A DoS of Neuroassembolism
Imagine a brain. Now imagine the Assembly Hall as that brain. Zones and lobes flickering, enlivened. Envision the stage as a pre-frontal cortex. Each of us through our reactions, opinions, questions, laughter, howls and hisses are just like neurons firing and misfiring. Each experience and each mental note was an aborted firing. Or even the poor inactive neuron, the one boy who stood like a statue, immobile, without cracking a moment’s smile the entire time. Sometimes it takes great stature and determination to not be amused. The Assembly Hall is a brain.
As it has sought to do in the past, one of Democracy of Sound’s missions is to reimagine various places and spaces on campus to invite other ways of seeing and experiencing such locations, especially those which are taken for granted, ignored or complained about. The first performance in the Fisher Theater last school year sought to lay bare the theater’s labyrinthine design and explore how its most noted weakness—the horrendous sound insulation—could be flipped around and used for sounding a range of music. Think about ten simulatneous performances in all of the rooms in the theater, on the formal stage, the informal backstage and other rooms. Inside that horrid shed that we know as the home of our school’s drama program is actually a complex cave; what if we brought the “outside” and invited the audience to venture into its many caverns?
"As it has sought to do in the past, one of Democracy of Sound’s missions is to reimagine various places and spaces on campus to invite other ways of seeing and experiencing such locations, especially those which are taken for granted, ignored or complained about."
In many ways, the Assembly Hall is the locus of thought on campus. Twice a week it serves as a kind of collective brain of campus life, simultaneously inclusive of both the vibrantly, criticaclly charged students and the chronically sleep-deprived. Of all the places on campus, it seems to be the most tied in its nature and identity to the presence and energies of those who inhabit, occupy and, yes, slumber there. So this past Friday’s assembly was as much an intervention into those assembled as it was of a particularly important place on campus. The oft troped description of “this generation” being in point defined by distractedness and confusedness: what could be richer for incisive experimentation and encounter? What might it be like to—rather than talk about distraction, confusion or even musical and cultural diversity on campus—encounter as a collective neural network (with each of us a cognitive and sense-bearing node in this meta-brain gathering) sensations in a most raw, un-tempered, un-filtered, radically multitudinous and playful way? What are the gradients of confusion, of distraction, attentiveness and “noise” across ages we each experience? What are our individual and collective thresholds for experiencing and focusing on multiple things at once? How do we each tune in—or tune out—to internal or external stimuli, whether we are in the middle of enjoying Times Square all day or night, watching a game in a stadium for a few hours or, yes, an assembly for 17 minutes choreographed to a historical count-up from 1781-2015?
It is incredibly interesting to hear, when attached to electrodes and amplified, how our brain activities actually sound—all those zaps, cracklings, rumbling noises—when we think, dream, imagine, desire, opinionate, prognosticate, judge? Zzzp! Ktktkt! Grgrgr! So when at the assembly a sonic climate begins to brew and accumulate into a storm.
Less a representative scan than a transversal cut that reveals how all generations, when experiencing confusion, sensorial saturation do not “fire” alike, or well. Some remain dormant, some are ablaze, some receive doses of chemical pleasure and others pain, joy, consternation, humor, outright disbelief, anger, frustration; but whatever the initial reactions and opinions, how do we each engage and open a process that extends feeling, thought, imagination over time? “That assembly was a complete waste of time!” Love that! Especially when “time” (temps in French) also refers to “weather” and “waste” (in part coming from the Germanic and Old English westan) means “to lay waste, ravage.” But perhaps less a sound-time ravaging (although this too) as much as an intervention to ravage, or at least question, the range of accruing logics, expectations, assumptions, even pleasures, we each currently hold, extoll, disseminate, demand as givens and have already begun to crystallize. Just because one sees musicians performing doesn’t necessarily mean that what the experience is about (as if it needs to be about a definable something), or what is generating an experience, is a purely musical one?
Back in the 1980s, growing up in Los Angeles, I went to a retrospective of the painter Francis Bacon. I was completely, utterly horrified, beyond confused, left noxious by the blood and guts, wracked and contorted bodies, splayed carcasses, screaming popes and strangely abstracted geometries. Eyes wide open; eyes wide shut! My opinion then was to never look at his work again: end of story. Decades later, his work and words give me untold levels of pleasure, energy, inspiration; perhaps more than any other artist. Reflecting back, I wonder if it was not so much the graphic depictions that so freaked me out as it was something unknown to me at the time, what Bacon so deliberately sought out to do in his work: to make the sensation come upon the nervous system as violently possible; in fact, so violently that it would bypass what he thought of as the retarding faculty of storytelling or needing to construct a story to register, understand, interpret the sheer force of colors, torsions, tensions he so viscerally expressed. “Brutality of fact.”
Deleuze and Guattari, in their last work written together, contrasted art to opinion: that opinions are like an umbrella we cast to protect us from chaos raining down, an umbrella replete with a firmament painted on its underside to enjoy as we are sheltered; but an artist is someone who dares to make a cut into this umbrella and its artificial vista, to allow a bit of the real to come streaming through. Chaosmos.