Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mapping_The Invisible Soundtrack

If Mapping_The Invisible had a musical score, it would sound something like Phillip Glass’ Glassworks Something that starts off in a familiar context but turns to the unexpected. Experimental and digestible. On second thought, perhaps Koyaanisqatsi (film score by Glass) is the more appropriate choice. I would argue that it is a cinematographic map. If you now have an abundant source of free-time and don’t know what to do with it, please watch it at your leisure:

Mind altering, no chemicals necessary.

That is, to me at least. I’d like to believe everyone has their own sonic interpretation of the course. What did it sound like to you? Anyone?

Anyone?

Hello?

M_TI

City of Women: what if those streets were named after women?

In complement to Celia’s most recent post, this article explains well how over-representation of men in city street name constitute a privilege for the dominating gender: “I can’t imagine how I might have conceived of myself and my possibili­ties if, in my formative years, I had moved through a city where most things were named after women and many or most of the monuments were of powerful, successful, honored women.”

A short read, very eye opening.

http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/city-of-women

Joanna Newsom’s “Sapokanikan”

Piotr Orlov from NPR asks “What the hell kind of word is ‘Sapokanikan‘?” He later answers, “when parsing the layers of lyrical meaning in Joanna Newsom’s new track wasn’t intriguing enough, there is first the matter of the title’s origin. ‘Sapokanikan‘ was the name of a Native American, Lenape village situated in lower Manhattan pre Dutch arrival, approximately where Greenwich Village now stands — which somewhat explains the accompanying Paul Thomas Anderson-directed video that finds Newsom wandering the streets and alleys of that New York neighborhood historically associated with cultural change.”

Director Paul Thomas Anderson is known for both his full length feature films (Magnolia (1999), There Will Be Blood (2007), and Inherent Vice (2014) – the latter of which features Newsom as a narrator and minor character) and for his music videos for artists including Radiohead, Fiona Apple, and Aimee Mann. The video gives the feeling of Anderson’s trademark long-takes (uninterrupted shots that track character movement without breaks or edits) without actually giving the shots themselves. Instead, a series of tracking shots follow Newsom around lower Manhattan and Central Park, through bodegas and bouts of unsuspecting crowds. The video can be read as a mobile exercise in mapping and layering the city, in which a history of the city is rewritten over and over again in both real-time (the filming of the video) and in subsequent viewings and performances.

There’s a nice moment at the end of the video in which a change of musical tone is matched by a modification in setting and visual tone, as Newsom – presumably by coincidence – encounters an emergency scene. In her words, “Sapokanikan is a ragtimey encomium to the forces of remembrance, forgetting, accretion, concealment, amendment, erasure, distortion, canonization, obsolescence and immortality.” That certainly clears things up.

It’s also worth noting that Newsom often switches away from conventional musical notation in her songwriting process in favour of her own system of written icons and shapes, including half- and full-moons, stars, and other cosmic symbols.

REAL-TIME LIGHTING MAP

https://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=sat;r=0;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;n=0;y=38.47;x=34.4775;z=3;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;

This interesting website (above) follows lightning activity across regions. Looking closer at the map one will notice how the majority of the southern hemisphere is not recorded, which leaves some outstanding questions as to why aren’t there any weather recording apparatus in those regions, and what that tells us about the conditions (socio-economic, political) of those areas.