| CorporalMente is a large scale, quadraphonic, electro-acoustic composition/performance piece for text, reader and computer that involves live processing as well as pre-composed electro-acoustic material in the form of sound files. The entire piece is approximately one hour and four minutes in duration.; The function of the computer is twofold: (1) it is a kind of extension of the voice in that it amplifies its various sounds (i.e., its sibilant, breathy sounds, its plosives and nasals etc., as well as its melodic, timbral and rhythmic content) and, (2) it is a mechanism for controlling events in real time during the performance. The instructions for the computer are written in a program called SuperCollider 2 for Mac OS 9.; The basis for the work is the text CorporalMente itself. This is an exegesis written in poetic form that includes various kinds of writing. These range from poetic verse and prose, to essay style writing. Also, the materiality of language is foregrounded by emphasizing the visuality of print itself, and by breaking words down into their phonemic components, thus focusing on language as pure sound. While CorporalMente is Spanish for "corporally", it has nested within it the word "mente ", which is Spanish for mind---thus the title can be read as embodied mind, implying a critique of the body/mind separation, which is here regarded as a false dichotomy.; The composition also explores the paradoxical nature of language. That is, a system we have devised for communication and making sense but which is made up largely of noises or non sense. This paradox seems to me to express the relationship between order and disorder. And this relationship is largely dependent upon how we choose to define order as a state distinct from disorder.; The latter is of special relevance because seeing order in disorder, making sense out of non sense, is what composers (and artists in general) do. As such, art is a kind of knowledge. However, it is a non-discursive kind of knowledge and thus stands in a critical relationship to instrumental knowledge and its attendant systems and ideologies. |
