Are we there yet?
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2nd Thoughts
Submitted by Joshua Pablo Ro... on Wed, 04/15/2009 - 12:53
After last week's intensive immersion into hip hip history, I'm actually feeling like I need to move away from "retelling history" as a model. That approach feels too restrictive - there's a kind of "heavyness" to history - and raises too many concerns for me about authenticity and representing other people's experiences. History will certainly continue to frame what I'm doing, but the project needs to have a more lighthearted and playful relationship with the past. So I've been letting go of that a bit and moving instead towards a more experiential and metaphorical way of thinking about things. One of the "big questions" I came up with last week had to do with the value of the shrine concept. On further reflection, the shrine frame/metaphor is still quite useful to me. Over the last year I've traveled to Japan and India, where shrines of all types and faiths dot the landscape and are integrated into daily life and urban space. In Japan in particular these shrines made a strong impression on me, and I was impressed by how they are not only used as a means for devotion and paying tribute to higher powers, but also can express an entire cosmology and worldview through their symbols and associated rituals. Hip hop too can be said to have its own creation myths, major and minor deities, things it holds sacred, fetish objects, and ritualized actions. I'm definitely still concerned about religious overtones and unnecessary baggage that comes with this territory, but for now I intend to just move ahead irreverently and see how it works out. ----------------- What I want to do is create objects that are larger than life and monumental to express their importance, but also tiny, miniature elements to illustrate the constellation of attendant artifacts that make up this domain. Also, I'm seeking to codify a series of ritualized gestures that visitors perform at various stations - something like that hand washing that is performed at Shinto shrines. I'll use these gestures as the principle for interactive interfaces that can be used to trigger the audiovisual content of the pieces. Some possible gestures I'm imagining:
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