User:Eastwood/research writing/ThesisProposal4

Graduate Proposal : Draft 4 (Final?)

What do you want to make?

I want to develop a performance and installation practice that asks whether embracing the precarious, and fragile position of improvisation can allow for greater human agency. My work will attempt to disrupt standard music making methods, and tools through improvisation, networks, and custom software instruments. For my final work I wish to perform a multi instrumental work that embraces the unstable nature of improvisation in software and music. I wish to put stress on my training in jazz improvisation through experimentation with custom built algorithmic instruments, as a exploration into whether improvisation can be a force for resistance against standardisation.

Why do you want to make it?

Improvisation interests me because of its immediacy, and its possibility for the unexpected. It is an act that we are not openly encouraged to explore, and the fields that perpetuate the practice are often closed and specific. In saying this however, improvisation is expressed in our daily activities. Yes like many improvisational practices, the daily events are imbued with affect that imply many of the actions. Mattin sheds light on the fragility of improvisation and suggests its essentially an improvisational music making process. To extend this idea, I believe it is the improvisation beyond an inherent system that allows improvisators to break a standard cycle. I wonder weather outside of music, by embracing the fragility of improvisation and collaboration we can critique our ubiquitous systems in new and exciting ways, and resist the forces of standardisation and blind progress.

Michael Flusser identifies systems as being functionally complex and structurally complex, claiming further that systems that are not functionally complex are stupefying and idiotic and stagnate creative thought... We obsess over systems, creating methodologies to understand, augment, liberate, control and destroy. Before we were as ubiquitously embedded within systems as we are today, systems have been shaping our activities for a very long time. Now I ask, how much agency we have left? Have we been stupefied and are now stagnating?

Music has a long history of improvisation, its root likely formed within it. Yet too, music has a long history of standardsiation, where like language, tools were developed for its archival, and dissemination. Only at very distinct times in our history can we see spikes of an improvised mainstream, which since has dwindled into a relatively fringe practice. Outside of music, one could suggest that improvisational practices exist within the DIY and Open Source software scene (to name two), which were born out of empowerment, and in some ways resistance.

I wish to understand my position within this interaction, how the systems impose themselves on me, and visa versa.

Relation to larger context

As society is built upon a complex network of interrelated systems, I hope to apply this research to many other subjects in the future. By initially using music as a isolated test-bed I am able to develop the tools that I can apply to other parts of my practice, and to wider issues that we face in our society. Music too, is situated within and affected by, more widespread systems that can be analyzed from this specific angle without restricting its reflection on music solely.

How do you plan to make it?

I have developed an algorithmic software instruments in PureData that is controlled using a MIDI and audio analysis. These instruments are running on Raspberry Pis interconnected over a network. I improvise on my saxophone in an attempt to make music with this autonomous computer orchestra, prompting the instruments to regenerate the melodic or rhythmic patterns.

I imagine that this work could take the form of a generative installation, a performance piece, and a book of man versus machine transcriptions of the new language that will have generated from this research.

What is your timetable

• Software Development
• Transcription
• Reading & Experimentation reflection
• Developing instruments
  • Saxophone repair and service
  • Sythesiser building
  • Network instruments
• THESIS