to continue on with paul pfeiffer- there seems to be a bit of debate about him. i seem to have a different opinion than everyone else, but i suppose its because i was familiar with his work and talked with him quite a bit when he was here. his lecture was not amazing, but i thought it was fine. i also thought he was very sincere and quite thoughtful in giving it and thinking about everything that was going on. while he may not have always had answers for questions, should he know it all? i think he could have answered them easily if he wanted to, but was answering them in the moment of reconsidering the ideas. i get more turned off by artists who have a spiel, know exactly what to say and just keep repeating themselves over and over. he was thinking about the questions, thats for sure. no he wasn't there to sell his work, but why should he? does he need to? is that the point? and in class i was thrown off by the fact that everyone took his not wanting to put his stuff on the internet and not do projects with corporations to be anti-marketing anti-commercial etc. but really, i think he's just not interested.

i just read casey's blog so alot of my comments are responding to hers. . .and also because we've been around each other alot lately and have been talking to each other about things. . .

so i'm going to continue with that in talking about the paul miller aka dj spooky book rhythm science. yes, casey and i were talking about social sculpture in correlation with miller's book and it made me think about bueys and the definition of social sculpture and rick lowe. ( i will argue till the day i day that sound is sculpture. sound is a material, it has shape and takes up space). . shaping life is sculpture, and isn't that what social sculpture is about?

wait so where am i going here? i did the exact same thing casey did, found the same bueys passage- Social Sculpture refers to a conception of art, framed in the 1970s by Beuys, as an interdisciplinary and participatory process in which thought, speech and discussion are core ‘materials’. With this perception, all human beings are seen as ‘artists’ responsible for the shaping of a democratic, sustainable social order. Social Sculpture lifts the aesthetic from its confines within a specific sphere or media, relocating it within a collective, imaginative work-space in which we can see, re-think and reshape our lives in tune with our creative potential.

i think maybe miller's thinking of his work as social sculpture is related to ideas of mixing of classes and races . . . one of the things that is so amazing about sound in the first place is that it travels and it keeps going. . .it reaches so many people in so many ways, its hard to stop. i think he means the social sculpture in his work in the re-contextualizing of these works he is remixing and the environment he is setting them into. there's a large audience for music, lots more than for visual art. you can release music and sounds into the world and people that want to hear them will either listen carefully to hear the literary gertrude stein or jazz innovators matthew shipp and guillermo brown or dub of king tubby or wu tang or thurston moore, or be entranced by his beats or the sound or the feeling itself. people listen to music for a variety or reasons, and his music pulls from different forces to create a blend of the intellectual, interesting yet pleasing sound . he can play all over the world to different audiences and they come together in that way. as simple and cheesy as the idea sounds, a common interest that brings people together of all different races and classes of people is a beautiful thing. so also, people that get into his music for one reason, might go on to investigate another aspect of something else he as sampled or collaborated with. so. . . i think that what miller is talking about in terms of social sculpture.

while his work does not as immediately shape society like rick lowe's project row houses, i think that the way miller could possibly shape society with sound is beyond anything that can be described. i'm not saying i think this is all true, but that i can see the possibility for it.

i didn't even get to everything i wanted to touch on. more later.