NeXmap Review, etc.

My hands are all messed up from sailing. I need to get some sailing gloves, and I hear they do exist. My hands feel like sand paper. But the weather was beautiful, and my fellow sailors sweet. We took out a Precision, which doesn’t steer with much. I think I’ll try to stick with the Lidos for a bit longer.

I had a lot of competing invitations last night, but ultimately I decided to go to Kristin’s video art show. It seemed important to support her in this project, and also I thought I would enjoy it (of course). It was called “NeXmap: New Experimental Music, Art, Performance” in the “recombinant media labs”, this cool space south of Market. They showed 6 pieces.

In the first one, a violinist played notes (music) and computer responded with harmonizing or dissonant notes. I believe they were the result of the computer processing her sounds. The effect was really interesting. At the same time, a Durer etching was projected on the screens (along the entire wall of the space, 360 degrees), first so blown up that all you saw were a few pixels, then slowly we got to see the image until it became so small that it was a tiny, quivering dot on a black screen.

The second piece was a series of photos and recordings of people in urban settings. It was called “a strange intimacy”, and seemed to be about how, in urban settings, we are always surrounded by people we don’t know, and maybe we like it that way. He talked about the closeness of it, but I also wonder about the alienation of it.

In another piece, a Claronetist played very powerful music called “Dust” which he said was about 9/11. Kristin’s piece was 5th, and she had edited a dance performance into waves so that it looked like the dancers were rolling into and out of the water.

Julie said that the final piece made her feel like she was in hell. (She arrived with a headache.) The room was black, and we lay on the floor. The composer said it was about the Tsnami in Thailand. It sounded like huge rats crawling in the walls and floor and ceiling all around us. As the music built, and became more frantic, I began to feel unsafe. It was a tremendous feeling. But then I remembered that I was in a black room in downtown San Francisco at a music performance. Of course I was safe – these were just sounds. It made me wonder about our basic human reactions to other situations – maybe we’re nearly always safe. How much of modern life is simulated, and how much of it can be controlled and made to be a positive rather than negative experience through thought?

I thought about horror films and how I find them “too scary”. I like that they cause you to clutch the person next to you for “safety”. I like that they instigate human contact. Our world right now has so many fewer risks than when humans were more active members of wildlife. And yet, we find things to be afraid of anyway. We are afraid of our airplane falling from the sky, or of having our hearts broken by the careless, or of slipping in the shower. We’re afraid of having things we value taken from us. We’re afraid of dying too soon.

I always talk about letting go of these fears. “Forget safety,” I say. “Loosen your grip,” I think. But right now I realize that that disregards our most basic human programming, real or not. Feeling fear is part of being human. What that leaves is a question of how we react to our fears. Do we bomb foreign countries? Do we run away from Love? Do we stop bathing? Well, we all know the answers to these questions for ourselves, but I guess the thing I want to keep in mind is what these reactions mean and if they are an appropriate reaction to the real level of risk I face.