dance #300, a still more glorious dawn awaits

Friday October 16, 2009

A still more glorious dawn awaits

12:30 a.m. Watching an auto-tuned remix of Carl Sagan articulating the magnificence of the Cosmos. The dance is Sagan reaching toward the horizon with his index finger pointing high. “The sky calls to us.” It’s both what he says and how he says it, including the rhythmical lilt of the music, of a kind of filmic animation of sound and song and inflection and gestures. Electronic animation, bending and stretching time to morph tune and tone and textures of voices. Meanings change too. Stephen Hawking’s voice electronically remodified.  The composer generates song–and so story—out of lines from the TV series Cosmos. It’s a kind of science poem. Sagan enacts ways of knowing and relating to the world, partly through science, largely through story. He enacts gestures of affinity, relation, and entanglement with worldly phenomena on a cosmic scale.  Brains and planets and systems. A performance like no other I’ve seen in the history of the sciences. An amazing composition. An inspiring story. Alice is happy we’re home. She was agitated for awhile. Now she’s chilling out and curled up on the chair, entertained by her new friend.

~ by nmyers on October 17, 2009.