I found the underlying concept in this reading to be very engaging as it walks us through Olivero’s internal feelings and personal retreats and how they led up to her externalizing them and sharing them with people around her; leaving her mark. The work she has done is impressive in distinctive ways as she was able to incorporate music and vocals in her meditation and healing. Just reading about it felt calming and reassuring. Her initiative in making The Sonic Meditation group a female-only meeting has allowed for a safe, women-empowering space. It’s also interesting that, although it was catered for musical practices, they also incorporated “journaling, discussion and Kinetic Awareness exercises”, which makes them feel more like a family, especially in the time of women-liberation where the house would be a sanctuary for them.

One of the meditation exercises that I found compelling was “Teach Yourself to Fly” where they would focus on their breaths and at some point allow their voices to sound, resembling the noise that an airplane makes when up in the air. This was a kinetic awareness exercise with the main goal of healing. The idea of focusing on our breath when meditating is not new, I have attended multiple yoga and pilates classes that emphasized breathing and its importance, allowing for inner peace and overall calmness. Moreover, when I used to have trouble falling asleep, I read online about a method that helps when focusing on breathing. Inhale while counting to 4, hold my breath as I count to 7 and exhale while making a “whoosh” sound, counting to 8, and then repeating the full process for multiple cycles. This, in my experience, allows the mind to focus completely on the sound and count and avoid overthinking or thinking about things that keep the mind wandering and awake.

I will interpret Oliveros’s “Meditation” as a kind of spiritual&physical pause that allows for intensive sensing of body, (sonic) surroundings, and time passing. What distinguishes Oliveros’s sonic meditation from other meditations is the highlight of sounds, and therefore listening and outputting voices. This is also where I see “communication” and interaction among a group of people, and where the content of performance lies. The question I would ask though is how much can we justify the performance value from a viewer’s perspective? In addition, I admire the value of sound and body experimentation under the political framework. The idea of haveing listening as a form of feminism and activism amplifies certian human sensation and the relation to external world. So it’s like we use our body to claim something about ourselves (and bodies). 

 

Compared to Oliveros’s actions my experience with meditation appears to be somewhat shallow. I guess I got introduced to meditation relatively late. The earliest meditation experience I remember was back in my Chinese high school, when hundreds of students filled a lecture hall for a psychological coaching for Gaokao(the national college entrance exam). You could imagine most students were paying little attention with heads down, because they didn’t want to lose every minute finishing tons of assignments. I was the type in-between, feeling it hard to choose whether to dive into the exercise book as well, or listen to the lecture which sounded interesting but might sacrifice my sleeping time. So in a constant shift between the lecture and assignments, students were introduced to practice meditation, which definitely made less impact. But I did follow the meditation seriously. 

 

Okay the point is not to discuss educational culture, but that meditation, which at that moment was regarded as irrelevant and disengaging by many people around me, actually brought me hyper feelings of my body and time. It pulls you from the shell and, at least for me, brings a more objective perception of self and surroundings. To some extent, I also showed my “embodied pursuit” that one can pause and rest facing tons of work to do. So I agree that Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations, and other forms of meditation, would never be escapism or disengagement. We need to pause and re-organize before the next step. Like written in the article, “Listening is directing attention to what is heard, gathering meaning, interpreting and deciding on action.” 

 

However I really don’t treat meditation as a regular practice, so I’m curious apart from more awareness on listening/sounds and body, how much the reflections on listening and Sonic Meditations can inspire ordinary people who don’t have the habit of meditation.

Hello everyone!

For personal reasons, I had to be out of campus and I just returned, so I couldn’t do the presentation live. I am attaching a video of my short performance here. I was trying to see how P5.js could be combined with things we already know from Hydra to create animations.

This is the performance

It was pretty fun to do. I think the music is pretty basic but it’s supposed to be just a base, the visuals are the actual show.

One problem that I was having with P5.js was that sometimes the previous sketch would stay in the channel. It was quite frustrating at the start but afterwards, I was able to use it as a way to create.

While reading this article, something that came to mind was how, in a way, sound already has some sort of visualization in nature like how noise lies on a color spectrum or how sine waves have a defined shape. While live coding, I usually try to visualize how the sounds that I generate sound and I find myself always going back to sound waves for inspiration or use them as a base to build off of. I found the works of Paul Klee particularly refreshing because he managed to capture how sound would feel in a still painting using simple shapes and colors.

 

One form of sound visualization that I hadn’t thought about as a form of art is music videos. Because of how normalized music videos have become, I never thought of them as a form of “art” that combines both sound and visuals. This kind of adds up to when the author says “the dual profession of artist-musician/musician-artist is no longer anything of note” and makes me question whether we must create something drastically different for the work to be “noteworthy”

This is a very interesting passage about two primary art forms: painting and music. In my past knowledge and practice, painting and music, two are parallel. And when we do live coding which combines graphics and music, there is a slight overlap between the two. Specifically, we just try to reflect the rhythms or beats on the graphics while the graphics may have similar themes to the music we make. This passage tells that painting, and by extension, our images can be another form of musical expression and vice versa.

This leads me to think about what kind of combination of graphics and music we are supposed to make. If we only want to make Algorave, it is a good way to use featured themes on both graphics and music, and let the graphics follow the beat or rhythms to change. Because one of the main purposes of Algorave is to make the audience dive into the beats and rhythms, using graphics to visualize the music and the beats of music are always good to use. But when we want to make something more artistic, with the combination, we probably need to change the starting point. Though it’s not the only way to do so, it must be one of the best ways, which is implied in the passage, is keeping the graphics and music parallel. Certainly, it’s not simply parallel. The parallel should be mirror-image relation, or say, the music and image should be doppelgangers of each other. The two can have their own different motives, and the two are interconnected in some ways to present together.

I think I learned a lot in this reading, I never knew about the Fluxus movement, and there were a lot of names that I had to google–in a good way, a way that made me feel less alone in the practice of new media arts.

It’s also interesting to me how many musicians came from Art School, and how art and music social bubbles have intermixed internationally. In fact, the reading even mentions that people didn’t always choose to wear multiple hats by choice, but rather because the market and economy dictated it. These economic constraints and the emergence of dadaism left a very noticeable effect on individuals who joined the Fluxus movement. A lot of the artists that were mentioned in the reading made anti-art intermedia pieces that were concise and short, sometimes humorous with less focus on the aesthetic than the message. 

I don’t think there’s much to agree or disagree with in this reading. It’s like a hyperlink framework of names relevant to what we do in class, which gives us history and therefore purpose.