June 27, 2024
Henrik Frisk - henrik.frisk@kmh.se
The (un)necessary self (Frisk, Henrik, 2013)
– giving up of the self –
move the focus from the creator to what is created and to understand the roles of the various agents involved
The complexities of the freedom of art is threatened
in the radicalization of the role of the creator, both a new work concept and a review of the self is necessary, even beyond the notion of giving up of the self
the moral values that are expressed through artistic practices in music, specifically improvisation, may complement traditional views on ethics
The notion of the Care of the Self (Michel Foucault's Volume Three of the History of Sexuality) is used as a method to approach this complex area
a self that is rooted in "practices of freedom" (Foucault, M. and Rabinow, P. and Hurley, R., 1997 p. 283)
"Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection" (Foucault, M. and Rabinow, P. and Hurley, R., 1997 p. 284)
When you take care of the body you do not take care of the self. The self is not clothing, tools, or possessions; It is to be found in the principle that uses these tools, a principle not of the body of the soul.
You have to worry about your soul–that is the principal activity for caring for yourself. The care of the self is the care of the activity and not the care of the soul-as-substance.
The principle that uses the tools of artistic practice is in essence the aesthetics of the creative act: the practice itself.
(though good and respectful can mean a lot of things in art practices)
…but a developed sense of ethics through a deep understanding for relations.
Deconstructs the subject/object.
is leaning on
telos
of an instrument can provide grounds for an analysis of its ethics
The use Foucault's creterias from the Technologies of the Self
to speak of an ethics of objects when not all human enjoy ethical rights
What is the difference between the traditional method for musical interpretation, rooted in Western musical practices (really art history), and the excavation of the technological and cultural significances of a particular electronic musical instrument of the past?
(see Roland Barthes in the famous essay The death of the Author)
To attempt to understand the qualities and the particularity of this instrument a wide range of parameters need to be considered related.
Not only origin.
by learning from early electronic instruments it is possible to better understand the complexities of these practices:
media archaeology
"from a flexible variety of possible control configurations, the synthesizer eventually stabilised into a keyboard instrument" (Pinch, T. and Trocco, F., 1998)
.. exclude the loosers and standardize the winners.
though it may well develop in other directions in the future.
Improvisation is part of the method that allows me to do this.
What is the difference between the traditional method for musical interpretation and the excavation of the technological and cultural significances of a particular electronic musical instrument of the past?
As long as I care about the relation between myself and the instrument, and the instruments relation to its context, I can be free to follow my artistic and ethically informed intentions, and these will develop into a sort of freedomm in and of themselves.
The giving up of the self along with the care of the self are not contradictions - they feed upon each other and allow for an approach and an epistemology of creativity that is more closely aligned with others than the solely the self.
Henrik Frisk