technicity lab

HUMAN BODY, TECHNICAL GESTICULATION, SONIC OBJECTS AND METAPHYSICS OF NORTHWESTERN AMAZONIAN PEOPLE

 Juan Castrillon & Keisuke Yamada

We want to explore a theoretical approach to understand how the human technical interaction, as a modality to explore gesture, can create not merely a particular speech itself (a particular music) but also different elements for human technical gesticulation as processes of visual and aural juxtaposition, and suggest its multiple possibilities of expanding knowledge and experiences of becoming with others. 

Concepts like human technical gesticulation (Leroi-Gurhan), possibilities for individuation (Simondon), transindividuation, and the discussion about the arithmetizitation of the geometry alluded by Stiegler help us to explore the sonic organization in a different way, closer to ethnical style (pace Leroi-Gurhan) rather than musical style (pace Hood), in order to prepare a possibility for one existential analysis of musical performance.     

In our approach we are reading about the Cubeo Hehenawa religious thought and Amazonian perspectivism, transcribing musical examples from Cubeo people in Northwester Amazon recorded in October 2013, analyzing Cubeo organology and songs, and drawing on Juan Castrillon’s field notes taken from October to November 2013.

We have weekly meetings in the Music Building at the University of Pennsylvania, and in this blog we will post our partial findings, impressions, conceptual maps, and photographs.  

Feel free to contact via email us: Juan Castrillon at juancas@sas.upenn.edu; and Keisuke Yamada at keyamada@sas.upenn.edu.