Post iteration project – pre structure project:

Part of my intent in setting this class up is to do three things – 1) provide a general overview to chaos theory. 2) Explore how the ideas can be used to discuss specific works of art. 3) Explore how these ideas can be used to generate art. The projects that we have done up to this point – unbalancing a system, weaving together five different elements into a whole, and iteration – have all been designed to provide a general introduction to the ideas. The balance piece works against the Newtonian sense of order by adding something to a system that sets it off on another pattern. As was pointed out – even projects that have a destructive quality still produced a new kind of order. The project of weaving pieces together was about the interdependence of all elements and how the whole is always more than the sum of its parts – a crucial idea when dealing with dynamical systems. The iteration project was – well about iteration.

It also laid the groundwork to begin discussing how this idea is played out in different mediums. Heinlein’s “all you zombies” uses the idea as a structuring device that allows the author to tell a non-linear story in a linear way. Iteration was, of course, also part of our butterfly effect conversation connected to Run Lola Run. It shows up wonderfully in Steve Reich’s “Come Out.” Listening to the sound created as the two tape loops separate is fantastic. You can hear the results as sounds just piles up on itself.  

This was the way in to the next conversation – so we started by discussing what students could hear in the recording. It struck me that with Reich’s piece he developed an iterative process that was additive – in the sense that the sound got more complex as the piece went along. We talked a bit about Reich’s essay on music as a gradual process – in which you can hear the structure – and then listened to – looked at Reich’s Pendulum Piece. As the mic swings across the amp you can hear it slow down. Great example of a fixed point attractor – which lead to the conversation at the next class.

We then moved on to a few examples of iteration that stripped away rather than added on. Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” is such a great use of this idea – recording and re-recording reflected sound until nothing is left but pulses of sound. William Basinski’s Disintegration Loops is also a great example of this. Haunting and beautiful – Basinski’s brilliance – like Reich’s – was to trust the process and let it go and simply listen to the results. The hope is that these examples would begin to establish a direction for what to do with these ideas.