scholarly journals Improvisation as an Evolutionary Force in Laptop Orchestra Culture

Author(s):  
Eldad Tsabary

Improvisation has always been at the heart of the laptop ensemble and it constitutes a core force in the evolution of individual laptop orchestras and the art form at large. A drive to innovate artistically, technologically, and collaboratively opens the way for many new modes of improvisation that are unique to the laptop-orchestra (or LOrk) setting, such as improvising with collective instruments, gestural controllers, and live coding. Navigating these novel logistical settings, collaborative forms, technologies, and sonic structures demands rapid, creative responses to emergent possibilities and challenges. Due to their tradition-defying, multidimensional, and hybridic nature at cultural, stylistic, geographical, personal, social, and technological levels, laptop orchestras may be viewed as a matrix of related behaviours and beliefs rather than a definite genre. In this essay I focus on how non-idiomatic improvisation serves as a crucial local and global evolutionary force within LOrk culture by breaking with old patterns to discover new sui generis expressive possibilities and by developing skills that radically expand improvisatory strategies. I also provide a snapshot of current improvisatory practices that are unique or have special implications for laptop orchestras (based on extensive contact and email interviews with laptop orchestra directors and members across various geographical and cultural contexts). Additionally, I offer my own experiences as founder and director of the Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk).

Author(s):  
Fiona Sampson

Today, poetry and art music occupy similar cultural positions: each has a tendency to be regarded as problematic, ‘difficult’, and therefore ‘elitist’. Despite this, the audiences and numbers of participants for each are substantial: yet they tend not to overlap. This is odd, because the forms share early history in song and saga, and have some striking similarities, often summed up in the word ‘lyric’? These similarities include much that is most significant to the experience of each, and so of most interest to practitioners and audiences. They encompass, at the very least: the way each art-form is aural, and takes place in time; a shared reliance on temporal, rather than spatial, forms; an engagement with sensory experience and pleasure; availability for both shared public performance and private reading, sight-reading, and hearing in memory; and scope for non-denotative meaning. In other words, looking at these elements in music is a way to look at them in poetry, and vice versa. This is a study of these two formal craft traditions that is concerned with the similarities in their roles, structures, projects, and capacities.


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 631-640 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis Satie

It is thought in the theory and philosophy of law, aimed at discussing the conditions of possibility of rapprochement between the art form and legal form. The text investigates, dialectically, the implications for the legal philosophy of the impossibility of such approximation, and the problems in a conservative approximation. It follows that: 1) would be a loss for a reason and therefore to legal philosophy, not to communicate between art and law; 2) the relationship between legal and aesthetic standards should be guided by the critical, especially in terms of Adorno's thought. It is by overcoming the dichotomy between possibility and impossibility, opening on the idea of constellation of methodological categorical fields of law and aesthetics in their current forms, paving the way for understanding the legal form as a tragic way.


Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852110331
Author(s):  
Leah Gilman

Multiple sociological studies have demonstrated how talk of ‘good’ motives enables people to maintain the presentation of a moral self in the context of stigmatised behaviours. Far fewer have examined why people sometimes describe acting for the ‘wrong reasons’ or choose to qualify, or reject, assumptions that they are motivated by a desire to ‘do good’. In this article, I analyse one such situation: sperm donors who describe being partially motivated by a ‘selfish’ desire to procreate, a motive which these same men frame as morally questionable. I argue that such accounts are explicable if we consider the (gendered) interactional and cultural contexts in which they are produced, particularly the way interactive contexts shape the desirability and achievability of plausibility and authenticity. I suggest that analysis of similar social phenomena can support sociologists in better understanding the complex ways in which moral practices are woven into social interactions.


2002 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nils Zurawski

This article examines the special role of non-technological, everyday surveillance in Northern Ireland, and its meaning for life in the conflict laden province. It looks at the dimensions of people watching other people and how it is that the culture of conflict, which undoubtedly still exists in Northern Ireland, also produces a culture of surveillance. This culture then affects the way in which other forms of surveillance are viewed: with the introduction of CCTV into Northern Ireland, it becomes clear that many issues connected to this technology differ in comparison to other locations and cultural contexts, particularly with regard to issues of trust


Author(s):  
Patricia Dickenson ◽  
Martin T. Hall ◽  
Jennifer Courduff

The evolution of the web has transformed the way persons communicate and interact with each other, and has reformed institutional operations in various sectors. Examining these changes through the theoretical framework Connectivism, provides a detailed analysis of how the web impacts individuals' context within communities as well as the larger society. This chapter examines the evolution of the web and the characteristics of various iterations of the web. A discussion on the emergence of participatory media and other participatory processes provides insight as to how the web influences personal and professional interactions. Research on how the web has changed cultural contexts as well as systems such as education, governments and businesses is shared and analyzed to identify gaps and provide direction for future research.


2018 ◽  
pp. 1-4
Author(s):  
Alvaro De Rújula

Beauty and simplicity, a scientist’s view. A first encounter with Einstein’s equations of General Relativity, space-time, and Gravity. Ockham’s Razor. Why the Universe is the way it is: The origin of the laws of Nature.


Author(s):  
Philippe D’Iribarne ◽  
Sylvie Chevrier ◽  
Alain Henry ◽  
Jean-Pierre Segal ◽  
Geneviève Tréguer-Felten

The content of expected procedures, their precision, the more or less strict compliance requested, and the way their implementation is audited, depend on cultural contexts. The first part of the chapter depicts a Cameroonian company in which the expectations for detailed procedures manuals to be applied literally are high. Such a use of procedures can be explained by the need to ward off the underlying fear that personal relationships outweigh the objectivity of the rules. Conversely, the second part shows that, in France, detailed operating procedures in the automotive and nuclear sectors contradict the quest for autonomy, associated with the importance of mastering one’s profession. A comparison with the nuclear sector in the United States shows that there the stakes are again different. This chapter deals with the way procedures are articulated with the expectations and fears, specific to each universe of meaning, which are generally ignored.


Popular Music ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cynthia Mahabir

Calypso is an art form that laughs at pain. That's the way we deal with our blues. We begin to heal ourselves immediately, through our culture and our music.' (David Rudder, Trinidad, New York Times, 31 March 1991)When you see me laughin', I'm laughin' to keep from cryin', but the laughter of these songs, implicit or overt, as often as not absorbs the tears.' (Langston Hughes 1966, p. 97)


2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (5) ◽  
pp. 672-699
Author(s):  
Jonathan Koestlé-Cate

Rosalind Krauss’s landmark essay of 1979 on the grid form in art characterized the grid in equivocal terms as centrifugal and centripetal, as structure and framework, and most significantly for this discussion, as a vehicle for the conjunction of art and spirit. The grid provided artists with a means to surreptitiously reintroduce the spiritual into an art form that appeared, on the surface, to be wholly material. Taking her essay as its basis, this article looks at the work of two contemporary artists known for their adoption of the grid as a guiding motif. In recent years James Hugonin and Gerhard Richter have each produced a stained-glass window for the church using a grid system, here discussed in the terms set out in Krauss’s foundational text. Writing on the grid, it is said, has produced “reams and reams of artspeak” yet little in the way of sustained reflection on this visual tendency in art for the church. This article seeks to redress this oversight with reference to two particularly striking examples.


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 220
Author(s):  
Jingran Qi

<p align="justify">With the development of the times, costume show has become a common art form. As the core of the fashion show, the fashion model not only shows the characteristics of the clothing itself, but also represents the fashion trend. There are also many categories of clothing models, depending on the style of clothing. As an art show, clothing models need to present the intrinsic qualities and perfect external image. Beautiful appearance is not enough just for models. If models don't have the right body language to show the unique temperament vividly, the clothing models will not have new attainments in clothing for the performing arts. In view of this situation, this paper fully discusses the necessity of the body language of the fashion model in the fashion show and the way of personalized emotion expression.</p>


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