“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Japanese Composer on the Fukushima Meltdown


HT David Reid. There's so much beauty and profundity in this talk by composer Otomo Yoshihide that I shall let it speak for itself. Well almost. Here is one poignant evocation of how the aesthetic dimension is the causal dimension:

The purpose of this project isn't just to perform music or organize entertainment. The biggest aim is to think about how we'll continue to observe Fukushima's ongoing situation. Right now, when everyone is hurting, a kind of entertainment that allows people to forget reality is necessary, too, so we're trying to balance that as well. If we try to face this harsh reality head on, we'd die. Because the ultimate way of facing reality would be to go right in front of the power plant itself.
He imagines an instrument that would emit feedback for 20 000 years incapable of being unplugged without an explosion...He also talks about a UStream channel, DOMMUNE, which I hope to watch as soon as I can.

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