XL (LETTERS ON XENAKIS) by NATHANIEL BOBBITT _Postmodern Culture_ v.3 n.3 (May, 1993) pmc@unity.ncsu.edu This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford University Press. Introduction and References Xenakis remains a musical figure whose methods have literary implications. To consider the personality of Xenakis, a musical and architectural thinker, becomes a means to extend literary tasks in favor of physical and sensory aspects of experience, behavior, and prerformance. Xenakis stands as a reference point on how to work with techology and how to wonder about a technological outlook within the writing process. In XL, Xenakis appears as the means to consider the literary task of treating greater quantities of detail and spatial reference within writing. The next step is clearly textual instability and a generative prose form. A. Breton's political/scientific approach, also in Xenakis -Collaboration and collectives -Science, Center of Mathematical and Automated Studies, compare Xenakis interest in musical cognition with Weil's thesis on Descartes' Science and Perception B. What are the exercises which develop an aleatory sense of treating greater quantities of data, all at once, via: -Symmetry -Asymmetry -Computational complex patterns C. "Objects in action," compared with optical illusions complex observations rather than the consideration of fallibility, hallucination: -Consider the juxtaposition with regular hitting hangers; scrapping tangle as frictive noise as a rythmic source -Waterdrops on a metal plate & microtonality D. Irrational quality to be found in "objects in action" -Acceleration in glissandi -Multiphonic versus microtonal drone -Octave glissandi...at a microtonal degree These irrational qualities anticipate a "siren" activity that tempi studies in Carter on the player piano. *** I. B.F. Skinner & Xenakis as models for the commentator's (the friends') consideration of behavior as quantifiable: -Skinner...item...collection -Xenaxis...group...manipulation -Use of memory as heuristic module within the sensorial practice: F(x, y)...sensorial F (x',y')...memorial -Skinner...behavior (habitual) -Xenakis...performance (task realization) Consider Skinner and Xenakis on math testing and the mathematics of experiment testing. M. Adieux, when I get a chance to break away from the hurry up and wait activity I write you, almost a symbol more than anything. A symbol of what I should be in contact with, not that I need reminding but all my mainstays are packed away. The necessity of a new place takes over so. The chance to meet with others is here, as I am a substitute teacher. Each day a new school, another direction, and a bus route to learn. The time schedule is that of the rural doctor. What does the sense of patrimony and grandfatherhood evoke for you: Such stodgy sorts perhaps are not vivid enough for "your punk German, your computer talk, cinema and the blurbs that run together." Yet you were friendlier (than the other Darmstadters) as an ideal separates...and allows one to respond. One day these letters, notes, and discussion may serve a sentimental end, that of being taken on as a companion in a stoic expression. For now, necessity takes over from irony. Both are merciless yet irony's heartlessness and pointed humor is another story. Perish the thought, enter hunger, perish the thought. I think of you as someone that asks for only a good-humored naturalness, as the bitter and remedial feeling after your desires are taken care of elsewhere. Instead there is the commentary the breeze after so many close calls and disinterested conversation between two commentators. The word finally appears commentaire. The ability to work, experiment, exchange over short periods, despite wider lapses of conversation. Good commentator, good night. _XENAKIS LETTERS_ 1.2.0 M. It hardly seems like it, but after two summers the term "volumetric" has taken on a life of its own coincidental, arbitrary, and unavoidable. I am content with this news which I must explain to you...as it means undoing a tangle. By now you know that I am always trying to find ways to make more out of my sentimentality. The act of reading a favorite is even more pleasurable if I can extend some aspect of an author and respond to that attraction in the reading. Better yet, someone shows me something "how to do" and I use it. The call-backs, the sentimentality I live over time through the debris of a better time, the reading matter, the source of conversation, the identifiable regard. You as commentator must have some idea about this as all this work grew out of that name..."Xenakis"...with enough associations and arbitrary ties, pointing out the same name. The ones today regard measure and the study in "pictures which make you think." Diagram, meditatio, Archimedes appears...in particular, the cases of the pendium, the bouyancy of things...offer the elements of a study of volumetrics in Xenakis. Author's Note: These quotes refer back until we consider curvature and foci in the forms of volume, but what I am after is the place of acceleration and temperature in volumetrics, the sonic boom in winter and summer according to crisp heat in the skyline. Archimedes was gained from Weil, as your news on Xenakis's use of the etch-a-sketch all pose one question: how graphism informs acoustics. Ever since someone said, "the concert was no good because of the acoustics," the relationship of sound and space was there, but what little advantage do we take of the notion. Steering clear of metaphor--the pendulum, the remote focal point, gravity, centrifugal force align: acoustics, graphics, math, music, and architecture--without metaphor. The first example will be mine...regarding clusters in the form of the siren, the warning signal, and radiated pitch. 1.3.0 M. Tell me something, when you are out at the club, at what moments does imagination take over from the body slamming. How weightless do they get or is it controlled busting one's head into a wall. Is it just black and blue or does clotting appear. Yesterday I read about India, rioters after an act of self-immolation. Degrees of frenzy, hunger, and new friends fear the insipid. _XENAKIS LETTERS_ The tenets of Logic: -To think faster, to learn (heuristic models) within correction and error. -To handle greater quantities of data -Applications for a math primer for everybody: -Selection -Mathematical Expectation -Weighting test criteria -Qualities of experimental testing as fundamental to quantification rather than 1:1 quantification of behavior. Conclusion: Seek modes and resolve application tenets: -rythmic comparison of irregular (odd numbered) figures at irregular durations. -interval in an interval -compare two-sided lineal time scheme Stroking facial movements to stimulate memory in dementia patients is comparable to a normal person's stroking of face when one is engaged or interested. Yet the dementia patients ramble and stroke themselves but it is their hair which they stroke. What role can stroking have in neurological functions in intelligence and cognition: -memory -learning -concentration -recollection -attention 1.4.0 M One can concentrate by straining the forehead to attempt to focus one's attention or shake one's head. The relation between gesture and intelligent functions is a means to consider therapy and neurological stimulation without drugs. When dementia patients forget, several steps are missing: -image of concentration -direction of image (contextual relation) -inability to hold onto the image *) slipping away of name--object association *) slipping away of verbal--phonatory mode Dementia is a regression into a childlike consciousness: sensorial and pre-speech. Reinforce sensorial rather than verbal lapses. We are living very modestly and that stops me. As always rules the motto "go broke in a beautiful place." The lake here, the amplitude of space, the triangle with Toronto and Canada are reasons for you to come up. The absence of identity makes it even a better place. One is free of influence, one can just bounce off objects in action. The radio reception is fair. The whole thing could improve. 1.5.0 M. Aural blocks of sound, the siren, the warning signal, or the sound block in desphase are most active when taken in their coupling or drone state. Stasis in these blocks is like gridlock in which the immobility of a section of a population flow swells until it stops and only can vibrate without forward motion for a while but the particles slide through, ungluing the gridlock. The gridlock is never fully immobile, neither is the stasis, in an aural block. The sonora block can be considered as a gridlock. The gridlock can be considered a compact space in a maximal growth pattern which virbrates within itself and then passes onto more discrete space and motion...becoming mobile interactive again amazing fluttering reeds, tongues, and ureal sounds. _XENAKIS LETTERS_ XL.2.0 M. This series you will find in one piece but it has grown over a disperse set of circumstances, which in a way fragments, this study upon arhictectural design in Xenakis's Phillips Pavilion. I wish this series were more solid, I have found few mathematical conclusions, I have been left to observe and pick at the bones for procedural observations. It was comforting to hear from you after those months in which I had no address to send you. Now you can call. The fact that German has outweighed programming and computation...on with change. Your mode of ruling out the waste and your admitted oversimplification are all parts of the commentary. What I ask is that we should go into collective research, rather than work on solos and then join, to give solos. "Find yourself a programmable young thing." If said what kind of hell would break out, in the form of a swollen lip. _Outline_ The success of this series would be the elaboration, of automated simulation and manually composed reconstruction problems. First condsider architectural design as it holds for acoustic activity.