Taking notes from the aesthetics and practice course, Dr Stephen Kennedy is a political philosopher and a critical theorist. During his talk, he explained the relation between his writing practice to the idea of materiality and process. Being an author of two books, Chaos Media and Future Sounds, he focuses on the links between noise, sound and music to philosophy. Exploring pattern formation, putting things in and out of their place but arranging, rearranging, collecting, composing and mixing. Steve Kennedy uses the same process of cutting, mixing and rearranging in mixing music as when he writes. Noise and chaos can be seen as a disturbance, but looking past that, there is formation within the sound, and this chaos is what people find excess. Kennedy also talked about how the influences or events of the unexpected can lead to something great. A connection can be drawn to this to Andrew Knight-Hill’s lecture on practice Research and knowing through doing and how ‘accidents’ can open up experimentations and the investigation.
There’s a lot of pressure on defining what we are doing and why we are doing this, from the start what we are trying to communicate. This is something that I feel has actually stopped me from making work. The fear of making something that doesn’t communicate what I want to or not being sure on what I want to communicate from the start. It takes a lot to let go and trust the experimenting process, but I would like to try this method to see what kind of work develops from it both in this project and in the Expanded Art Forms. Steve Kennedy mentions if you take a theory and apply a theory to create something, something is lost. The curiosity and freedom of the exploration is taken away, becoming almost like a formula.
Adding to the conversation, I personally feel that I am at a standstill because I wasn’t sure what I was trying to communicate or explore. Thinking back on past lectures and experiments, what has really interested me is mod roc as it is a material I haven’t used a lot before. The talk was inspirational in helping me take a step back from the meaning of the work, what I want to communicate and try to explore (perhaps mod roc) for what it is in front of me and not trying to add meaning to it.
Figure 1: Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space (Kennedy, 2015)
References:
Images
Figure 1: Kennedy, S. (2015) Chaos Media: A Sonic Economy of Digital Space, [online] Available at: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/chaos-media-9781623567064/ (Accessed 28 October 2020)
Comments