there’s another frontier to this idea, though, analog vs. digital. i think you can use “analog” and “digital”, or simply “relative analog-ness” (analogity? analogicalness? analogicality?), to describe the relative quality of an artist’s experience, the artist’s experience as they make their art. and maybe even: the more analog the artist’s experience, the better their art. maybe.
think of a sculptor with hammer, chisel, and stone. or a painter with paint, brush, and canvas. these artists have the most analog of artistic experiences. their outputs are finely recorded. every muscle twitch is reflected in the artistic work. and the artist in turn responds to the behavior of their tools and materials. it’s a feedback loop.
(full disclosure: i recently switched as a dj from playing all vinyl records to playing mostly cds. the fact that my idea reflects this evolution is natural i suppose; analog, even, to my experience.)
imagine if you sat down at a computer and tried to sculpt something, and then programmed a robot to carve it out of some big-ass marble slab for you. that’s a nice simple example of what i would call a digital artistic experience. on the scale of relative analogicality, somewhere between sculpt-by-numbers and pounding out a marble slab by hand lies just about every artistic experience you can think of. including the artistic experience of the dj.
the dj’s interaction with the turntable is a very analog experience, compared with their experience of interacting with a dj cd player. a dj cd player has most of the same functions as a dj turntable. you can speed the song up, slow it down, make tiny corrections to keep beats aligned, cue songs. most dj cd players do much more, and can emulate just about anything you can do with a turntable.
but the turntable has a spinning, solid steel platter propelled by magnets at a speed regulated by a quartz crystal. the artist interacting with that spinning platter is having an experience very high on the scale of relative analogicality. the kinds of corrections you can make on a turntable are different than what you can do using a digital wheel, and at times they can truly become a desired part of the artistic output. with a cd player you can make corrections disappear. with a turntable, you can make corrections actually sound good.
but, of course, with great rewards come great risks. cd players are much easier to use to keep beats aligned, and they arguably allow djs to make better music, more often. so much for my theory.
okay but there’s more. the DJ doesn’t just stand in front of a spinning platter or cd player. they stand in front of at least TWO spinning platters and/or cd players, and whatever other gadgets they brought with them, and a mixer with at least a couple of channels and god knows what insane functions built into it, and a towering system of loudspeakers to carve their art into the air. from all these disparate parts emerges an instrument, and from it emanates art.
it does not matter whether any of the components of the dj’s instrument is digital. the power of the dj, at least the powerful one, is in their ability to create something greater than the sum of its parts. that function is analogous to what the cd player does with its laser as it reads ones and zeros, and it’s the same thing our brains do interpolating the, yes, binary information flowing into them from our senses. parts, my friends, is not always parts (Parts is Parts notwithstanding).
for a mixed-up treatment of analogous topics see also: What Google is Doing to Our Brains.
future post: emergence 101
future post: left brain - right brain : right ear - left ear
future post: music as a boundary of emergence: dancing “on the edge of chaos.”