Miguel La Corte
B. Caracas, Venezuela. 1999.
Music designer and programmer focused in researching and developing new instruments and experiences that address our modern digital condition.
His work has been presented within CTM Festival 2023 in Berlin, Goethe Institute Venezuela and within HKW Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris and CCCB in Barcelona through the Cultures d’avenir program.
CC0: instrumenting a multiplied sensibility
In 1922 Laszlo Moholy Nagy presented an early and farsighted remark on the basis of music media.1 Through a gramophone-specific work, the artist proposed a “scratch-hand-writing” technique that converted the gramophone into a synthesizer of tone relations. By converting a system designed for the bare reproduction of media, into a system of active production and participation, Moholy-Nagy stated the importance of disseminating the creative process as an essential element in cultural development.
In 1943 Margaret Mead, the american anthropologist expressed her concerns of the rational dependency of modern cultural environments such as the exhibition space, and implored for new cultural experiences capable of providing sensory connections.2 Parallel to Moholy-Nagy, she expressed and evidenced a turning point in culture through the advent and extension of industrialized machinery.
As a response to their time, they both exclaimed for the importance of distributing new relations and connections which naturally involve the body and its senses into the cultural experience, beyond purely that of the mind only and its rational structure.
Through enormous efforts, the proposal of distributing creative processes and multiplied sensorial experiences has been iterated to different degrees throughout the last century. Besides Moholy-Nagy and Mead, John Cage3, Nam June Paik4, among others, also proposed constructive attempts to create new systems of participation in culture.
As every age of art is defined by the limits of its conditions of experience, so is this time defined by the best attempts to test and redefine these limits.
Today, the production of media is universal5. In addition to the massification of personal computing, the development of new infrastructures for music interaction on the web, presents a unique opportunity for public access to the core sensorial experiences and creative processes which define our cultural essence.
Enabling access to interactive experiences, is granting the public power and control over the creative process, therefore implementing a new sense and relation from and towards our environments; Following the law of requisite variety, our potential for creation and imagination is directly proportional to the way we envision and treat our environments.
Today the development of collective instrumentation and distributed creative processes proposes a bright potential and different future for music and culture. A future shared through creative processes rather than ubiquitous reproductions, is a future of open creation and shared action.
It is in this context where CC0 is born.
CC0 is an instrument6 designed to enable a state of multiplied sensibility7 . Through the distribution of multiple creative processes we can collectively experience an “extension and refinement of the capacities of perception…where the modern individual can respond to the sensory, cognitive and political challenges set with ever greater intensity by technological development.”
It is only here, by utilizing the potential of the mere machines that have consistently controlled our environments to their catastrophic consequences, where we will collectively reverse these issues. Through experiences of collective creation, we will amplify our sensibility to our environments, and unwind our conceptions of creation as an activity that enforces itself over these, thus finally understanding our living surroundings as an integral part of us, and not as another.
References
1. Moholy-Nagy, L. (1922) “Produktion—Reproduktion,”
De Stijl 5, No. 7, 98--100 (1922)
De Stijl 5, No. 7, 98--100 (1922)
“The objective of the artistic use of the media, in other words, should be to produce an extension and a refinement of the capacities of perception and the consciousness of the modern individual, in order to put him in a position where he can respond to the sensory, cognitive and political challenges set with ever greater intensity by technological development.“
2. Margaret Mead (1943) Art and Reality From the Standpoint of Cultural Anthropology
College Art Journal, 2:4, 119-121
College Art Journal, 2:4, 119-121
“For art to be reality the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience. our present practices, by which people sit on stiff chairs and listen in constrained silence to a piece of music, or wander in desultory unpatterned groups in an art gallery looking at framed pictures in desperate disregard of any relevance which might exist among them, is the very opposite process. One sense may be heightened, one emotion sharpened, but except in rare cases, there is no increase in the whole’s individual’s relationship to the whole of life.”
5. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media.
MIT Press, 2002. Page 31
MIT Press, 2002. Page 31
“The computer, which since the early 60s was used as a production tool, has become a universal media machine: a tool used not only for production, but also for storage, distribution and playback.”...…”In a historical loop, a computer returned to its origins. No longer just an Analytical Engine, suitable only to crunch numbers, the computer became Jacquard's loom — a media synthesizer and manipulator”
6. Walter Smetak Simbologia dos instrumentos
p.41.
p.41.
“It is not at all easy to create new instruments. Firstly, let us analyze or try to give meaning to the word "instrument". If we divide the word in half, two Latin roots appear: instruere-from instruct, and mentis-the mind. Yes, to instruct minds. Thus, we quickly arrive at the single meaning of music and the synthesis of all the arts: to instruct minds; and consequently, to provide a form to voice and speech. To accomplish this task, we needed a new mindset, or a new mental state, a new intelligence, free from all the prejudices forming what we have been, we are, and we will be. However, this does not mean that what we are is devoid of significance.”
Notes
3. John Cage placed silence at the most vociferous spaces & centers for our communication. Beyond challenging the conditions in which music had been (infra)structured into, he exclaimed for a new and more sustainable media ecology where sharing is central to the creative process.
4. See Participation TV by Nam June Paik.
7. After all, Luigi Russolo was right within his “Art of Noises” manifesto; by leveraging machinery we will achieve a multiplied sensibility. Not by expanding our senseibilization to the aesthetical qualities of the ubiquitous noises present in metropolitan society, but - as expressed by Moholy Nagy - by the expanded possibility to engage the public in the act of remote and interconnected creation.