creativity/machine

this is not (only) music consumption

I’m feeling a bit serious about music today.

This is the christmas playlist I put together on a whim yesterday morning, when I woke up and realised I had free rein over the construction of christmas day for the first time in years.
xmasplaylist.gif
Which, thank god, got me thinking again about the ways in which available cultural resources are mapped, remixed and reused by ordinary people in the service of creative cultural agency. This eclectic playlist does not demonstrate that I can use technology to endlessly “customize” my everyday life according to my “tastes”, but that I can reach out to an invisible, absent, but very real imagined public with a mixture of values that, in different ways and at different levels, I share. And secondly, that even from a position of isolation, I can participate in affective alliances that predate and proliferate far beyond my own existence. What I get back is much more than “pleasure” – it is a stake in the possible futures called into being by the timbre of sincere human voices, clarion calls to the sublime (yes, I DO like Celine) and celebrations of the warmth of the mundane. And, especially, a good laugh (please, do yourself a favour, and seek out Cartman’s O Holy Night).

jeanburgess

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6 responses to “this is not (only) music consumption”

  3. Completely off the topic but related to our discussion the other day about footnoting in MT, you know what you be cool jean – if there was a system where you could put your asides in like Word-style comment tags. Sort of like if you could annotate posts flickr style. I randomly swept past this plug-in for WordPress (I think) that allowd you to do something simlar to this but I can’t quite remember how it worked. It was something about making you able to leave comments attached to specific parts of a post, which is what I think I’m talking about but I didn’t really read it…anyway, that’s what I think would be cool.

    And why is there no Bing on your list? It’s just not xXxmas without Bing.

  4. that would be cool. and there is no bing because bing is shoppingcentrenuclearfamilytinsel xmas, which is most definitely not the kind of xmas I wanted to think about on that particular day. but i don’t mind a bit of bing every now and then.