Interference Principle and Carnatic Music

Using pieces of the antipodal mapping and thinking about how we are going to be transforming the site through projections, sound and story, I decided to use the idea of carnatic music and the interference principle to explore how to create a surrealist space.  To mention some things that have influenced my thoughts, I’ve been reading Urban Toys which is a book put out by Nadim Karam about his sculptural works which create these back stories and also been looking at the video work of Diana Thater, Krzyszstof Wodiczko, Janet Biggs and Dawn Dedeaux.  These have all had considerable influence on the development of my thought processes.

Surrealism – stressing the subconscious or nonrational significance of imagery arrived at by automatism or exploitation of chance effects, unexpected juxtapositions.

Our backstory of the site (which for super secret reasons I cannot post here) is based upon this idea of a real history, an imagined past set of events and present conditions culminating into this new space.  It is about layering these elements to create something that is a little skewed, a little wild.  Drawing upon this, I thought that the interference principle was a nice term to use where the addition of 2 or more elements creates a new waveform – the butterfly effect.  It is this “interference” that we are highlighting and using to create the space.

   

Carnatic music is one of the oldest (if not the oldest) forms of music in existence.  There are a few different takes on the etymology of the word which is now used solely as a location description of the area in Southern India.  Karnataka – Kanatak – Karnatik – Carnatic:  karna = ear, atati = he pleases  “that which pleases the ear” or kar = black, nadu = country or land “black soil” or karu = elevated, nadu = land “elevated (divine) land”.  The latin spelling from carnaticus = “pertaining to the flesh”.  It is said that carnatic music is of divine origin with connection to and immitation of sounds made by animals and birds.  The main emphasis is on vocalization and when instruments are incorporated they are meant to be played in a singing style.  Carnatic singers keep the beat by moving their hands up and down in a specified pattern, using their fingers to keep time.  It is notated by tonic solfa, kind of like Western music however the seven swaras (notes) correspond to chakras, animal spirits and the cycle of life and death.  There are two basic elements:  raga, or melodic formulae, and tala, or rhythmic cycles.

I have to make clear as well that, since I have reformatted my machine, my video editing software is acting up so these are all very rudimentary – windows movie maker at its finest!  They’re basically just sketches anyway, so enh.

 

Having previously documented the various sounds around the site, I took these into some ideas about how they can be reinterpretted through visuals and composition.  I also looked at the hand mudras associated with carnatic music, developing them into a more symbolic look which when cycled through kind of give this impression of motion and look a bit like animal representations.

To bring it all together, I have used this idea of rhythm, cycling and connection.  The rhythm and cycling are based on the carnatic music explorations obviously, but also from the initial sound explorations.  The connection part comes first from my documentation of physical “connectors” and then from this idea that we are layering these realities, histories into some sort of new interpretation.

After the “pin up” today, I am pretty excited that our ideas are really forming this nice whole.  No matter what KBen’s interpretation of whatever he chooses to listen to, our story is solid and the plans are coming together nicely.  The most immediate questions (other than how the hell are we going to do this in a month?)  are how to script the journey through the site without making the audience feel railroaded into some sort of museum tour and how to create participation elements, interactive spaces?  How do we navigate this sort of treacherous site?  How many yards of fabric are we going to need?

One thing I need to remember is that as a group project we are all playing roles – we don’t each have to do everything.  And I think I’m an idea person, a stimulus, the “ground-breaker” as the birthday book calls me.

Oh, and the lemur project…  heh.