Tag Archives: power

Week 08: Life is a Musical

A few weeks ago while researching which past student K-film I wanted to write about for my film essay, I came across ‘Life is a Musical’  (2012).

Something pretty powerful happened inside this work for me, and that was recognising the power of the pause.

The piece is primarily about sound, and uses looped clips to create somewhat of a ‘soundtrack’ to life. However, where I really struggled was in thinking of the piece as conceptual overall (I think it makes more sense for me to say ‘continuous’ here instead) when there are breaks in the sound patterns. I found the flow constantly disjointed once I was within the rhythm that the fragments were giving me.

But then I stopped to think about what the film was actually doing, and I realised that this could be another really important way that the user can interpret meaning: through the spaces in between sounds.

An outstanding favourite lyric of mine is:

The only thing of worth you can learn from mine is that the spaces between words deserve to shine.

Junctures. Caesuras. Pauses. Rests.

They give the audience time to reflect, consolidate and appreciate. That’s powerful.

(Image via flickr)

Week 03: The power-plays behind definitions

This week, following the concept of definitions and taxonomies discussed in symposium 02,  I had a conversation with my friend about the politics of definitions. These are some of the things we said:

There is always someone, or a group of people, who choose what a definition is.

For everything that gets included in a definition, there is something that is excluded.

Maybe it’s dangerous for us to always categories things to fit perfectly into clear-cut definitions. The fast-paced world we live in is fluid by nature – things are always changing. Definitions can be counter productive and restrict these changes and innovations.

I like taxonomies because they have boundaries and let me know how to think about something.

Adrian mentioned in the lecture that definitions and taxonomies are always problematic. It it not always the case that things can be pigeon-holed in the way that definitions demand. Adrian says that taxonomies are artificial, because the probabilistic world we live in is not a binary world that can be classified into black and white. Even though humans have an inherent need to coral and domesticate things in order to make sense out of them, perhaps definitions are not the most productive way to go about this.

(Image via flickr)