David Fire
Sound installation and live performances by David Fire & guests
This is another step in my bigger project – the annihilation of dualisms and return to holism, ism ism or pulling the red long carpet beneath the feet of the analytical minds with all their distinctions. Being here in Germany, where analysis, embedded in a rule based society, seems to be the only weapon against the chaos, the unpredictable, the uncontrollable, that is threatening out there. But why weapon? Why should we use the terminology of war? Why can’t we be part of the chaos, as we surely are whether we like it or not? Why the distinction between in and out, nature and human, home and out-there?
Well, we simply live in a dualistic society partying constantly on the notion of body and soul, me and the others, in and out, home and the street. Sometimes it seems to me that western culture set the goal of splicing the world into two, just for the joy of merging it back later, but as my polish grandmother said when I parted from my girlfriend and came back together with her- ‘a broken vase can be glued but it will always remain broken.’ In fact there is no innocence here. The west spliced the world in order to gain power. Under the golden rule of all blood shedding heroes of Europe- divide to rule. Don’t get me wrong- I don’t think that Asia has the truth, that Buddhist holism is truer than the Cartesian view of the world. I just see different types of human- one that eats a lot of meat, red meat, and wants to control others out of sheer hunger for power, and another that eats less meat and wants to find accord with nature instead of controlling it and destroying it in the process.
If the goal of wisdom is power – the West wins. If it is happiness – big looser. As for truth – if you agree that it is an accord between mind and nature, than you will agree that truth must lie in joy and not in power.
I do my contribution with tiny bites of the cake of dualism I have but my mouth with my teeth to bite with. In Africa I have studied percussion within a tribe that has but one word to describe both movement, or dance, and music. Please refrain from thinking that they are merely primitive with limited vocabulary, as physics supports their unification of the terms. Indeed sound IS movement, and there cannot be any sound without something moving, a speaker membrane, a string vibrating, the stars in their grooves. Moreover there is no movement that is silent.
Move your hand – it has a sound, but it’s too low for you to hear, because it’s too slow. The wave you’ve just produced can be heard perhaps by elephants, who have really big ears to hear the far away rumble of their own kind across the savanna. And so I place a sensor that detects the visitors’ movements, and translates them into percussive behavior of robotic arms spread across the room. How many of us have daydreamed while moving their hands, imagining the orchestra responding, while listening to internal music? I want to make this come true. If you think that this is an easy way to avoid learning how to play, you are both right and wrong – for by doing this, music is reduced to a pure intuition, careless of technique, but responsive to your musicality, your intuitive motion. For still – if you are not musical, even if all you do is move your hand, it cannot sound good. Last word about the use of robotics instead of digital media type prepared sounds: this project goes out into the physical world. Computer music is leaving the digital domain, and is being projected back onto the physical objects, vibrating skins, metal and glass. The complexity of natural sound, of nature itself re-gains its value, its place. The human body itself is back in the picture, after it has been reduced to a finger on a mouse and an eye on the screen. My feeling is that this is the right direction to go when we think of future life with technology.
