A paper on Cornel West’s “The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual” and Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On that I presented on the 25th of October 2006 at Princeton University during the ACLA Annual Meeting: The Human and its Others.
Tag Archives: music
about ulysses lied
This seminar focuses on Kittler’s latest and perhaps most ambitious project, Musik und Mathematik. This work aims to present a cultural history of the Western world in four volumes, starting in ancient Greece, then passing through Rome, the middle ages and up to the present computerized age. In the Fall of 2009, alternating between locations at Utrecht University and the University of Amsterdam, organizers Sander van Maas en Jan Hein Hoogstad invite scholars from all disciplinary backgrounds to join in the reading.
new adventures in low-fidelity
This essay makes a case for media-epistemic pluralism, by staging an encounter between Friedrich Kittler’s Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and Ralph Ellison’s autobiographical story ‘Living with Music’. It argues that a medium does not function autonomously, but always forms a complex constellation with other media. This constellation takes shapes through the interventions of the conceptual persona of the engineer.
about pluralizing rhythm
The volume Pluralizing Rhythm aims to rid rhythm of its harmless, nearly esoteric, reputation as a cosmic unifier by understanding it in the light of the contemporary medial turn. It consists of contributions that combine the political, aesthetic, musical and theoretical dimension of rhythm, by performing a close analysis of text and objects from contemporary arts, music and politics. In short, Pluralizing Rhythm complicates, disturbs and pluralizes the notion of rhythm.
a rather fortunate accident
Ironically, the results of mistakes often end up to be far more interesting than those of hard work. Marvin Gaye’s 1970 hit “What’s Going On” serves as one of those miraculous examples of serendipity. During the recording sessions a rather fortunate accident occurred. The singer had recorded two alternate takes of the lead-vocals that were one octave apart. When the artist asked the sound engineer on duty, Ken Sands, to play these two tracks for him, the technician unwittingly played them simultaneously in mono. The unintended result was a duet between the singer and himself