At the beginning of 2007, I was asked to write something for the very interesting Product Magazine, so naturally I said "yes".
I got asked to comment on the question ("in no more than 200 words"):
"Has technology undermined or engendered creativity in music?"
'Hmmm', I thought...
For some reason I came up with the following (longer than 200 words):
-------
Some highly inaccurate musings / provocations on technology in our practice (completely disregarding a definition of the term ‘technology', as is my inalienable creative right)…
Astruc's caméra-stylo is what we all want – romantic ideal of genius at one with tools.
Problem is, however much I admire the guy, Bazin was just wrong, and wrong for one simple reason: never really made the stuff himself . Idea is to lose control, not BE in control.
Quest-for and belief-in similarity of reality and fiction is what makes Godard's Bazin-influenced early work so technologically minded for me. But my reading of this work at odds with dénouement of Godard's (Bazin's) arguments. Like all great art, was mostly an accident. That outrageous editing, the enforced (thank fuck) need for brevity, the on-purpose-inaccurate (like a ‘musing') hard-cut sound world, coalesce a hybrid surr eality that RESPECTS above all viewer/listener. No need to explain to us what is ‘meant'; follow the ‘story'? – what matter if we do or don't; sentences that scan? – (you get the idea). The engagement is in the WAY we experience, not the boredom/burden of facts we may or may not take in (like Hollywood on Prozac). Script, shot, soundtrack – integrated in a way that could be nothing other- (no other creative act-) than the cinema AND IT'S TECHNOLOGY. Like Chion's contract upsidedown. [Paraphrasing]: “I don't push the sounds around” said Mr F in response to Herr S – Dan Lander has this gift in his cinema-for-the-ear – this essential ignorance at the point of creative decision-making, to which if we let the technology dictate we would gain too much control.
A friend of mine once proffered a very convincing argument (I paraphrase here) concerning technology-in-creative-practice and WAR. He suggested that as all technological advances come down to us creative types second-hand via the advancement of the U.S. army's ability to blow people up, to utilise technology for the production of ones creative goals is to support the very capital function that wants to blow up critical thought. “ We must see, learn to see that when the time comes to add up all the defeats and victories, very often we have been fucked and we've been fucked because we, I, didn't want to see, you, she, he, nobody wanted to see that all their dreams are represented … he didn't want to see that all his dreams are represented at any given moment, given and taken back, by zeros which multiply them… ”, as someone once said for Jean-Luc. My friend: probably being provocative, like including this anecdote in this anecdotal musing; but it is an attractive thought…
The technology in my work? - but I hate ‘it'. Merely a means to an end that no more ‘engenders' than ‘undermines'; surely it depends who is in the Director's-Chair? You know, I still carry around with me wherever I go, a small music-manuscript-notebook and a pencil – I guess they're my ‘girl and gun'.
Peter Dowling, April 2007
-------
...jump to Peter Dowling's info-page...
...view original article as html...
...view published article as pdf...
...subscribe to Product Magazine...