[microsound] 'that's edutainment'

[Stephen Hastings-King]

 i'm not sure i understand the relation between working with conceptual
games/problems and working with sound that's being presupposed in some of
the responses like the one i will leave below (the quotes from audio
culture--which is a lovely collection in the main, even as some of the edits
are strange)...

it's like folk assume there's some rigid translation at work in linking
them--so what comes up against this projection (and it's nothing more than
that) seems two-fold:
1. if you don't use the same approaches or know the same languages, what you
do is somehow less legit.
2. in reaction against this, there follows usually one or another defense of
immediacy.

i don't know where that assumption comes from.

speaking for myself, these are parallel games.  i think of them as
oscillators that generate separate signals but that couple in the process of
making stuff and which through that open up different
possibilities----sometimes i try to set up constraints explicitly presuppose
theoretical questions, but more often i find that the registers of working
interact with each other almost on their own, simply as a function of how i
think in performance settings and--especially---of how i think when i'm
listening back to the recorded maps of performances.
and i find the problems that arise from trying to bend writing around to
interact with sound work without substituting it for soundwork to be an
interesting.  difficult, but fun--you know.

it appears that some folk here find this combination of pursuits to be
generative and some don't--which is fine---but i haven't seen anyone trying
to impose that combination on folk who don't work that way, and it wouldn't
have crossed my mind that this (or any other) discussion about philo or
politics here would be taken as doing that.

i guess i've been on this list for a while now and i've never understood the
differend that seems to come up during political or theoretical questions
surface.

=========
on "everyone's a situationist" i meant more or less what kim
suggested...tons of folk are out there doing psychogeography these
days---alot of "radical cartography" leans on it.  i find some of it
interesting, alot of it not so much, like anything else.

i've worked alot on situationist stuff and over time have become
increasingly suspicious of the whole category of psychogeography (the
"subjective appropriation of urban space" which was set up as a reaction
against and critique of the types of urban planning that were being used in
the paris of the late 1950s--you know gridspace and the creation of space
for an automobile-oriented city that went along with the reworking of the
parisian housing stock during the 50s, which resulted in the erasure of alot
of older streets and flattening of alot of buildings---and the type of
design that built structured environments for leisure--that kind of thing).
it seems to me that it gives up more than it gains by retreating to the
subjective.  this even as i think psychogeography experiments generate cool
maps.

am doing stuff, so have to get back to it.


ps thanks for the recommendations re. critiques of  information theory.
some i knew about, some i didn't.  good.

stephen
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