A variety of approaches, a singular aim?

This post is designed to provide a summary perspective on the first two weeks of work/play in DMA. As I see it we are doing very well in terms of functioning as a healthy learning community or ecology, and we're meeting the goals of the course. We've identified some common features of composition in general, some unique features in various forms of artistic composition, and a set of specific characteristics of new-media composition. Meanwhile we have also identified various approaches or avenues to understanding and becoming better new-media composers, and we've brought this understanding of multiple approaches back full-circle to a sense of common or shared humanity. Not bad for two weeks.

Common features of composition in general

In our initial work/play we sought to explore and understand composition as an inherent capacity of human beings, linked to the basic physiology of perception and the basic psychology of representation. This gave us an early window on the simplicity of composition (the triangle of composition, representation, and perception is relatively tidy) and also its complexity (none of the three constituent elements of the triangle are the least bit simple!).

From there we began to notice a common basic structure within composition, even when it is considered in varied forms including paintings, sculptures, dances, poems, films, musical pieces, and so forth. All of these forms have their unique features, yet all can also be seen as involving three simple building blocks: 1) having something to say, 2) saying it creatively and intelligently, and 3) saying it with technical facility. Again the elements form a simple, stable triangle, but none of the elements that compose the triangle are the least bit simple.

So arguably we gathered that composition as an activity is simple yet complex --or deceptively simple perhaps-- or (if you like fancy words) we discovered that it has a kind of stochastic structure, meaning a structure that combines nonrandom elements (the triangles) and random elements (the immense variation and interactive potential of the constituent elements of the triangles) into a higher-order unity. In some ways the nonrandom elements act to filter the random elements, and for this reason the overall structure is sometimes referred to as a stochastic filter.

A particularly joyful lawn mower

Unique features of artistic composition

The above framework provides us with a basis for understanding why composing an artwork is similar to, yet different from, composing a mowed lawn for example (even though the chap depicted in the image on the right is cutting quite an aesthetic dash in addition to cutting his lawn :)

Lawn mowing clearly has an artistic/aesthetic aspect and a stochastic form, but neither the non-random elements of the genre of lawn mowing, nor its random elements, have nearly as much complexity as those involved in composing artworks. Conceptualizing what a mowed lawn should look like, deciding on a mowing process, then choosing a tool (mower rather than scissors, for example :) is much simpler than conceptualizing an artwork, deciding on and enacting a process, and selecting and enacting a technical repertoire to materialize a message. I think it's safe to say such things without offending the lawn mowers among us.

Self-similarity in a Mandelbrot set

So, in artistic composing, the ideas or themes explored are often very complex (perhaps involving ideas and/or inspired intuitions, conscious as well as unconscious or semi-conscious impulses, etc.), the process is inherently complex because it involves at least two and possibly four processes at once (creative and intellectual processes are surely intertwined and involved in artistic composing, with spiritual and scientific processes also likely part of the mix), and the techniques are also often quite complex as well.

Yet it remains intriguing that the form of composing is self-similar across types and scales (as depicted in the image on the left). In one way or another, composers all seem to gather things up (tools, materials, and so forth), think and/or talk, use tools to assemble or reassemble materials, reflect, and share --though not always in that order! Lawns get mowed, artworks get created.

Unique features of new-media composition

We then moved on to explore in some detail the specific characteristics of new-media composition, since this is the proper subject (gotta love that kind of phrase :) of the DMA course. We first sought to explore and understand its uniqueness through unearthing or extracting the principles that inform it. We arrived at a reasonably good list: from Lev Manovich we gathered the principles of numerical representation, modularity, variability, automation, and transcoding. From Marshall McLuhan we gathered the principles of simultaneity, ubiquity, and fluidity (or boundary-blending). And I added the principles of reflexivity and hyper-individual+hyper-social.

The methodology we used to 'put the principles in motion' so to speak was a basic compositional algorithm, depicted on the right. So in effect the principles we identified re: new-media, plus the algorithm, add up to the non-random part of the stochastic filter.

This combination closely mirrors the framework outlined in one of my favorite books on composition, written by James Webb Young. It is an elegant book (an archetypically 'slim volume' consisting of a mere forty-five pages) called A Technique for Producing Ideas. In this book Young states:

"In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas. Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything."

So it would seem identifying principles and putting them in motion via an algorithmic method is a sound approach to take, especially if the aim is to produce compositions. It's noteworthy that Young's book is practical in nature, designed to help people produce ideas, not just understand what ideas are. So it's in line with what we are trying to do. Our aim is to become better composers, not just to study or learn about composition.

Multiple approaches to new-media composing

Yet it is certainly not the case that one specific stochastic filter will work for everyone. Here again, having such a filter may be universal, and being able to construct one DIY may be a requirement for would-be artistic composers, but the actual components of such filters may need to vary from person to person and from project to project. So. . .

• As elegant as it is, the principles plus method approach to constructing a stochastic filter is not the only one to take, nor is it likely to be the single approach that will work for everyone and/or in all cases.
• For some, an approach that features experimentation with genres may make the most immediate sense; not only figuring out how to fully utilize new-media-friendly forms like social-intervention, sound-collage, and remix, but also figuring out how to invent new-genres to suit one's own new-purposes or unique insights.
• For others learning from exemplars may make the most sense. Exemplars might in other words form the nonrandom elements of a different type of stochastic filter. Composition is after all complex, as are human beings, so why not learn about new-media composing by learning about the subset of human beings called new-media composers?
• Or, yet another approach that might work best for some, why not learn about new-media composition autobiographically rather than biographically, by learning about ourselves as composers who are alive in, and alive to, the new-media era?



A 'digital weave' composition I made some years ago
based on a scan of a watercolor painting

• Or consider the triangle of ideas, processes, and techniques: in the fundamentals of compositional practice as played out in the new-media landscape, here too we find interesting variations. JR and Candy Chang both seem to riff on or emphasize the idea characteristics of the new-media era, its participatory, fundamentally and highly social character. Others like William Kentridge for example may riff more on the process aspects, the crazy-wonderful combinations and genres of 'new' and 'old' media that we can now compose for ourselves, and then compose within. Still others --Katerina Cizek comes to mind-- may tend to riff on the technical potentials of new-media.

A single, convergent aim before and after all?

So where does all of this leave us after two weeks? IMO all of the above approaches make good sense, so we are poised to mix and match them, combine and recombine them. Do you see how there is a conversation going on between the general and the specific, the random and nonrandom, the convergent and the divergent, one thing and another? The various approaches outlined above are possibly also "in conversation" with one another. And they perhaps form, at a somewhat larger scale, a self-similar set of nonrandom filtration elements for a somewhat larger stochastic filter.

So the hope is that everyone finds their own way into the conversation about new-media composing (with the help of friends and colleagues of course) and into enhanced awareness and mindfulness of its common structural characteristics and its specific variations, the commonality it has with various other forms of artistic composition, and the commonality as well it shares with the composing that everyone is doing everywhere and all the time physiologically and psychologically.

A level junction

The training for composers is IMO a matter of becoming a fully developed person, a person who is fully conversant with the self and the world, fully mindful and aware of structure and variations forming higher-order unities.

In this regard the self is perhaps the ultimate medium (I mean folks including Socrates have thought so, no?) and the world itself is possibly the ultimate school, canvas, and/or stage (and didn't Shakespeare say something like that?)

It is also notable and hopeful that this emphasis on the whole person as composer, and on the larger world, was part of the founding ideology of UNCSA. It was made very clear by Vittorio Giannini, one of the school's founders, that developing the capacity of full personhood was one of the the ultimate keys to becoming a complete artist of any stripe or type.

Let's let Buckminster Fuller (one of those lucky ducks who got to hang out down the road a piece from Winston-Salem, in the 1960's American renaissance, at Black Mountain College) have the last word on these matters. He came up with a formulation similar to Giannini's re: composing a life. His advice to young people was basically this: 'Wake up, look around at the world, figure out what needs to be done, and then do it.' On that note, what say you, shall we proceed?