It is free and so are we

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Was at DIS – “designing interactive systems” – a conference in Boston. More about this later. Sadly, was too annoyed and overwhelmed by the comment spam situation on confectious to do much posting. Yes, it will be fixed soon. Stayed briefly in NYC with a friend who is a theater critic. Stolen from her bookshelf: an essay by John Cage, which now appears oddly apropos to translating and re-representing lived experience as electrons passing through a screen. Cage was a musician; this text was written for — and about — performance before an audience. But he was also a product of his time, and a commentator on the larger cultural shifts around him. I don’t think he’d mind my borrowing these words for myself:

Our poetry now is the realization that we possess nothing. Anything therefore is a delight (since we do not possess it) and thus need not fear its loss. We need not destroy the past; it is gone. At any moment it might reappear and seem to be and be the present. Would it be a repetition? Only if we thought we owned it, but since we don’t, it is free and so are we. Most anybody knows about the future and how un-certain is. What I am calling poetry is often called content. I myself have called it form. It is the continuity of a piece of music. Continuity, today, when it is necessary, is a demonstration of dis-interestedness; that is, it is a proof that our delight lies not in possessing anything. Each moment presents what happens.
...

Mobile means: if that element is tossed, it acts, but disappears.

(John Cage: A Year From Monday, Juilliard lecture, 1953)

What Cage described in 1953 seems perilously close to the incorporation (or dis-incorporation) of lived experience through digital “personal” media. Playlists, blogs, search results, photo sharing: translated into bits, printed on paper, burned into magnetic tape – sensory memories are...nothing, in a way, and cannot be owned (cf: DRM, open source). As the recording of memories in digital form (or the mediating of human life through digital documentation) becomes more prevalent, the accumulation of all these traces of lived experience effectively approaches a continuous stream, what Cage would call presentation of what happens. Cage's point, of course, is that no matter how identical the bits remain over time, you can't cross the same digital stream twice.

What I find so beautiful here, and so helpful, is Cage’s belief in dis-interestedness – or lack of ownership — as a means towards delight. Walter Benjamin believed in artifacts and doubted the survival of uniquely experienced objects in “an age of mechanical reproduction.” Cage, the diva of the unreproduceable, gives us (or me, at least), an escape hatch from Benjamin’s pessimism about objects into the freedom of of performance. It doesn't matter how endlessly reproduceable – how free the bits are. What matters is that we will never experience them with the same eyes.

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