Herbert Marcuse said “The incessant dynamic of technical progress has become permeated with political content, and the Logos of technics has been made into the Logos of continued servitude. The liberating force of technology-the instrumentalization of things-turns into a fetter of liberation; the instrumentalizatlon of man.”
The distance between us. The human stumbles in the inevitable journey of our transformation. Our virtual technology has created a personal space for our liberation, and yet in it we are constantly exposed to otherness and carried in a rush away from the historical self, into a new kind of forgetting.
So it’s both the extreme self held tightly by accelerated rhythyms, reflections and voices of it’s own perceptual bubble. And a disembodied self; a removal from our historical flesh bag of emotions and memories.
I’m going to drink rosemary everyday and walk to remember. In the morning I will dedicate a moment to the unknown kin that will tickle my wings. And in the evening I will leak out these interactions into the form of music.
Listening, observing without judgement, staying with my own trouble, refusing to engage in the accelerated infosphere, yet I am part of that sphere, partly born from it. It’s so yummy and it’s comfortable to hang out in virtual space. Yet it’s so intense that I lose contingency, so my music gets shit.
What is solitude in relation to the current mass social media?
I want to paint this stumbling, this awkardness, of a longing to disengage, alongside a longing to connect. This is about a planet but us being on the planet. And also, a longing to engage, as the artist, a longing to share visions.
How do we practice this disengagement? Is the other further now, as we lie cosy in our perceptual bubbles, or is that the human condition?
How can music propose these questions, of the tensions within (dis)engagement? A new kind of failure, the failure to interact, the need for retreat, not into a glorious shining presence, but into the mediocrity of the thick.