dgitalb

dgitalb



Chapter Six - dgitalB, personal culture

Image -13 Buskers in Japan

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On personal culture and cultural annotation

Personal culture understood as the combination of both individual experience and epistemology. dgitalB is an intimate discourse I am interested in sharing by the search of that which is to come. dgitalB is a memory of the translation of music into a public experience. dgitalB is the documentation of a process in learning, it is a record of personal evolution/movement, from a dream to an intimate song made public, to an interview on hip-hop, to an assessment of culture that intervenes with and entangles intricate associations between the local and Diaspora. dgitalB is mediated busking, learning how to escape all that is formulaic about the use of media. New messages emerge in repetition.

Image – 14 Screen-grab on the Turntablist transcription methodology

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[...] TACET [...]

My reflection on the cultural information I researched during this practice is crucial in the understanding/perception/sharing of this experience and concept that aids this transcription or annotation of that cultural information. I have visually mapped this research by incorporating selected quotes into the video component of this work.

I am interested in textual film. It is my contention that image reduction places emphasis on sound as a conveyor of multifaceted interpretation and expression of personal history (the memory of the process of creation both as an intimate and public experience).

The captions in dgitalB recall and beckon textual analysis. Text is a voice and a narrator. It is relevant to point out the unique interplay between image and sound in music videos. Douglas Kahn asserts that, during Modernism, we saw the transition from the age of Narcissus to the age of Echo or the combination of the two: a transition from appreciating the arts mostly by sight to the added sense of aurality (Kahn, 1999: 5). McLuhan, in the Gutenberg Galaxy, coins the concept of the “Global Village” to describe Western perception as one driven by a past oriented in the mechanics of typography and a present (future) based on technology and its multisensory pervasiveness. dgitalB is a visual experiment with text that explores the relationship between listening and viewing.

My use of captions seeks to culturally route and contextualise dgitalB, ideally triggering a multiple informed experience of the sounds and music for each perceiver. But these individual experiences conduct, guide and support these captions/cultural annotations. My audience is also my performer.

The text and sound aims to establish a narrative that poses this question: What is or could be dgitalB? dgitalB is a designed experience. It is an explicit musical document about a situation: my personal observation of a moment in Cuban music and my position and reaction to it.

dgitalB, as a visual experiment, has many references that I think are important to point out. Here is a brief list of them adapted to the context of dgitalB:

-Cultural Metadata: cultural data that provide referential context to dgitalB’s sonic experience.

- Cultural Annotations: a way to connect the audience with added cultural value while in her/his experience of sounds and music. These annotations are to resemble music notation. They are the cultural notations of my sound design.

- Cultural Source Code: comments that supply another tier of content referring directly to the moment of input. The use of text is an elaboration on an idea that first arose when creating PETCBRYS38: the relevance of the cycle input/processing while in creative practice.

- Credits in a music video as played on TV, locate and validate the content of this short film and sonic expression to a certain level of legitimacy. Today, music video credits provide information that was once technical data. These captions are entirely cultural in that they frame the social status of music (sound) to a standard of quality that implies: “this is the best possible design (recording) of the sounds you love. This is the best possible expression of our emotions. “

When thinking of dgitalB, consider synaesthesia and memory; and the influence of video in conveying the experience of popular music. dgitalB is a portrait of a moment (a fleeting memory) through sound and text, hence the speed of textual display. Do we recall the amount of breath taken while reading a page? Observation would push us to relive the experience to check on all missing elements. New messages emerge in repetition.

The idea of annotation relates to the reasons and format of this paper.

I have started this section with the quote Tacet to allude to the one notation/note Cage used in 4’33’’. Cage meant the musician should not play during a movement. Jonathan Katz in his article Queer Silence argues that the reason for Cages silence amongst other things meant also a voluntary retraction to make any commentaries judging his position as a gay man during the McArthur era. So, based on Katz we could assert Cage was definitely providing for a cultural and social commentary that he considered inherently part of any musical composition. The texts that I use are a cultural pathway for the listener. I am obsessed with issues of sound, music and culture. They constantly challenge me. Here is my experience/culture as my music.