John Walker's Electronic House

It’s the closing stretch of college time, and like an angel descending from the heavens, our final two lectures are from Simon Perry.

It’s really quite sad that Simon (Siiiiiiiiiimon) takes the stunned silence of the class to be some sort of negative, rather than the overwhelmed sound of a people processing so much extraordinary information in such a short space of time. (It would be too easy to say that this is further exaggerated by our sheer bemused reaction to being taught… at all).

Anyhow, as with the last time we were lectured by Simon Perry six weeks ago, all the ideas I based a recent essay (or indeed that time, a dissertation) upon suddenly seem either intellectually trivial or grossly wrong. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry when in a dismissive, throwaway remark he says, “Well, you’ve just studied personhood, so you must have been told…” and then goes on to say more useful information in a single sentence than in the previous thirty hours of lectures we had on the subject.

Anyway, enough grotesque sycophance. The point of posting is to offer up something I recently put together for the essay handed in this morning, for the said personhoodityment-ness assignment. A sort of audio collage. The Latin word for ‘person’ is persona (crazy), at one time meaning ‘a mask’, and then later in their Crazy Empire Mayhem, ‘the role in the play’. So what is our part? I wanted to make the familiar unfamiliar, and at the same time try and literal-ise the madness of the media. And then bring in the calming sense of Negativland (I hope this is the first time they have ever been described in such a way) to offer some hope and a challenge. However, all that said, it’s a bit abstract, so I might be talking like an idiot.

It’s called In The World, and it’s here.