Time, sound, scale, senses, change
Ryan Knighton is going blind with retinitisa an so travels to St. Burchardi church in Halberstadt, Germany to hear a changing note in John Cage’s composition - As Slow as Possible, song duration 639 years.
"Travel, when I started going blind, became a paradox, because in the four square blocks of the neighbourhood where I normally stick, I have an incredibly rich memory place that I’m inside all the time and I know everything in really excruciating detail," Knighton, now 35, said during an interview at a neighbourhood café.
"But if I leave those four square blocks and I go to Berlin, even though I’m going out into the world, it feels incredibly small. It feels like I’ve gone into an emaciated pencil sketch, because I just have a generic idea of buildings around me and no sense of anything beyond that. I don’t know where to find anything. I don’t know if I’m walking by a mattress store or an ATM machine. "So I was interested in that paradox: that the world has somehow become smaller by going out into it to make it bigger."
"How I would get [to Halberstadt] on my own would imitate the way this organ is being handed down generation to generation, which is its actual performance - not the song itself but performing the co-operation of generations. And that’s very much what it’s like going through the world as a blind guy, because you’re always going [like] Tarzan, elbow to elbow, and indulging the trust of other people to get you where you’re trying to get."
John Cage used the I Ching to make compositional decisions.
via - Chasing the music of one moment
Cool project! I like the comments (http://www.john-cage.halberstadt.de/new/index.php?seite=dasprojekt&l=e) about the media event created by the most recent change of tone in 2006.
BTW, Ryan Knighton’s book “Cockeyed” contains an interesting discussion of his perceptions of the world as his eye sight fails and he learns to cope with blindness.
Comment by Glenn — April 21, 2008 @ 10:46 am