story of a new
capable of, I immediately engaged
a fine
Italian didn’t feel like the language
trip
reading, hat
I danced
out flew A miraculous sight
A long time passed
I remembered
slow
waning
Although at first I struggled with this excercise, in the end I found it to be quite rewarding to think of language in this different way and be so selective with the confinement of words given to you. The seemingly random words can be made to create something strangely profound. I like the sense of time passing, life experience, and varied emotion that can be infered. I took these ideas of the relationship between voice/language and time/experience into the next excercise:
Meditation on “story of your life” by Ted Chiang
Inspiration: ‘my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitecimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present’
Light a stick of incense
Film, speed-up, reverse to make a loop
Silence
“This is a performance”
“premeditated”
“fate”
“This is not an improvisation”
“A script”
“Free will”
“Life”
record loop and phase these phrases (even granulise them)
Performance lasts for as many loops feels right
Continuing the idea of loops from the graphic score, thinking of themes of time and experience (prompted by the earlier excercise), I wrote this text score in class using the novella ‘story of your life’ as inspiration. The short story which was famously turned into the film Arrival is basically about someone changing their perception of time and therefore how they experience life through learning an alien language. Funnily I read it the other night when I couldn’t sleep which messed with my sense of the days and the week. The quoted metaphor stuck out to me as it reminded me of zen and meditation.