World Premiere: 22 May 2009
San Francisico, USA
Documentation video clip soon
Rovat 2009: Fissures, Futures
From the press Release:
‘Rova Saxophone Quartet returns for another ground-breaking take-no-prisoners collaboration.’
‘Featuring acclaimed Berlin digital-animation artist Lillevan and an international crew of music giants from the field of improvised music, the show will consist of a suite of pieces in which the musician’s sounds influence the spontaneously composed film images, and the in-time digital animation inspires the music.’
‘Artists include Rova, Lillevan, percussionist Kjell Nordeson plus string players Lisle Ellis, Joan Jeanrenaud and Carla Kihlstedt.’
The piece is inspired by the thoughts and works of futurist and visionary Buckminster Fuller
Venue: Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, 3200 California Street
Time: 22nd May and 23rd May: 8:00pm
©MylesBoisen
©MylesBoisen
©ThomasLehn
Here are some of Buckminster Fuller’s thoughts in his own words:
‘… society tends to think statically and is always being surprised, often uncomfortably, sometimes fatally by the omni-inexorable motion of Universe. Lacking dynamic apprehension, it is difficult for humanity to get out of its static fixations and to see great trends evolving.’
‘Most importantly we have learned that from here on it is success for all or none, for it is experimentally proven by physics that “unity is plural and at minimum two” – the complementary but not mirror-imaged proton and neutron. you and I are inherently different and complimentary. Together we average as zero – that is, as eternity’
‘There is no shape of the Universe. There is only omnidirectional, nonconceptual ‘out’ and the specifically directioned, conceptual ‘in.’ …The atmosphere’s molecules over any place on Earth’s surface are forever shifting position. The air over the Himalayas is enveloping California a week later. The stars now overhead are underfoot twelve hours later. The stars themselves are swiftly moving in respect to one another. Many of them have not been where you see them for millions of years; many burnt out long ago. The Sun’s light takes eight minutes to reach us. We have relationships __ but not space… ‘Synergy’ means behavior of whole systems unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately…. It is dealing with the whole that makes it possible to discover the parts’.
‘The greatest of all the faculties is the ability of the imagination to formulate conceptually. Conceptuality is subjective; realization is objective. Conceptuality is metaphysical and weightless; reality is physical. The artist was right all the time. Nature is conceptual’.
A little bio material taken from The Buckminster Fuller Institute R. Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983); inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet and cosmologist was one of the most enlightened mystics of the last century. His universal vision saw our planet as ‘Spaceship Earth’. Buckminster Fuller was one of our world’s first futurists and global thinkers. His 1927 decision to work always and only for all humanity led him to address the largest global problems of poverty, disease and homelessness. He realized early on that by examining global problems in the context of the whole system—the whole planet—he would have the best chance of identifying large-scale trends that would allow him to anticipate the critical needs of humanity. He has been called ‘the first poet of technology,’ ‘the greatest living genius of industrial-technical realization in building,’ ‘an anticipator of the world to come—which is different from being a prophet,’ ‘a seminal thinker,’ and ‘an inspired child.’ But all these encomiums are fairly recent. For most of his life, R. Buckminster Fuller was known simply as a crackpot. He is also something more than the mere sum of his praise and criticism. He is a throwback to the classic American individualist, a mold which produced Thomas Edison and Thoreau—men with the fresh eye that sees and questions everything anew, and the crotchety mind that refuses to believe there is anything that cannot be done. What Fuller sees excites him with the vision of man’s potentialities, and he has made it his mission to help man realize them. Says he: ‘Man knows so much and does so little.’