I had a wonderful conversation with my wife last night about the futurist, I was a little tipsy at the ole brew pub here in town, we had a nearly 3 hour conversation about how the futurists were really the first transhumanist. When I came home from the brew pub I sat down at my computer and started writing what is below. I posted it right away, this morning I read it and I thought man, I must have been drunk. But I want to leave it up regardless, as I am beginning to think that perhaps my life's purpose is to be an example to others on how not to live. In others WORDS do not drink high quality premium beer and try to even begin to construct an argument that you really have no place writing about. I would suggest reading about the futurists though.
If you are interested in looking at this bibliography concerning futurism I found it quite useful
click here
I have begun to think of the Futurist, as the original trans-humanists. They were a group of people who at that moment in time (early 1900Â’s) had work to upend the Victorian ideals of the time. I am beginning to build an argument of the notion that the Futurists were the foundation for what the neo-romantics of the 1960Â’s were working to express, the notion that man and nature and technology can work together to create a new art.
I am writing at this time with little background knowledge of futurism, other then I have read 2 works on futurism. I would like to argue that the futurist moment was a moment to upend the social and political structure of Victorian idealism. Using the very foundation that Victorian idealism was built that of mechanics, minus the Puritanism.
I want to specifically discuss the Futurist fascination with technology at the time in regards to creating music. The futurist in my mind was obsessed with understanding and building a visual and auditory rhetoric. We can begin by looking at zuam poetry, which used the notion of tonal sound to create a “ universal language”. Zaum as well as the futurist notion of music which incorporated noise, worked to created a music that transcended the cultural and political boundaries that were already established. This is a sophisticated idea of the time that sought to work towards a unified identity, the futurist sought to do this through the use of machines.
This ideas have made me wonder : How and why to we attach meaninglanguageauge ? do we do this with sound ? for instance does the sound of the violin have the same effect in terms of how the word violin effects people ? (foggy)
Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Its phenomenology clearly distinguishes it from metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic contrivances that sometimes employ the term "synesthesia" to describe their multisensory joinings. An unexpected demographic and cognitive constellation co-occurs with synesthesia: females and non-right-handers predominate, the trait is familial, and memory is superior while math and spatial navigation suffer. Synesthesia appears to be a left-hemisphere function that is not cortical in the conventional sense. The hippocampus is critical for its experience. Five clinical features comprise its diagnosis. Synesthesia is "abnormal" only in being statistically rare. It is, in fact, a normal brain process that is prematurely displayed to consciousness in a minority of individuals.
I am fascinated by this notion in the framework of the work of the futurist. Who can language be incorporated in the human mind in such a manner? I think it is a wonderful gift. It makes me want to further investigate the idea. I want to understand the cultural and physical dimensions of this “disorder” how can language produce visual elements? I recently met a woman who experiences the color green when she adds 5+7 that is so beautiful to me, I can not express my fascination with it other then that most of my research into the history of electronic music has been framed so far with wanting to understand how we as humans process information.
If there is anyone who is reading this, and you have any thoughts on the subject please help me connect the dots.
