Week 9: Listening I – Perspective, Production & Genre

Non-Acousmatic (Causal and Semantic) Listening.

 Perspective and Production

Visual framing, reality and excess.

Narrator / ‘troubadour’ model of framing.

 Death Grips: Up My Sleeves (2015)
Death Grips: Billy, Not Really (2015)

76 changes in 9 minutes / change of state every 7.2 seconds)

Cornelius:  Point of View Point (2002)

 Cross Puposes: De-Personalisation and Hyper-Personalisation

Ned Collette and Wirewalker: Il Futuro Fantastico (2012)

 Cocteau Twins: Ooze Out and Away, Onehow (1986)

Perspective as motivic idea / character AND complex (inverse) relationships between materials and production

True Strength: Reedy 1 (2015)
True Strength: Reedy 2 (2015)
True Strength: Reedy 3 (2015)

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GENRE:

Reading Presentation: Sara (Amy Devitt: Writing Genres [extract]) 

Genre has been redefined, then, from a classification created by critics to a classification that people make as they use symbols to get along in the world.

“Miller concentrates on what genre reveals about purpose, object, and motive, and she concludes that "what we learn when we learn a genre is not just a pattern of forms or even a method of achieving our own ends. We learn, more importantly, what ends we may have. Knowing the genre means not only, or even most of all, knowing how to conform to generic conventions but, more importantly, knowing one way of responding appropriately to a given situation.”

“Genre labels, too, classify unique items, but they classify symbolic actions rather than just types of texts.”

"Thus context is an ongoing accomplishment," in Russell's pithy phrase, "not a container for actions or texts"

“In fact, the genres themselves define and create the situations as much as the situations create the genres, for people construct situations through their use of genres.”

What is (not) good genre art?

John Zorn: Cat o’nine tails (1993)

Colonialism poorly disguised as punk rock.

Girl Talk – Let Me See You (2008)

 Humour and teleology.

 Werner Herzog: Lessons of Darkness (1993)

 Robo Cop (1987)

 “The problem isn’t that the director got his fascist propaganda all over your action movie. The problem is that your action movie springs directly from fascist propaganda.”

Neon Genesis: Evangelion (1995)

 Criticism of implicit mythologies and generic presuppositions through ‘imminent critique’. Generic values / structures function as microcosm for real-word values / structures.