that almost always aesthetic choices are determined by the life situations, and not vice versa. They also shape by what might be called the world view of creator, but also his attitude and moral life. During writing, I used David Revill’s competent biography The Roaring Silence: John Cage - A Life, which, irrespective of magnitude of the accumulated evidence of the source material remains a proof of almost crystalline objectivity of the author: as when he describes the lessons that Cage learned due to difficult experiences of an emotional crisis period (due to personal problems) and financial collapse (which is related to the economic crisis of 1930s America and the hardships of war). From this period: “lesson of acceptance” and “practice of patience” in relation to own emotions - at first just as exuberant, as unfulfilled - in relation to the world and the people, sounds and musical material (supported by the idea explained to him by G. Sarabhai: “to sober and quiet the mind”) - became the guiding motto in Cage’s life. In the shape of subsequent aesthetic assumptions, the deficit in talent and “staying in line”, were also reflected in almost all the components of the Cage’s concept of art such as acting to overcome both his own individual limitations, and the entire former Western aesthetic paradigm.
My work consists of five chapters, introduction and conclusion. It also contains a time line of John Cage’s life, bibliography of Cage’s writings, titles of major critical studies and the remaining critical bibliography. In the first chapter At the basis of avant-garde. Some facts from the history of aesthetics from Kant to Cage in the context of an aesthetic nature of art (with music in the background), raises the question of the status of contemporary aesthetics and the adequacy of its categories for the description of contemporary art. To introduce the reader to the problems of aesthetics, I present Kant’s conception of beauty and Hegel’s and Schelling’s concept of art in the context of a dispute about the aesthetic nature of art (A. Danto, G. Dickie). Then, I present Nietzsche’s concept of art with particular emphasis on Wagner’s impact, all in relation to the fundamental dilemmas of creative individual in the modern era. In the next part I describe the avant-garde revolution, which took place in the play first half of the twentieth century in relation to theoretical propositions of Dewey, Adorno, and Bauman. In the second chapter In Schoenberg’s circle: the source of new music, I present the history of acquaintance between the creator of dodecaphony and Cage and the reasons for their separation in connection with the concept of expressionist art, taking into account the position of anti expressionistic Popper, and all this in the context of opposition of tonality to atonality and the uniquely American category of “experimental action”. The third chapter From sound to noise, from noise to silence. Formation of a new aesthetic of music by John Cage, I present the assumptions of Cage’s first manifest Future of Music: Credo, the impact of development of American civilization on aesthetic of his early ideas, the relation of Cage to Futurism, the concept of noise as an integral component of music in the context of twentieth- century discoveries in the field of electro-acoustics, psychology of the new perception, lying at the basis of the Listening to music manifesto, the concept of “music of all sounds” and “music of all time” as well as Cage’s understanding of time in the context of ontological discontinuity of the universe of sounds, and essential for his aesthetics of music, the term “indeterminacy of the composition.” In the fourth chapter Between art and experience, I describe the sequence of events from the biography of Cage, which had a direct influence on the shaping of his conception of art, in respect to the development of technology, artist’s creative and emotional crisis, relationships (including social) with abstract expressionism and discovering the silence for music. In the fifth chapter Philosophy and the aesthetic dimension of the work of John Cage, I present his views in the context of the anti-platonism position (Nietzsche, B. Fuller), a dispute between modernism and the avant-garde, and also in relation to the pragmatist concept of aesthetic experience (Dewey), the time and the sublime categories (Beckett, Lyotard), the concepts of fear and chance (Heidegger, Sartre), the experimental action and chance (W. Welsch, M. Eldred), the concept of demilitarization of language and a new philosophy of reception (Derrida), and in the context of Eastern thought (Suzuki), anarchist and apolitical nature of art (Thoreau, Artaud), Marxist criticism (C. Cardew) and the philosopher-artist category (J.-N. Vuarnet).""
trans. Magda Gziut

Este trabalho apresenta uma investigação sobre o indeterminismo na música, a partir da análise de três obras musicais que utilizam processos de indeterminação como elementos estruturais. Partindo de uma contextualização das práticas e tendências musicais que enfatizam o fenômeno da indeterminação, é feita uma reflexão filosófica sobre o papel da experiência na música aleatória e experimental, enfatizando a importância da idéia de novidade e sua associação com o acaso. A poética compositiva e o aspecto virtual da forma são as bases sobre as quais se fundamentam as análises das peças.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE: poética, indeterminação, fenomenologia, música experimental

ABSTRACT

This work presents an inquiry on indeterminism in music, based on the analysis of three musical works that use indeterminacy processes as structural elements. A philosophical reflection on the role of experience in aleatory and experimental music is made after an oversight of the musical practices and tendencies that emphasize the indeterminacy phenomenon. The concept of “new” and its relationship with chance are also explored. The compositional poetics and the virtual aspect of form are the basis on which are founded the analyses of the pieces.

KEYWORDS: poetics, indeterminacy, phenomenology, experimental music

Aleatorik ist ein oft und oftmals sehr verschieden verwendeter Begriff. Der Text gibt einen Überblick über das semantische Feld und unterbreitet einen Vorschlag für eine umfassende Definition, die Aleatorik und Zufallsprozesse voneinander abgrenzt.

To me a composer is like a gardener to whom a small portion of a large piece of ground has been allotted for cultivation; it falls to him to gather what grows on his soil, to arrange it, to make a bouquet of it, and if he is very ambitious, to develop it as a garden. It devolves on this gardener to collect and form that which is in reach of his eyes, his armshis power of differentiation. In the same way a mighty one, an anointed one, a Bach, a Mozart, can only survey, manipulate and reveal a portion of the whole flora of the earth; a tiny fragment of that kingdom of blossoms which covers our planet, and of which an enormous surface, partly too distant, partly undiscovered, withdraws from the reach of the individual, even if he is a giant. And yet the comparison is weak and insufficient because the flora only covers the earth, while music, invisible and unheard, pervades and permeates a whole universe. (Ferruccio Busoni) 2 There is something very appealing about likening composition to gardening; both activities are part art, part science, and part manual labour. Busoni's gardening analogy seems particularly appropriate for John Cage, who was a keen gardener himself; tending plants was part of his daily routine.

John Cage, Merce Cunnigham and Allan Kaprow’s works, theories and methods are used as a motto to understand how a newfound status of the artwork was instigated by their shared interests and researches, which ran transversally trough different types of artistic practices. These artists, have not only broadened our understanding of what an “artwork” can be, but also questioned its existence as physical objects, that we can recognize as materializing the conceptual immediacy of the work.

"Chance", was a fundamental method to them, as a way of generating compositions and pieces independent of the author’s will. Even if it might not be evident, this attitude towards art-making had a concern for objectivity and acted as a producer of order inside their creative process. No urge for expression of the self. It is indifferent in motive and originated in no psychology or dramatic intentions. The final purpose was indeed, to be freed from any kind of artistry or taste.
Nevertheless, the use of chance-operations was widely considered as a negation of the artist’s responsibility. If technical ability and artistic virtuosity were not at stake anymore, spectators started questioning what distinguished a common person from an artist. This distinction became even more tenuous when a shift from a traditionally “object-based-art” started to dilute itself into the “artistic-project”, which emphasized process rather than product.
In order to elaborate a personal interpretation of the work, the spectator is obliged to focus on the continuum of narrative that makes the artwork into something other than a fixed object. The audience is no longer confronted with an artwork but with the documentation of life in the "art-project."
But how can “Chance” be accurately documented? The context and the specificity of circumstances are also fundamental to the uniqueness of each performance. Plus, very often, the works cannot be equally recreated twice, and therefore, no documentation will ever be able to convey the precise qualities of that unrepeatable moment. One can also say that the documentation of something is not the thing itself. Ultimately, this disparity cannot be erased, and it is a divergence that separates the viewer from the reality of the work.
Undeniably, Cage, Cunningham and Kaprow’s practice and pieces (intentionally) raise several questions of value and authenticity. But the essence of any experimental work is hard to perceive because the absence of the familiar is more palpable than the odd presence of what is actually there. New forms in fact not only seem disturbingly wrenched out of contexts that have given old forms their meaning, but can appear to be abstracted from “content” itself.
But transgression and discomfort are soon absorbed and digested by the ever-enlarging cultural boundaries. Today, contemporary art has an interesting, if sometimes ambiguous, relation to its broader culture. Even though it is still hard to grasp and understand it, art has never had a less controversial social reception than the one we can witness in our times. Art was never so strongly a part of the mass culture that it has sought to observe and analyze from a distance.
So, can we assume that the blurring between Art and Life, which Cage, Cunningham, Kaprow and many others, desired, finally happening, (even if in a distorted way)?

This chronology includes comments on John Cage´s works: The concepts of selected notations are described. The chronology can be read like an introduction to Cage´s concepts or like a journey through his ideas.
In: URL: http://dreher.netzliteratur.net/1_Cage_Chronologie.pdf

During the 1960s Warhol acquired his first tape recorder, which he used to write a novel, entitled simply "a." The premise of the book was that it reproduced, indexically, twenty-four hours in the life of “Ondine,” an interesting protagonist not only because of his feverish style of elocution but also because of his deviant lifestyle as a drug user and homosexual. Taking Warhol’s notoriously unwritten and unedited novel as my subject, the argument put forth in this essay hinges on fascinating archival discoveries, which reveal that the accepted understanding of Warhol's novel within the framework of the readymade is inadequate. Through never-before examined editorial files in the Grove Press Records and audiotapes at the Andy Warhol Museum Archives, I show how Warhol’s novel strategically embraced and deployed arbitrariness, chance, and error as both a style and as a rhetorical provocation.

In John Cage’s career as a composer, spanning nearly six decades, the years 1951 and 1952 provide for many purposes a convenient line of distinction. From the earlier year came the Concerto for Prepared Piano and the Music of Changes, Cage’s first compositions to make extensive use of chance operations, followed the next by 4′33″ — the “silent” piece. While it is certainly true that his subsequent works and methods compel their own attention, indeed presuming new analytic tools, it is not unreasonable to regard these compositions as epochal, defining the aesthetic and philosophical positions which made Cage the most broadly influential artist of the second half of the century.

This work discusses McLuhan's ideas of electrical media as the extension of human central nervous system, consciousness, and wearing all mankind as our skin. In cyberspace the traditional essence of art and the original concept of art history have disappeared; all now is part of a real-time holistic data sphere inseparable from its models of perfection and simulation. For McLuhan, the artist is the sole person able to cope with technological reality with impunity, because of his awareness of the changes in sense perception. Examples of fuzzy boundary art are explored, with a focus on new media art by Ephemeral8, MTAA, Eduardo Kac, Nam June Paik and Ezra Orion. Such artworks challenge traditional artistic conventions such as “aura”, "author", and "art object", while transforming us all to an actors in a digital mosaic of a holistic theater.

This paper looks at the various challenges of art history and the role that psychological analysis has played in advancing the discipline. By taking a long view on the uses and misuses of psychoanalysis in art history, it is possible tentatively to forecast future developments in the theory of art history in relation to the mind. A key development that has emerged in the last 25 years has been the arrival of what can collectively be termed neuroaesthetics. This paper looks carefully at the neuroscience of art history to ask if the rise of new perspectives on art and the brain interferes with, or even replaces, psychoanalytic explanatory models. It is argued that the rise of neuroscience will at the very least precipitate a revision of traditional Freudian, Kleinian and Lacanian approaches. However, the paper does not take the view that this is because the new theories are more scientific and therefore have greater reliability. Rather, it is argued that too little attention has been paid to the growing body of informed scepticism that there now is, and urges caution before abandoning large areas of psychoanalytic thought. The paper concludes by asking if in fact we need psychoanalytic ideas in art history, and, if we do, how these can best be put to use.

Animation is an expressive field. Its etymology elicits the breath of life, drawing upon the Indo-European root, ane-(to breathe), and the Latin root, anima (life). The sentiment isn't lost on those who explore the field's possibilities. Animate forms evoke profound perceptual sensations. Yet, while the illusion of life appears spontaneous and unrestrained, audiences are rarely sensitive to the labor involved in the production of animated content. For all that its immediate sensations suggest, animation is traditionally time and energy intensive-commonly involving projects planned years in advance, organized through industrialized systems of labor. In such models, risk mitigation reigns supreme and capital loss is avoided at all costs. Oxymoronic? Traditional production leaves little room for chance. The expanded field of animation has long suggested alternatives to Twentieth Century industrialized film paradigms. Artists, theorists, and engineers continually press the boundaries of the field in search of more direct, expressive, and idiomatic forms. While such alternatives have historically proven challenging to scale-often limited by cost and the accessibility of production and distribution systems the practice and pedagogy of animation has reached a critical inflection point. Advancements in virtual production and motion capture technologies, real-time 3D computer graphics engines, machine learning, and visual programming tools provide open technological frameworks for exploration in more improvisational, spatial, and interactive contexts. While such changing technological paradigms offer revolutionary new possibilities, they also present opportunities to reframe thought and pedagogy. This paper explores historical and theoretical examples related to animation in the expanded field. In particular, it considers improvisational and chance operations as structures for expressive practice, reimagined through real-time animation pedagogy. Framed by the historical avant-garde, Expanded Cinema, and immersive storytelling practice, this paper explores new prospects for animation at the intersection of art and technology.

Discusses shift in the politics of the avant-garde after World War II.  I argue that the utopian aspirations of the avant-garde are refocused on providing singular, non-binding examples of alternative ways of seeing, thinking, and experiencing everyday life.  Chapters on John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, David Tudor, Stan Brakhage, Gilbert Sorrentino, Samuel Beckett.

Through a detailed analysis of "Soundings: Ocean Diary" (1994), David Tudor’s contribution to "Ocean," his last collaborative project with John Cage and Merce Cunningham, this essay probes into one particular topic which I had deliberately left on the periphery of my argument in "Reminded by the Instruments": the personal and artistic relationship between Tudor and Cage. Tudor’s idiosyncratic take on Cage’s approach to music is revealed, and a series of puzzling evidence documenting their long-time friendship is presented for others to solve.

Dada, the exuberant art movement that burst into prominence in the 1910s and 1920s, revolutionized traditional notions of art and aesthetics. Artist Hans Arp, for example, tossed colored scraps of paper into the air to compose chance-based collages; Hugo Ball performed sound poems devoid of semantic value; and Baroness
Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven modeled a headpiece fashioned of sardine cans. To most art historians, Dada remains a culturally contingent expression of World War I trauma, nihilism, and political disillusionment and an aggressive attack on the moral bankruptcy of Western culture.

The author suggests that this negative interpretation originates from art history’s methodological blindness to the importance of play, not only to creative and artistic endeavors, but to human identity itself. Dada is characterized by an effervescent love of improvisation, curiosity, novelty and an unselfconscious exploration of the phenomenal world; it emphatically professed to be “anti-art” and “a state-of-mind.” When considered from the perspective of play research and positive psychology, Dada emerges as an early and visionary milestone in understanding play as a fundamental expression of humanity almost a century before academia would take adult play seriously.

Consciously acknowledged or not, by both creators and users, the man- made built environment is a potential symbol which creators and users can either ignore or recognize; not only a symbol but a metaphor.

              It is the intention of this monograph to validate, and, hopefully, encourage the intentional, controlled, and designed making of metaphors because building metaphors  are actual, real and consequential.  The matter of applying the technology and ideas to make such metaphors are abundant.  What is at question is the will and intention of using these resources. In other words, whether we intentionally make a metaphor or not, the building is a perceived metaphorically as a metaphor.

            Even if a builder intentionally aims at not making a metaphor the building is still perceived as a metaphor.  Creators of the environment perceive the created work. In different ways and for different reasons. These differences are in the effort, time and intensity of involvement with the creation and subsequent use of the work.

              The result of creator's efforts becomes a symbol and a metaphor, this phenomena is serious, important and with its consequences worthy of validating.  The creator, well-motivated or not, will be at the beginning with an idea and involved in the process of using technology to convert ideas into a reality.  The user, perceiving or not, is involved with the product of this process and for a much longer period of time., perhaps attaching to it  meaning, significance and importance often  different and unexpected by its author.

                When by chance, the importance and consequences of the authors concerns are successfully imparted and manifested in the work and perceived by the users we can observe that this phenomena is rooted in the author's own sensitivity and concern about what his context means to him and his family. What importance is the built environment in his own life and how would its improvement, change, or modification affect him. It has been personal, cerebral, and willful. The architect chose to do it and followed his decision by a sustained effort. Have architects ignored there right, authority and unwritten mandate by being careless about this creative goal.  The goal of making metaphors and symbols, and, if revived what would change?  Would they be more uplifted and would their lives improve? Would the perception of there lives improve?

DEMILITARY Z ACJA JĘZ YK A: POWA ŻNE Z ADANIE DL A MUZ YKI NAPISANYM W 1957 ROKU tekście programowym Experimental Music John Cage pisze: Odpowiedź na to pytanie [o cel pisania muzyki] może przybrać formę paradoksu: celowa bezcelowość (purposeful purposelessness) lub bezcelowa gra (purposeless play). Owej grze nie przyświeca zamiar wyprowadzenia porządku z chaosu czy udoskonalenia świata, jest ona po prostu dążeniem do uświadomienia sobie wagi prawdziwego, otaczającego nas życia, które jest na tyle interesujące, że człowiek poprzez odpowiednie nastrojenie, pozbywa się myśli i pragnień torujących mu drogę, pozwalając działać życiu niejako z jego własnej woli (its own accord) 1 .

In 1948, John Cage claims form to be the sole element in music that must be freed from all compositional laws. In the same year Claude Shannon’s information theory and Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, both struggle with the problem of significant shape (Gestalt) that a given observer frames any received information into. In 1955, Gregory Bateson and Cage each theorize an observation they had respectively performed three years ago. For the cybernetic anthropologist, it was the discovery that monkeys can frame their interaction by exchanging the meta-message "this is a play." For the experimental composer, it was the epiphany that absolute silence didn’t exist, and was only framed as such by the unacknowledged force of the meta-message "this is music (sounds intended to be listened to).” Without knowing each other, they coin the same term to address the theoretical fruit of their observation: experimental action—the nullifying of pre-set frames and logical types by the observer which allows the creation of the unforeseen (improviso). But the significance of Cage and Bateson’s theory also lays in their performative aspect: the observation they enacted was in itself a paradigmatic case of ‘experimental action.’ This paper formulates a historical perspective for this duality of ‘experimental actions’ in both experimental music and systems theories, where theory (theoria) becomes always confounded with performance, and vice versa. The parallel confluence is traced from the early days of cybernetics and information theory up to autopoiesis on one side, and from the introduction of chance and indeterminacy to music by Cage to the composed/structured improvisations of Christian Wolff and Grand Union on the other. But by doing so, it also acknowledges and questions the ambiguous nature of its own observation and the abstraction of facts it necessarily enacts. Thus experimental action is theorized and performed once again. Among other things, the perspective presented here should illuminate why academic journals necessitate abstracts like this one.

Fondazione I Teatri di Reggio Emilia, 2019 Area comunicazione L'editore si dichiara pienamente disponibile a regolare le eventuali spettanze relative a diritti di riproduzione per le immagini e i testi di cui non sia stato possibile reperire la fonte.

The PDF presents the folded poster with reproductions of the illustrated text panels (in German) of the exhibition "Art as walking on the limits: John Cage and modern art". It was published by the Staatsgalerie Moderner Kunst in Munich (now Pinakothek der Moderne). It presents John Cage in/between Marcel Duchamp, Black Mountain College and Fluxus. The panels introduce into the concepts and strategies of artists who transgressed the limits of established art media via experimental notations.

This book investigates the concept of pos-modernism since its roots on Philosophy, Social Sciences and Architecture to its musical sense in the 20th century. Also discusses the meaning of "post-modernism" in Brazilian music.
Now it is being reissued by Ed. Unesp, 2015.

Resumo: Relacionada contextualmente com o percurso da música brasileira do século XX, a obra Mutationen VI, para violino e fita magnética, composta por Claudio Santoro em 1972, caracteriza-se pelo uso do que o próprio compositor chama de "aleatório controlado". A análise da obra relaciona os aspectos pertinentes à notação musical não-tradicional-através dos trabalhos de Gould (2011), Strange e Strange (2001), Dourado (1998) e Stone (1980)-às "estratégias de invariância" (Costa, 2009; 2018). A articulação de processos aparentemente díspares, como o dodecafonismo, técnicas tradicionais e estendidas ao instrumento e a gravação da parte eletroacústica pelo próprio intérprete são exploradas e expostas neste trabalho.

Knots and Fields, a documentary of 75 mins in length, looks at the history and the contemporary relevance of the famous Summer Courses in New Music, which have been held in Darmstadt, Germany since 1946.
The film includes interviews with many significant figures from, and witnesses to the courses’ history, including composers Pierre Boulez, Helmet Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough; the first student to enrol in 1946, Hans Ulrich Engelmann; Dr. Otto Tomek, the radio producer who was a regular visitor during the 50s and 60s; and three of the five directors of that courses have had during their 65 year history.
Knots and Fields is a film by Andrew Chesher and David Ryan (2010).

This paper discusses a significant performance event of the 1960s titled 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering. In 2006, MIT held an exhibition to mark the fortieth anniversary of this event, the first large-scale performance in the US in which electronic technology, and importantly, ...

According to Giorgio Vasari, one of the greatest innovations of Renaissance art was the introduction of the canvas, a new material support that allowed pictures “to be carried from place to place.” With their flexibility and resilience, canvases proved to be ideal in fostering painting’s mobility, allowing pictures to be easily transmitted and exchanged across long distances. Yet, as a downside, increased mobility also introduced pictures to what geographers call the “friction of distance,” exposing them to the risk of losses, miscarriages, and, above all, material damages. In this lecture, I will explore the physical harm caused to paintings through mobility, investigating the ruptures, scratches, and other physical traumas that could jeopardize their material integrity during transit from the places of origin to their final destinations. I will consider cases of such painters like Titian or Rubens, whose extensive output was frequently endangered by long distance mobility. In doing so, I will also consider early modern attitudes toward material imperfection, addressing them in connection with modernist ideas of chance and creative spontaneity. As Marcel Duchamp’s Large Glass (1915–23) demonstrates, for example, modern aesthetics came to terms with the idea of damage during transit, accepting vulnerability as a creative function of the art object.

W enn Kommissar oder Detektiv am Ende eines Krimis die smarte Lösung ihres Falls präsentieren, dann hat der Mörder ausgespielt. Entweder ist er tot oder er wird verhaftet, seine Machenschaften sind aufgedeckt, es ist geklärt, wer wie mit wem was warum gedreht hat, das Rätsel ist gelöstdas Spiel vorbei. Manchmal weist der Ordnungshüter den Verbrecher noch daraufhin, in welchem Zug der Fehler lag, oder er zollt ihm Respekt für die Herausforderung, vor die er ihn gestellt hat. Denn was sich seit dem 19. Jahrhundert in der seriell wiederholten populären Ausformung des modernen Krimis nach dem stets gleichen Schema um einen Gesetzesbruch und seine Ahndung herum entspinnt, hat Spielcharakter. Nicht zufällig vielleicht übt schon der erste berühmte literarische Detektiv wie viele seiner späteren Kollegen sein Amt als Hobby aus: Edgar Allan Poes Auguste Dupin zieht aus dem Aufklären von Kriminalfällen einen ähnlichen Genuss wie aus dem Lösen von » Rätseln oder Wortspielen « 1 • Mjt Roger Caillois' Einteilung der Spiele wäre das, was im Krimi zwischen Detektiv und Verbrecher gespielt wird, dabei in erster Linie agon, ein Wettstreit ocler » Kampf, bei dem eine künstliche Gleichheit der Chancen geschaffen wird, damit sich die Wettkämpfer unter idealen Bedingungen miteinander messen können« 2-setzt der klassische Detektivroman seine Regeln doch so, dass alle Beteiligten auf Eliminierung von Unbestimmtheit aus sind und sich eine Situation ergjbt, in der »der Geist mit dem Geiste kämpft« 3 • Die Lektüre von Kriminalromanen wird von Caillois, wenn sie mit dem »Versuch [einhergeht], den Schuldigen zu identifizieren«4, als »reinste Form d_es ludus« 5 bezeichnet, des »Hang[s] zur Meisterung künstlicher Schwierigkeiten«6, bei dem Berechnung 1 Poe 1979, o. S. Der ludische Charakter des Krimis wird in Poes Erzählung »Der Doppelmord in der Rue Morgue«, die als erster Krimi der Weltliteratur gehandelt wird, auch dadurch überdeutlich, dass sie von einer Reflexion über Spiele (Schach, Dame, Whist) eingeleitet wird.

An exploration of textural cut-ups. How ‘systematic derangement’ works in a creative environment, and how we can adapt the techniques to discover more about ourselves and our relationship with society.

This paper will share my recent discoveries which are a direct result of my research into creative idea-generation, and the textural cut-up techniques developed by the artist Bryon Gysin, and the writer,
William Burroughs.
Burroughs believed that controlling influences use the media to flood society with words and images that manipulate and contain us. By confronting this media narrative, by cutting it up and distorting it, he suggested that we could escape from its influence. I propose that we can take this further and extend the techniques to discover more about ourselves.
I will examine textural cut-ups through the creative methods of Burroughs and Gysin, but also by exploring the work of John Cage, Tom Phillips and David Bowie.  I will also discuss my own practical experiments in using the techniques of ‘systematic derangement’ to create insights and new directions.
My research has shown that ‘new’ ideas are discovered by creating connections. By linking random elements together we create new possibilities. My paper will discuss how this works in a creative environment, but will also explore its uses as a tool for personal development and decision making similar in form to the Taoist
I Ching.