Video-Bop: Cycle 3
Posted: May 2, 2024 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Cycle 3 Leave a comment »The shortcomings and learning lessons from cycle 2 provided strong direction for cycle 3
The audience found that the rules section of cycle 2 were confusing. Although, I intentionally labelled these essentials of spontaneous prose as rules, it was more of a framing mechanism to expose the audience to this style of creativity. Given this feedback, I opted to structure the experience so that they witnessed me performing video-bop prior to trying it themselves. Further, I tried to create a video-bop performance with media content which outlined some of the influences motivating this art.
I first included a clip from a 1959 interview with Carl Jung in which he is asked:
‘As the world becomes more technically efficient, it seems increasingly necessary for people to behave communally and collectively. Now, do you think it possible that the highest development of man may be to submerge his own individuality in a kind of collective consciousness?’.
To which Jung responds:
‘That’s hardly possible, I think there will be a reaction. A reaction will set in against this communal dissociation.. You know man doesn’t stand forever.. His nullification. Once there will be a reaction and I see it setting in.. you know when I think of my patients, they all seek their own existence and to assure their existence against that complete atomization into nothingness or into meaninglessness. Man cannot stand a meaningless life’
Mind, that this is from the year 1959. A quick google search can hint at the importance of that year for Jazz:
Further, I see there to be another overlapping timeline. That of the beat poets:
I want to point a few events:
29 June, 1949 – Allen Ginsberg enters Columbia Psychiatric Institute, where he meets Carl Solomon
April, 1951 – Jack Kerouac writes a draft of On the Road on a scroll of paper
25 October, 1951 – Jack Kerouac invents “spontaneous prose”
August, 1955 – Allen Ginsberg writes much of “Howl Part I” in San Francisco
1 November, 1956 – Howl and Other Poems is published by City Lights
8 August, 1957 – Howl and Other Poems goes on trial
1 October, 1959 – William S. Burroughs begins his cut-up experiments
While Jung’s awareness is not directly tied to American culture or jazz and adjacent artforms, I think he speaks broadly to the post WW2 society. I see Jung as an import and positive actor in advancing the domain of psychoanalysis and started working at a psychiatric hospital in 1900 in Zürich. Nonetheless, critique of the institutions of power and knowledge surrounding mental illness emerged in the 1960s most notably with Michel Foucault’s 1961 Madness and Civilization and in Ken Kesey’s (a friend of the beat poets) 1962 One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. It’s unfortunate that a psychoanalytic method and theory developed by Jung which emphasizes dedication to the patient’s process of individuation, is absent in the treatment of patients in psychiatric hospitals throughout the 1900s. Clearly, Ginsberg’s experiences in a psychiatric institute deeply influenced his writings in Howl. I can’t help to connect Jung’s statement about seeing a reaction setting in to the abstract expressionism in jazz music and the beat movement occurring at this time.
For this reason I included a clip from the movie Kill your Darlings (2013) which captures a fictional yet realistic conversation had by the beat founders Allen Ginsburg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucian Carr upon meeting at Columbia University.
JACK
A “new vision?”
ALLEN
Yeah.
JACK
Sounds phony. Movements are cooked up by people who can’t write about the people who can.
LUCIEN
Lu, I don’t think he gets what we’re trying to do.
JACK
Listen to me, this whole town’s full of finks on the 30th floor, writing pure chintz. Writers, real writers, gotta be in the beds. In the trenches. In all the broken places. What’re your trenches, Al?
ALLEN
Allen.
JACK
Right.
LUCIEN
First thought, best thought.
ALLEN
Fuck you. What does that even
mean?!
JACK
Good. That’s one. What else?
ALLEN
Fuck your one million words.
JACK
Even better.
ALLEN
You don’t know me.
JACK
You’re right. Who is you?
Lucien loves this, raises an eyebrow. Allen pulls out his poem from his pocket.
I think this dialogue captures well the reaction setting in for these writers and how they pushed each other respectively in their craft and position within society. Interesting is Kerouac’s refute of being associated with a movement which is a stance he continued to hold into later life when asked about his role in influencing American countercultural movements of the 60s 1968 Interview with William Buckley. Further, this dialogue shows how Kerouac and Carr incited an artistic development in Ginsberg giving him the courage to break poetic rules and to be uncomfortably vulnerable in his life and work.
For me video-bop shares intellectual curiosities with that of the beats and a performative improvised artistic style with that of Jazz. So I thought performing a video-bop tune of sorts for the audience prior to them trying it would be a better way to convey the idea rather than having them read from Kerouac’s rules of spontaneous prose. See a rendition of this performance here:
With this long-winded explanation in mind, there were many technical developments driving improvements for cycle 3 of video-bop. Most important was the realization that interactivity and aesthetic reception is fostered better from play as opposed to rigid-timebound playback. The first 2 iterations of video-bop utilized audio-to-text timestamping technologies which were great at enabling programmed multimedia events to occur in time with a pre-recorded audio file. However, after attending a poetry night at Columbus’s Kafe Kerouac, the environment where poets read their own material and performed it live inspired me to remove the timebound nature of the media system and force the audience to write their own haikus as opposed to existing ones.
Most of the technical coding effort was spent on the smart-device web-app controller to make it more robust and ensure no user actions could break the system. I included better feedback mechanisms to let the users know that they completed steps correctly to submit media for their video-bop. Further, I made use of a google-images-download to allow users to pull media from google images as opposed to just Youtube which was an audience suggestion from cycle 2.
video-bop-cyc3 (link to web-app)
One challenge that I have yet to tackle, was the movement of media files as downloaded from a python script on my PC into the Isadora media software environment. During the performance, this was a manual step as I ran the script and dragged the files into Isadora and reformatted the haiku text file path. See the video-bop process here: