Featuring as a keynote lecture at the Rhythm and Event symposium held at the London Graduate School on 29 October 2011, Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey (the two masterminds behind the forthcoming text Evil Media) talk rhythm and strategy in the ecology of the everyday in this recorded lecture archived with the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.
Stepping into the keynote role for Steve Goodman ("we are not the Steve Goodman tribute band"), Fuller and Goffey allow themselves to be guided in their discussion by Goodman's text Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear and his recording work with Hyperdub Records, tracing resonances between his work and theirs in analysing the forces produced in the enfolding of rhythm and event.
Fascinated by the gridded and sequenced "tetrisisation" of the world's normative rhythms, and their correlative potential for creativity, Fuller and Goffey take this thirty minutes to unpack three key techniques of rhythmic control (recursion, sorting and workflow) which exist in quotidian life and "make up the contemporary infrastructure". These strategems operate within and constitute "grey events"; such events are so undifferentiated, vague and "grey" as to be imperceptible, yet are also the points which, entwined with these widely-used stratagems, may generate new creative configurations.
"It's that interstice [of the non-correlation of the formalisms of software and peculiarities of the everyday] and the patterns of events that emerge out of it where the rhythms grey media events occur and which strategies try to operate with that matters for us. Those operations are meant to ferment, to stimulate and propagate, to produce more gaps and cracks for crowd-sourcing entrepreneurs to set up shop in, for a hive mind with diminishingly small fractal gaps of appropriable activity or attention to operate with. Alternatively, they allow us to maintain a state of plausible deniability regarding the interstice and the efficacy of the rhythms that it introduces."
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