slow

I remember reading about slow food, then I was applying to a conference and encountered a category for slow new media, what in the world is that I thought... I tucked that in the back of my brain for a while and today my brain came up with a rationalization. I am working on a new piano piece and had the idea to combine different translations of the same material. I have had Ben Folds on the mind since waiting in the cell phone lot at General Mitchell International Airport while baritone Nathan Krueger made his way across the tarmac. I was thinking about aging, our long friendship and the energy of summertime and youth. The piano piece will use my translation system where I and the various algorithms I employ create beautiful omissions and arrangements of a soundfile. Ben Folds seemed like a great starting place; summer, energy, philosophy, undergraduate music training and piano all swirling about my psyche. I started with using Grooveshark to pull up some recordings and hoped that while I vacuumed the living room starting place would emerge. Settling into a position of retina glued to the screen and ears focused, I decided on a starting place. Instead of grabbing a digital version (note, not a copy, but VERSION!) I thought, hay I have all these on CD, so I started through my ten 1000 plus cd binders and began to marvel at the ordering. I remember spending entire days reorganizing my cd's thinking through the logic and changing the rules. Looking back, those are afternoons of another era or another life. Reveling in the archeological dig through my own psyche, I thought, why not just grab the digital copy with a simple search, then I realized how much I was thinking about my choice and how embedded in my own history that choice resides. This paging through page after page was suggesting new avenues of investigation, the aethetics of the album cover, the visceral of holding and flipping through pages, perusing notes and performers. I was consciously engaging with the project in a slow manner. My dissertation highlights the differences between human and digital routines in the production of art. Each plays a role, I have instinctively known that, now the term slow media actually has a place in my approach. I am working on another project involving Twitter and am involved in a conversation about the types and ideas of conversation. The opposition that Twitter seems to highlight is conversation according to Millennials versus Baby Boomers. Well, here I am in the middle of that spectrum, able to see both. Slow and hyper both have there places/uses. I now know that my aesthetic values employe tenants of both approaches (It is interesting that I structure this as ends of a paradigmatic space). In the physical realm, I have been trying to figure out how the LasuDax project is slow media. I initially thought that project fit the category, but I couldn't say why. With this definition emerging, I am considering the role of the Dax in the project as an object of control in expression and subversion of the Lassus. (I will describe more on the project as it takes shape, for now, know there are Daxophones that are filtered and follow the lines of a Lassus duet). The slow is the control mechanism of the hyper, each playing a role the other is not suited for.