Bob King thinks of himself as a composer. He likes this term "because it gets me
out of all the boxes of thinking I'm a teacher, a scholar, an artist, a parent,
etc." For Bob, "composing cuts across all of these categories and unifies them meaningfully. Having an identity that is a verb rather than a noun also makes sense
to me." He works as an instructor in the Division of Liberal
Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. His source fields
include philosophy (B.A), painting and drawing (M.F.A.), and cultural studies/education
(Ph. D.), and for Bob all of these converge in the field of media studies.
How would you describe what you do?
I do a lot of things, so I'll try to describe that. In order to
simplify, it might be helpful to know that I regard the aesthetic as one of four
basic ways-of-knowing or WOKs or probes that humans have devised to phrase
questions and get responses from reality. In my scheme of things the other
three WOKs are the scientific, the spiritual, and the intellectual. I see each
one as uniquely capable of highlighting or revealing particular aspects of
reality, including states of consciousness and those sorts of aspects of
reality, that the other three cannot get to.
My surmise is that if humans could make do with less than four WOKs
and still know reality thoroughly, we would probably have reduced the number by
now. Despite attempts by one group or another to rid the world of one WOK
or another, these efforts always seem to fail over the long haul of history.
All four seem to persist. So what do I do? I honor, explore, question, combine,
recombine, and remix them. In
this, I see myself as as composer, and I see acts of composition as closely
intertwined with acts of representation (in a psychological sense, as Lacan
describes it) and with the constant activity of perception (in a purely physical/critter
sense).
Sometimes my WOK remix process involves composing artworks (drawings,
furniture, photoshop pieces, lamps, audio collages, paintings, video montages,
meringue sculptures, etc.). Sometimes my WOK remix process involves composing
courses, assignments, writings, agendas, etc. Sometimes it involves composing
neural/somatic states (I like the idea of neural composing). Sometimes it
involves composing studies and polls and analyzing the data gathered. So I
guess that makes me a remix composer. What do I do? I compose.
Is this different than what other people think you do?
I would imagine so. My surmise is that a lot of people don't know what
to make of me or what I do, and are therefore either mystified (I've
repeatedly been described as abstract) or irritated (in which case they might describe
me as a computer teacher for example, in order to ascribe to me a concrete
identity, or possibly to irritate me in return) or blandly neutral (some describe
me as philosophical). Of course I also have friends who seem to understand
and like me, and appreciate the things I do and the way I do them.
How do you know if you’re on the right track with a project?
The initial indicator for me is a feeling of being inspired, and after
that a feeling of being in a state that Jackson Pollock described as "in
contact," or fully alive, or in a relational state of consciousness (a la Betty
Edwards), or in a "flow" state (as Csikszentmihalyi describes it), or as
a participant in the coming-into-being of en emergent phenomenon (like a midwife, as
Socrates --according to Plato-- described it).
How do you go about making choices?
I think I make compositional choices mostly based on the relationships
of one thing to another in whatever it is I'm working on. If I am composing a
course, I make choices about assignments in relation to an idea or direction
that is inspiring to me, or in relation to the learning goals I have in mind.
Or it might go the other way 'round. I might make choices about learning
goals in relation to an assignment idea that I find inspiring at the time, and
so forth.
The joy for me in this type of composing is the sense of
interconnectedness that it brings, and the adding of connections that I hadn't seen before.
The same sort of relational decision process applies to visual and multi- media compositions. I tend to make decisions based on the interplay of the
various elements (ideational as well as formal) of the pieces as the elements
come on board. This is sort of like adding a member to one's family, and
noting that this changes all of the relationships.
For example I may feel that a visual composition at some point needs a
bold horizontal element in the bottom third of the frame, running coast to
coast, side to side, and this is based on perceiving something lacking in the
relationships already on board. Maybe this is like a band that senses it needs
a horn player, or an accordion player, or something like that, for other
elements to play off of. I find that seemingly formal decisions (things like
deciding to add a horizontal element) sometimes end up registering across and
meeting a need in the ideational aspect as well. That part is interesting to
me.
How do you know when you’re done?
In my case this depends on the type of composition. When I am
composing paintings or other sorts of visual work, and my inner composition is
tilted towards the aesthetic/creative WOK, I sometimes know a project is done
when it feels to me like I participated in making it, but didn't make it in an
egoistic, self-determined sense. It's like I kind of stand back from it and feel
a nice sense of having been party to something I know not what, and yet there
it is, and it's done.
When I was involved in conversational email writing (which was the
creative endeavor that got me interested in new-media composition) with a
writing partner, there were moments like this as well, times when a
conversation would just seem to, surprisingly and out of nowhere, finish, without any
attempt to make that happen. My
guess is that people used to talk about muses in this type of context, but I don't know much about that. In Jenlink and Carr's
typology of conversation (a useful tool when applied in other contexts as well,
including composition), any of these types of markers or occurrences would
qualify the activity as 'transcendent,' as compared 'transforming' or
'transactional.'
In composing courses, assignments, and those sorts of projects, my
inner composition is tilted towards the intellectual WOK, and I tend to know
projects are done when the relationships between the various parts seem to be
clicking with connections and so on, in tandem with the addition of new
connections. In Jenlink and Carr's typology, this likely belongs in the 'transforming'
category. The specific feeling of done-ness in this regard is similar yet also qualitatively
different from that of completing an aesthetically-oriented composition (and I
still think Betty Edwards description of R-brain and L-brain functionality in
her book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain describes the qualitative
difference best).
What’s your workspace like?
My workspace is more like a network of places, including online as
well as face-to-face places. It's sort of a distributed workspace I guess. All
of the spaces (I have a home workspace, two work workspaces, and several
online workspaces) are flexible. The f2f spaces all feature components that I
have composed and constructed myself --custom work surfaces, desks,
shelves, benches, etc. All of the items I make convey a sense of construction.
For example my work surface/tables have modified sawhorses as supports. All of
the workspaces have tools laying around, within easy reach.
I approach the making of many things in a modular, re-use kind of way.
For example in making furniture I often limit my materials to
two-by-fours, pine boards, and deck screws. That way anything I make I can easily be
disassembled and made into something else. To some extent I approach my workspace
(picturing its network-form as one thing) in much the same way. It is capable
of shifting in emphasis, which I guess connects to the shifts in emphasis that
occur in my inner WOKs / neural workspace as well. Did I say I use metaphors
from complexity theory quite a bit? In this case one of my favorite concepts is
emerging in this narrative, namely the notion of self-similarity or sameness
across differences in scale. Did I say that I think of metaphors as tools? So
ideas can be among the things that might be laying around in one or another of
my workspaces.
What are your essential tools
Woodworking tools are essential to me, as are painting and drawing
tools and software tools for multimedia work, and, as noted, ideas and
metaphors. I anticipate the addition of programming tools --Processing and MAX-- to
this menu. I am at a place now where some of the composing projects I want
to get involved with on the new-media side of things are going to require
that I develop some programming chops.
What’s the most surprising tool you use?
I sometimes use sharpened sticks as drawing tools to make ink
drawings. One of my sons made me a beautiful set of these for me one time, when we were
on a weekend camping trip.
What was your biggest mistake or the one you learned the most
from?
Well, the biggest mistakes I make seem to be ones that get big from
repetition and accretion. These include not thinking big enough (this is my main
mistake in aesthetically tilted WOKdom) and not infusing things enough with
conversation (this is my main mistake in intellectually tilted WOKdom).
Examples of the first type of mistake, and lessons learned, look like
this. I was painting one time, stuck at some point or other in the process,
and happened to notice the window-reflected image of the painting I was working on,
and saw how helpful it was to see it differently in a major way (as in backwards). This led to turning canvases 90 or 180 degrees every once in a while as
part of my working method. Rather than agonizing over small changes, it worked better
to find ways to think big, so to speak.
Another example. I was creating an art installation to simulate an
industrial rooftop (the installation was called Uncommon Ground and the rooftop
idea was designed to create a resonant context in which to situate the group of
paintings I had made for the show). I was working on the rooftop part of the
installation with the curator of the gallery space, who happened to be a sculptor.
We were talking about how to create the rooftop effect and all of my ideas
were really small -- I mean I was thinking of adding a little pipe here or there
coming up out of a roofing-paper covered floor. He suggested thinking bigger,
and to show me what he meant we got into his truck and drove to a downtown area
where there was an unoccupied building. It had some substantial HVAC ducting on
its roof, on the scale of 4' by 5' pieces. We ended up 'borrowing' one, let's
put it that way, and I ended up building another one out of masonite, painting it
to look like sheet metal. These pieces really anchored the context part of the
show. Same mistake, same lesson learned. Think bigger.
An example of the other category of big mistake I make --again made
big by accretion and repetition-- is that in composing courses and other intellectual-oriented WOK projects I often fail to include
conversation among participants as a main element in the composition. Given that I think
I know the importance of conversation to learning --I mean I see the main human
WOKs as forms of conversation after all-- this is probably a mix of stupidity
and cowardice on my part. One or the other by itself could not account for
the number of times I've missed the ball on this one. The lesson is to
think social and/or think affective, and to make this part of intellect-oriented compositions.
Can we share an example of your work?
Here's a link to a recent video composition that kind of bridges the
two areas of composing that I for the most part separated in the above
responses. It's a video I made as a self-portrait for teaching (intellectual WOK)
purposes, and is also a more or less purely creative exploration of genre-creation
(aesthetic WOK) featuring a genre I refer to as a channel-surf.
No comments:
Post a Comment