Categories: uncategorized
Date: 14 April 2003 22:18:00
I lurve this.
Interactive toys noise and visuals, could spend all day there.
On a completely different note, I read a Brian Eno lecture the other day and thought it was fascinating and had a lot of parallels in church/mission. Here's the bit that really got me thinking but you can read the whole thing here.
Evolving metaphors, in my opinion, is what artists do. They produce work that gives you the chance to experience in a safe environment, because nothing really happens to you when you looking at artwork, they give you the chance to experience what might be quite dangerous and radical new ideas. They give you a chance to step out of real life into simulator life. A metaphor is a way of explaining something that we've experienced in a set of terms, a different set of terms.
There's a very interesting book by Lakoff and Johnson, that famous thirties singing team, it's a book about metaphor, it's called Metaphors We Live By. They give a very clear example of the effect of metaphor. They say we use in our culture the metaphor, argument is war. All of our language about argument "she defeated him", "he attacked her position", so on and so on, they are all arguments that relate to fighting.
When we think about the process of arguing, we tend to then reconstrue our possibilities in terms of that metaphor. What Lakoff and Johnson say is suppose that somebody had said argument is dance, suppose that was the dominant metaphor. So instead of it being seen you have the process where one person defeats another, it becomes a process where two people together make something beautiful between them. We could have that metaphor for argument, we don't.
But do you understand that a shift of that kind produces an entirely different kind of discourse. How the the shift from one way of dealing in activity that we all engage in to another changes that activity. Suddenly our language of possibilities is renewed and different.
What I'm saying, I suppose, when I talk about these things here (on his chart of the differences between generative and classical musics), I'm saying we're saddled with a whole set of metaphors that belong over here. Those are our metaphors about how the world works, how things organize themselves, how things are controlled, what possibilities there are. Generative art in general is a way of not throwing those out, we don't get rid of old metaphors, we expand them to include more. These things still have value, but we want to include these things as well.
My feeling about artists is that we are metaphor explorers of some kind. ... An object of culture does all of the following, it innovates, it recycles, it clearly and explicitly rejects, and it ignores. Any artist's work that is doing all those four things and is doing all those four things through the metaphors that dominate our thinking.