Observing Design

Here is an interesting article forwarded by Tanu ,by designer and teacher, Ken Botnick, who was incidently a Fulbright Fellow at NID, National Institute of Design,Ahmedabad in the year 2005-06,on the Subtle Technology of Indian Artisanship.
He echos what I have continuously felt while travelling,working on projects, meeting up with varied artisans and having discussions with them about their work in Rajasthan.
He has very valid things to say.Hear him out here .

Breaking away from the restraints of the metaphor

I have been throwing this word around for the past week without doing any justice to the clarity of its meaning, so much so that i have been thought to be speaking greek (which by the by I started learning from a friend yesterday)
When Milann and I were studying film at the National Institute of Design,we decided one day to wake up at 5am and go out for a field recording.So we smuggled a Tascam and mike out of the institute and reached the railway station, convinced that it was the only place that could provide equity to our first field recording.
And then the discoveries were spell binding.
Often times, in my experience, I have found that the sudden appearance of a visual image or sound, which has its emergence out of context, leaves me baffled to the extent that I have to pick up that camera and shoot or catch that sound somehow. Maybe hold onto that particular body language of a person by means of a still photograph.

So as such there is a nature-culture binary code in place, through which one can find certain unintentional structures, that can be paradoxically fabricated to some extent. Point being to bring about a blurring of the edges of your own aesthetics. Sharawadgi can be understood as a contrast from the very banality it is based on. It belongs to the sounds of everyday life. It will come only by a conscious deconstruction of contexts. By breaking away from the true meaning. It is the actualization of an impossible potentiality.

So the new imagination or the transported imagination once you find it, becomes a way by which one accesses the unlimited. To simplify, it is to challenge the imagination or the transported imagination, every time you get an interesting visual or sound idea, and you play around with the possibilities, so that you realize the potential it could accomplish within that medium or even without.

For instance, once the shot is taken, it would be interesting to analyze what triggered the thought process in the first place.Was it conceived before or after the shot, if so were there other elements that came into focus while one was taking the shot.It could also be that everything fell into place once the shot was taken.That would be one way of looking at it.
The other would be to question the medium itself.So I am sitting at a restaurant, or better still I am on a shoot, watching people work. This is the one time, people are off their guard, working seamlessly towards a common goal., And I pick out this one guy whose body language is of particular interest to me. Our resident photographer is busy, involved in her own thought process, taking photographs of the shoot and the crew and whatever else that strikes her mind.
I am excited to know how those photo-narratives will turn out.At the same time, I wonder if it was really that essential to capture that body language through the means of the photograph.Perhaps I could apply another medium here.My first thought was a charcoal drawing.Or maybe I could sketch him on the back pages of my notebook.Or better still, put him in a film. Now how would I evoke his body language in a film?

Acoustic Sharawadgi

So,a certain essayist by the name of Sir William Temple came up with the term sharawadgi in an essay he wrote in 1685 called 'Upon the Gardens of Epicurus'dealing with the Japanese culture of gardening.And he wrote,

'But their greatest reach of imagination is employed in contriving figures, where the beauty shall be great, and strike the eye, but without any order or disposition of parts that shall be commonly or easily observed: and, though we have hardly any notion of this sort of beauty, yet they have a particular word to express it, and, where they find it hit their eye at first sight, they say the sharawadgi is fine or is admirable, or any such expression of esteem.'

And then by the time we reach the 18th century,we have Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue introducing it in their book'Sonic Experience'And they put it like this,
'the sonic wandering of the flaneur listening to the multiple sounds of the city bears the potentiality of encountering such experiences of the sublime, of a formless shape, apparantly disordered, with no intention, that hides its artistic elaboration from eye and ear.'

Time moves slowly today.The onset of evening.4pm.Traversing through my silent soundscape.
Listening to the last set,Brody in The Pianist.Passing thought.It would be fun casting Mr.Brody.I'd go mad with detail and movement,silence and speech,breathing,stillness.Someday!

For now,reaching back into the silence of sound.Taking off from a thesis I wrote a year back,I had a mad urge to dig it back into form.It was already looming over my head,a dark cloud in the wee hours of the morning, I slept fitfully.

The past weeks have gone by listening to a load of music.Too much information meted out.All I could do was to ween out singular sounds.The only way I could make sense of my listening.Pull out,listen,put back,take the whole.No structures.Dwindling shapes.

And so I found Andreas Bick who was pouring out my thoughts in his space.I sat wallowing on the side.Then I dove in.
Bick,composer and sound artist based in Berlin, writes about sound related things in general.He puts it out there interestingly,says, silent listening is about the fringes of music, the periphery where music turns into sheer sound- concrete, wild, sometimes stunning.Am in that silent space,the periphery.
Am coming back with more..