“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, July 1, 2013

Tuned City Brilliant

It was both very political and very contemplative, at the very same time. I couldn't attend all the events, as I was there with my family. But it sounded like the city was being walked, camped in, sat in, stood in, recorded, heard, and on and on. All over the shop. You could put on Victorian period acoustic glasses and hear certain tones emanating from plants. You could do a Debord and discover Japan is actually at the end of a strange alley round the back of the canal. And on and on. What I did hear was incredibly rich.

For once the tech people were absolutely and totally in charge of the machines we all have to use: of course! They are musicians!

Thank you Raviv, Ann and a huge host of others. Hillel Schwartz's talk was awesome, as was meeting him. Termites!

It was great to meet everyone. I was very touched to find that people had been influenced by my stuff on ambience and music, and it's a line I continue to develop. In fact I'm pretty sure my talk is a slightly more rigorous and also practical account of things than the one I outlined in Ecology without Nature.

As part of the build up to the conference, workshops had been teaching my stuff on that, and this was an incredibly nice surprise.

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