Arabesque
In a message dated 9/24/02 1:02:49 AM, gulmer@english.ufl.edu
writes:
Re: Transversal Music from Manhattan to Merrimack
One of the most interesting memorials created is the Sonic Memorial created
through PBS:
http://www.npr.org/programs/lnfsound/stories/020204.sonicmemorial.html
it includes an interview with Phillipe Petit:
When Philippe Petit, the aerialist who illegally transversed the tops
of the World Trade Centers, stepped off the first building and onto
the wire he reported
to the strongest sensation was the vibration/hum of the buildings.
Petit's illicit and dangerous wire made the buildings in to the stringed
instrument.
connecting back to an Internet entry from Derek Pasquill:
In a message dated 4/23/02 3:50:06 AM, derekj_pasquill@HOTMAIL.COM writes:
<< 'When I see three oranges I juggle; when I see two towers I walk.' Phillipe
Petit, aerialist, commenting after his arrest in 1974, for crossing between
the Twin Towers on a tightrope...
regards pasquill >>
What is interesting about Deleuze and Gauttari is that a rhizome structure
might be more likely to create a hum rather than the melody. And so maybe
with the web structure, a thousand melodies make a hum. What I remember
about the
function and sound of the tuning fork is that the sound seems to emanate
from the molecular structure of what it touches. As I reported before the
last time
I was that the trade centers was to see the Glenn Branca directed symphony,
harmonic and cacophonous music made by 100 electric guitars. Glenn Branca
was himself influenced by early sound experiments from John Cage to John
Cale of
the Velvet Underground.
The World Trade Centers were being built (1966 to 1977) right around
the time of the heyday of new sound music. My mother, a Julliard trained
classical
musician
hated John Cage (and she told me so many times for no apparent reason)
and the Velvet Underground was undoubtedly one of my favorite musical
groups.
In the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago there was an excellent
article on the building of the World Trade Centers. It is worth reading.
Minoru Yamasaki,
a peripheral architect, along with the structural engineers, made some
interesting steps forward from previous New York architecture. Instead
of relying on
the
an overbearing pervasive solid grid structure they decided to create
the structure with the steel lattice on the outside of the buildings
and a central
core structure,
thus yielding much more open floor space to satisfy a real-estate pressures.
The buildings were therefore considered "light," the first
supertall buildings designed without any masonry. The idea of surface
lattice as structure
added to Yamasaki's interested in Islamic architecture could be said
to have formed a modernist arabesque. This design could be seen as the
structural
precursor to post-modernist(?!) Gehry's current crumpled architecture,
which is also
reliant on computer CAD surface design. (Help me out here Bill Tilson!)
(Eisenman, Derrida's collaborator, also proposes crumpled buildings as
a replacement
for the WTCs, see NYTimes Magazine.)
The distinctive quality of the World Trade Center facades was their
deep vertical and horizontal veins, small windows, which seemed so
impenetrable.
When I was
asking a friend about why Islamic architecture always uses pattern
I was told the answer is obvious, Islam is an iconoclastic religion,
which
will
not tolerate
the image of God. So the Trade Centers obscured our God, Capitalism,
in their surface grid. (But this is an argument we already know quite
well, and maybe
we're not looking for it here.)
In the post-structural paradigm the interest is in the surface, the
surface as challenging depth, the essential, the problems of abstracting.
The
facades of the World Trade Centers, in their surface intricacy (however
grid based
rather than arabesque) could be seen as a step towards the digital
lattice, a celebration of its endless surfaces and connections. One
of the pathologies
associated with the TV or E-generation is the inability to concentrate
on one line of thought. Our methodology must be associated with the
anti-thesis of
abstraction:
DISTRACTION/DYSTRACTION
Which is not unlike eye wandering along an arabesque. (Or in my case:
dyslexia, the inability to see properly, or to see backward, in mirrored
patterns,
dysliterate.) This distraction is different than the sublime distance
of modernist abstraction.
The field through which we wanderingly transverse is the GROUP SUBJECT,
the body (politic) of the KA CHING, or as I have in mind, the mixture
of the
internet and the city. As Donna Haroway would have it, part body
part machine. This
must be how the chora forms, out of or through (its navigation stupid)
the collective of everything surrounding or connected to a place,
perhaps particularly
if that place is a collective disaster. The combination of dystraction
and recognition mechanically finds Stimmung, which is both insightful