Infinity Interrupted

Out of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi a passage describing the blockages.

It is interesting to note that the these two societal obstacles to flow, anomie and alienation, are functionally equivalent to the two personal pathologies, attentional disorders and self-centredness. At both levels, the individual and the collective, what prevents flow from occurring is either the fragmentation of attentional processes (as in anomie and attentional disorders), or their excessive rigidity (as in alienation and self-centredness). At the individual level anomie corresponds to anxiety, while alienation corresponds to boredom.

And a few pages later we are presented with a potential antidote

Music, which is organized auditory information, helps organize the mind that attends to it, and therefore reduces psychic entropy, or the disorder we experience when random information interferes with goals. Listening to music wards off boredom and anxiety, and when seriously attended to, it can induce flow experiences.

Cue Metal Machine Music and a locked groove.

And so for day 1296
01.07.2010

storyscapes

In her memoir Crazy Brave Joy Harjo remarks about the effects of television. They provide a nice capsule version of the history of media in the era before streaming and binge viewing.

I turned on the television, the story box that changed the story field of the world. The commercial aspect of stories threatens the diversity of the world's stories and manners of telling. The television stands in the altar space of most homes in America. It is the authority and the main source of stories for many in the world.

But her story goes on and suggests a way to "break" the medium (in effect what has been done by plug and play technology that allows for instant interference).

Once when I was a student I had two televisions. In one the picture worked and not the sound. In the other the sound worked and not the picture. Together I had a working set — an Indian television set, I often joked.

Alert to the means at hand. (Recall Towards a Poor Theatre, anyone?) Or by means of attunements.

And so for day 1153
08.02.2010

Designing for Mutability

The imperative is identified.

the need to make design as fluid as possible so that it can pour across the wires into the unpredictable receptacles, rhythms, and ultimately the lives of others.

Alan Liu is here referencing material accessed through the Web. What he here describes in The Laws of Cool can also be valid if in a more limited sense for print and television. The key is the accommodation of rhythm. And this design principle can even be extended to theatre hacking by Olivier Choinière or imagine a stroll through the Oakville Galleries in the Gariloch Gardens with the Janet Cardiff's A Large Slow River (2000). Life presents us with opportunities to resize, delay, pause, in short mashable moments, and as the description of the Cardiff piece says "Our attention is fixed on listening and imagining. Synchronistic events also play with our understanding of reality as events and scenes described on her CD coincidentally come together in the physical world." And as any meditator can tell you — sounds occur in one's head often unbidden.

And so for day 347
26.11.2007