A CPTRG Research Event
Royal Holloway’s Contemporary Political Theory Research Group is pleased to be hosting a talk by Dr Martin E. Rosenberg of the New Centre for Research & Practice.
Please note that it is a free event and open to all, but for the sake of getting a sense of numbers we ask attendees to register with Eventbrite here.
TITLE: "The Aesthetic and Micropolitical Implications of Arakawa and Gins’s Architectural Theories, and the Cognitive Neuroscience of Jazz Improvisation"
DATE: Friday, 10 May 2019
TIME: 5-6:30pm
VENUE: Room 1-02, Senate House, University of London
ABSTRACT: I would like to focus on one part of the model I have developed to describe the relationship between embodied and distributed cognitive processes involved in jazz improvisation. I wish to address how multiple time-scales within the individual function simultaneously during performance, sometimes at cross-purposes, sometimes in synchrony. I came across a version of this model of contending forms of time cognition earlier.
In the architectural theories of Arakawa and Gins, they describe an “architectural body” moving through an “architectural surround.” For Arakawa and Gins, the immediate data of sensory experience, called “Perceptual Landing Sites” (requiring fast cognitive processes), would be juxtaposed with the cognitive schema, arising in memory, called “Imaging Landing Sites” (requiring much slower cognitive processes), by a default cognitive screen called “Dimensionalizing Landing Sites.” I illustrated how precarious this balance is by resorting to a personal experience when I broke my nose. The model proposed by Arakawa and Gins becomes visible in its dysfunction, and we had discussed their sources in various phenomenological philosophers, but especially Francisco Varela’s essay “The Specious Present.”
This model of cognitive emergence (fast time), and top-down cognitive control (slow time), is also central to understanding of how cognition happens during jazz improvisation. “Conscious” and “unconscious” processes involved in the performance of jazz can contend in unproductive ways during performance, and yet are capable of achieving synchrony in ways that enhance both individual performance and the interactivity of the jazz ensemble. Yet, it is when cognitive processes during improvisation demonstrate dysfunction that will make visible the model I propose. I refer to the disconcerting experience that jazz musicians report: getting lost. Through illustrations of how competing forms of time cognition seek synchrony in architecture and in jazz, I propose a direct connection between aesthetics and micro-politics.
BIO: Martin E. Rosenberg completed his PhD at the Department of English, University of Michigan, in 1990. His dissertation examined the cultural work of the scientific concept of ‘emergence’, beginning with Henri Poincaré, Henri Bergson, and Marcel Duchamp, and ending with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela and Thomas Pynchon. Martin has written numerous articles on Deleuze and Freud, Ezra Pound, Duchamp and Thomas Pynchon, Samuel Beckett, John Cage, Kiki Smith, and the avant-garde architects Arakawa and Gins. He published a widely-read article on emergent behaviours such as bifurcation in jazz improvisation and composition that are visible in music notation, and currently researches the philosophical implications of the cognitive neuro-science of improvisers. Originally trained in jazz composition at the Berklee College of Music, he has returned (after thirty years) to performing and composing jazz in the Pittsburgh area. He is currently a Research Associate at the New Centre for Research & Practice.
https://thenewcentre.academia.edu/MartinERosenberg
