The social body constrains the way the physical body is perceived. The physical experience of the body, always modified by the social categories through which it is known, sustains a particular view of the society. There is a continual exchange of meaning between the two kinds of bodily experience so that each reinforces the categories of the other. As a result of this interaction, the body itself is a highly restricted medium of expression… To be useful, the structural analysis of symbols has somehow to be related to a hypothesis about role structure. From here, the argument will go in two stages. First, the drive to achieve consonance in all levels of experience produces concordance among other means of expression, so that the use of the body is co-ordinated with other media. Second, controls exerted from the social system place limits on the use of the body as medium.
– Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols
Category Archives: fourteen forms of melancholy
from https://www.objectsandsounds.com/sonic-confessions-with-martyna-basta/:
“When I make music, I feel like I’m writing a letter and my message is just expressed in tones instead of words. The fragments of my thoughts are scattered in pieces, so perhaps my message is never clear but rather just full of questions.
Most of the time I also feel like the pieces I make are just kind of coming my way and taking shape naturally. Almost as if it’s happening without my control, even though I’m the creator. I am also an observer at the same time, so the outcome is always a surprise.
…
My process is spontaneous and chaotic. I feel very strongly driven by intuition and impulsivity. I can create a piece in a very short period, but I find that it’s important for my practice to leave it for a while, so I can come back to it and hear it differently or have other ideas that can contribute to it. Giving space to my music is just as important to me as making music.”
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from https://shapeplatform.eu/2023/mistakes-became-a-source-of-inspiration-an-interview-with-martyna-basta/:
“From what I’ve observed – because I believe that being driven by intuition means that you also learn about your practice on the way – my albums evolve as a culmination of emotions, sentiments, or images experienced during a particular period. I never start a record with a blank page, but rather collect some sketches for a while, see what they’re about, and only from there I start to weave everything together, adding some new little narratives here and there. It’s very interesting to me because it shifts your position from being a maker, a musician, to being an observer. I like to think of music not just as a product of my making, but as something mysteriously materialising before me, originating from some magical realm.
…
I don’t think I’ve ever sonified a specific memory – it evokes the action, but it’s more a feeling that leaves a trace in the music. When I revisit my past compositions, it’s like flipping through old photographs, revealing fleeting glimpses of emotions. This is the essence of how my compositions unfold – I often blend field recordings from different times and places into a cohesive whole.”
Feeding the Worms
by Danusha Laméris
Ever since I found out that earthworms have taste buds all over
the delicate pink strings of their bodies, I pause dropping apple
peels into the compost bin, imagine the dark, writhing ecstasy,
the sweetness of apples permeating their pores. I offer beets and
parsley, avocado, and melon, the feathery tops of carrots.
I’d always thought theirs a menial life, eyeless and hidden,
almost vulgar-though now, it seems, they bear a pleasure so
sublime, so decadent, I want to contribute however I can,
forgetting, a moment, my place on the menu.
The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos.
It has two directions. Where do you place
yourself, at the periphery or at the vortex?
Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing
control; the winding in is a tightening, a
retreating, compacting to a point of
disappearance. Beginning at the center is
affirmation, the move outward is a representation
of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive
energy, of life itself.
Spirals—which way to turn—represent the fragility
in an open space. Fear makes the world go round.
– Louise Bourgeois
“In my study, I noticed something interesting about the etymology of “genre” and “gender.” Both words come from the Latin word “genus,” translating to “race.” It was an enlightening discovery to learn that “race,” “gender,” “genre,” and even “class” all come from the same word in Latin, thereby having the same function.”
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/117/387112/noise-is-the-nigga-of-sound/
https://www.e-flux.com/journal/138/553676/who-haunts/
https://www.e-flux.com/notes/575616/how-to-haunt-oppenheimer-and-black-hanford?utm_campaign=later-linkinbio-e_flux&utm_content=later-39391406&utm_medium=social&utm_source=linkin.bio
“The powers of the world are invested in destroying time like subsidised corn burning in a field”
– Porpentine Charity Heartscape
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From Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky’s short story, ‘Collector of Cracks’:
The jerkiness of our vision, the discontinuousness of our perception of a motion picture, say, is a fairly well-known fact. But to face that fact is not enough: One must go inside it. Wedged in between instants – when the film, having withdrawn one image from the retina, is advancing so as to produce another – is a split second when everything has been taken from the eye and another new given it. In that split second the eye is before emptiness, but it sees it: Something unseen seems seen.
…
From Stuck in a Sticky Shed with Side Chain Compression by Kristen Gallerneaux:
Stone, slime, mud and soundwaves are mineral level media with opinions. The taboo that connects the grime to the shine of our everyday digital life is on Drew’s mind too:
The tools I use are haunted by the souls that made them and origin in which they were conceived. It feels inescapable, as I type on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro. All the techno-wonders just feel drenched in exploitation – or bad vibrations – embedded in the circuitry.
Logic sometimes breeds monsters. For half a century there has been springing up a host of weird functions, which seem to strive to have as little resemblance as possible to honest functions that are of some use. No more continuity, or else continuity but no derivatives, etc. More than this, from the point of view of logic, it is these strange functions that are the most general; those that are met without being looked for no longer appear as more than a particular case, and they have only quite a little corner left them.
Formerly, when a new function was invented, it was in view of some practical end. To-day they are invented on purpose to show our ancestors’ reasonings at fault, and we shall never get anything more than that out of them.
If logic were the teacher’s only guide, he would have to begin with the most general, that is to say, with the most weird, functions. He would have to set the beginner to wrestle with this collection of monstrosities. If you don’t do so, the logicians might say, you will only reach exactness by stages.
— Henri Poincaré, Science and Method (1899), (1914 translation)