"There is something incredibly liberating about surrendering yourself to the unplanned."
Matthew Herbert , Musician
Video Interview, The Creators Project
a ViceMagazine & Intel Collaboration
More and more, it feels like art/design will be the next driver in what feels like a post-knowledge paradigm. As a form of soft creation, art/design constructs meaning by the interpretation of facts: the relationship between knowledge domains, its instrumentalization and its intentions.
*note to self: this is a paragraph that needs enormous elaboration
Matthew Herbert is an audio artist that touches on such themes. It feels like he operates with an attitude of the here/new, collapsing distinctions between old and new, futurology and nostalgia.
One of the records Matthew Herbert is soon releasing uses the sounds of a pig getting killed. "There will be one stage where we butcher the pig, and we'll bury mikes into the carcass, you know? Just to get a different perspective on the sound, you know?" he says with a tone of genuine curiosity and an overture of glee in his voice.
That is one instantiation of why Matthew Herbert is interesting. He posseses an emergent manifesto, one that is guided by a reactive ideology that is generative. Called "the Personal Contract for the Composition of Music [Incorporating the Manifesto of Mistakes] (2005)", it is a list of 11 points of self-imposed limitations that choreograph accidental moments for him to seize.
The equipment is designed for you to replicate a moment in the past. Electrohouse kit. HipHip kit. IDM kit grunge, these are categories that are packaged as products. But artistic work, really, is a process, not a product."
[excerpts from interview]
When what we know we know grows substantially, and what we know we don't know is shrinking (and what we don't know we don't know doesn't matter), how we reveal what we don't know we know might be, until the next paradigm shift, the most fruitful territory to be in.(1)
(1) ref: Slavoj Zizek, GoogleTalks