- Part of 'A topology of musical encounter' (summary) -
To emphasize the comparison with the cultural quest Bartok undertook in Hungary – cultural separation was strongly related to the physical limitations of villages and provinces that must have weighted heavily in the determination of one’s daily life back then. From village to village people knew songs that only existed within their direct community, not anywhere else in ‘Hungary’. In the present Amsterdam the same type of collective islands exists, but with the difference that it is not geographical borders separating them, but likings, cultural knowledge and economic means, in other words individual characteristics of a personal reality that connect people together. These groups live pretty mixed throughout the city and could practically be neighbours. The collective doesn’t primarily gather in one quarter or neighbourhood, but more in a mental sphere that crosses through the whole city, and far beyond its borders.
In fact, by mediatized means, these ‘collectives’ are more and more formed globally, creating their own pathways in the digital reality. This process of digitalisation of collectives sometimes doesn’t necessarily imply any development in our physical reality. It might as well stay a sheer digital, virtual experience that is therefore not less ‘real’ in our daily lives than a physical experience. My intention is to focus exactly on this missing link between the possibilities of the digital reality to connect and create collectives, and the physical reality we live in. Therefore it is interesting to take the ‘borders’ of a city like Amsterdam as a limitation, and see how those realities in the personal sphere and the collective sphere take a tangible shape in the virtual reality of digital media, and how we can find the means to translate these developments back into our physical reality, which is still the place where the actual musical encounter happens and musical innovation is born.
Of course one can oppose that digital realities are so far advanced nowadays that they provide means for musical creation and encounter solely on the virtual level. This is by all means true, and should not be undervalued. But it also creates a strong counter-effect in the views and needs of people – the more possibilities one has to actually live digitally, the more urgent the question becomes what to do with our physical reality. Clearly the answer does not lie in leaving it behind all together, but in creating more refined pathways from digital to physical reality, combining the best of both worlds in close interaction. The necessity to create stronger and more intelligent connections from a ‘global‘ digital communication to a ‘local‘ physical experience is definitely present. A next step would be to apply the possibilities in the digital reality for the benefit of innovative music practice between the various musical worlds present in Amsterdam.
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