The Conceptual Cage: The New Media “Ism”

Plato once said, “such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than the shadows of artificial things.” Media design research has a rich history in the concept of found physical artifacts and physical motion such as the early Lumière films. In order to believe what is being presented to us, we use our mechanical eyes to interpret the real, which in Duchamp actuality is the artificial. We quote and refer to these interpretations as the divine word of God and forget to question the concept of perception. The truth lies in what is not being shown; what is not on stage, in the film, on the tv screen, or in the book. We forget about the natural, the heartbeat, the wind and focus on the creation of the perceived reality. The quiet noises John Cage says are the most intriguing and what everyone pays attention to during a concert, the symphonic sneeze.

Charles and Ray Eames, were incestuous packrats of their time, storing and collecting snippets of reality that they organized and preserved in a Mondrian-like library, called the “Eames Office.” They were both obsessed with reference and the concept that their work could be intellectually supported by fact. ”The Eames were fanatical contextualizers and often gave viewers a great deal of text to read.” Their visual decoupage was an explosion of a scrapbook with little appreciation of white space, or lack of visual noise. Beginning in the early 1940s Charles begin his professional endeavors in the film industry with “The Spirit of St. Louis” where he worked as an aerial photographer and on the visual aspects of production. This marked a turning point in his career where the fetish of documentation became an addiction with major recognition with his film participation in tinsel town. The Eames rejected the experimental film industry in California after the war, and became detached from the contexts of humanism in their films, so their style could not be defined and was simply labeled art. Ray was more interested in documenting objects with color transparencies, and still photography. The Eames’ became hooked to the substance of documentation and after they both had passed away, The Library of Congress gained possession of their 750,000-image collection.

“Among the many happy compulsions of Charles and Ray Eames was their fetish for documentation…” which became a visual overload. They expected their viewers to edit the provided material and create their own connection to the given topic. Sometimes too much information can be perceived as confusion, “certain exhibitions seemed cluttered if not, overwhelming.” Editing makes a work and knowing what not to say is just as important as screaming it at the top of your lungs. It is evident from looking at the Eames’ work to see their passionate inspiration from designers such as Bel Geddes and Walter Dorwin Teague who were obsessed with creating spectacle, freeze frames of statuesque circus poses. Walter Benjamin once said that, “Quantity has been transformed into quality.” So is a MTV video with anime seizure causing imagery, hacked into a techno beat the way media should be portrayed? Is a website with fast Flash animation and the same “Digital Underground” riff, contextually more intellectual than the long take of a Chantal Akerman film? “There was a 12-minute film presentation of 2200 rapidly changing images…” from one of the Eames’ presentation that epitomized their lack of editing. A holding of a shot, is like Merce Cunningham holding a dance move, it takes tremendous strength and intelligence to know when to do it. ”This feat requires a delicate balancing act, the playing out of a tension between “process (with its threat of incoherence or loss of mastery) and position (with its threat of stasis, fixity or of compulsive repetition…’(Neale, 1980, p.26)” As a super-sized culture, we are obsessed with how fast and how many calories we can consume per second. We feel lacking when we are not ingesting our corpulent opinions and don’t step back and see what is concealed in the pretty primary colored cells of the Mondrian-like library, mental prisons, Cage-isms. The Eames were obsessed with the direction, the control, and the production of intention, while John Cage was interested in the absence of all intention.

John Cage the composer, the poet, the teacher and the theologian who allowed his viewer or player to freely move around in the conceptual space like an Alexander Calder mobile. His media research relied upon the concept of free humanistic thinking, which incorporated ideas of chance and time. The way he conducted his career was independent of power and position, he resisted these labels of referent. In his famous 4’ 33” he sat at a piano and did nothing, which emphasized the audience’s sounds and exemplified their noise as music. He said, “I think we need space and we need space between ourselves and ideas, we need what freedom we can get.” Structure causes conformity and he wanted his work to reflect the weather, not having a beginning, middle or an end, so the user could play any amount of it at any time. John Cage grasped the conceptual reality of life and did not rely on the standards of tradition and conformity. For example, his view on microtonality was that he saw fields of sounds as not having discreet steps, which conflicts with the traditional idea of scales. He liked to think of a field as a place in time that one could land at any point. Freedom from structure was important to Cage, and after WWII he brought to the surface what was valuable and what needed to be rethought and reradicalized in the earlier part of Modernism. He gave CPR to the older modernists such as Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and the Musique-Contrécte of the earlier part of the century. “For Dadaism sought to abolish art without realizing it, and Surrealism sought to realize art without abolishing it.” John Cage gave freedom to the entire world, a needed refrain and realization that everyday noise is music and that true silence and order does not exist, not even in perfectly organized Eames’ office and slide library. By composing musical scores that contained found objects and attempting to produce natural noise, he freed the concept of the instrument, the conductor, the musician and the listener from their cages. An example of this is, “Water Music” (1952) where he placed performers and gongs in the water. The gong being the only instrument that can be heard above and below the water, creates different musical pitches. The listener heard a higher pitch from the performers who heard a lower pitch under the water. Like Duchamp he found unadulterated objects and brought them into a new forum. Cage’s work was a ready-made, a crescendo on what people ignored and what they needed to see. Emotion and effect was not needed and he took the ordinary and put it on a white pedestal in an empty room. He edited his work and forced his viewers to question what was in front of them, what they usually ignored or told to be quiet at their Beethoven symphony performances. John Cage emphasized the death of the natural by the obvious, “…that a beautiful woman who gives pleasure to men serves only to frighten the fish when she jumps in the water.”

Even after his death, John Cage is considered a radical because he changed the concept that inner spirituality and belief systems could be a means of media research. He epitomized the anarchist artist, the artist who does not preach anarchy but realized in his work that it has no center, hierarchy and conductor. His views on religion often caused controversy, especially in the Christian world. He viewed Christ through Agnostic eyes, where he believed in split the stick and there is Jesus, which is exactly like the Buddhist statement, every being whether sanctioned or non-sanctioned is the Buddha. He also believed that God was the only thing that kept people in line, and from an anarchist viewpoint that the idea of God is too much like the idea of government. Because of these beliefs, in the late 1940s Cage began intensely studying Zen Buddhism with Daisetz T. Suzuki. This alternative spiritual education helped him free the tradition of music in his own mind. He realized that the function of music is not to communicate or entertain, but it is a process of self-discovery where the viewer becomes aware of environmental sound and they should not be controlled by personal taste. He offered his collaborators as well as his viewers some breathing room. Cage’s work shows a freedom of fear and compulsive physical reference by giving compositional permission to create alternative systems of writing, unorthodox authoring systems. He gives them the space to trust and to have autonomy in their own imagination. Other reasons for his practice of alternative research was that Cage studied under great prodigies such as Arthur Schoenberg, the classical composer from UCLA and later Adolph Vice and Henry Cowell, who was the most influential teacher to him. Cowell was the first person to put his hands on the strings of the piano to alter the sounds and even pluck them like a harp as Cage would hold down the pedals with his hands. This occurred during the early 1930s and was an inspiration for Cage’s “prepared piano” where he placed found objects in the strings of the piano to modify the tonal values of what a piano was intended to sound like. The “prepared piano” was another deviation of the found object, but not how it appeared in nature, but how it sounded and operated in real time. Gertrude Stein once said, “the percussive instruments are those to be found in a living room: furniture, books, paper, windows, walls, and doors.” Cage was interested in time and space, and the idea of chance. With Robert Rauschenberg’s visual expertise and Merce Cunningham’s abstract dexterity, they began to collaborate on the concept of chance. In his collaborations with dancer, Merce Cunningham, he broke the standards of chance and created order, not chaos in his composition. As partners, Cunningham’s style fed off Cage’s ideas; he was not interested in climax of story or interpretation, but how drama could be created in the intensity of the theatric experience and human situation on stage. Cage wanted the natural noises and movements to be included in composition, which he termed “interpenetration.” In the late 1930s Cage worked with Otto Fischinger, the father of pre-After-effects and abstract film to create sound, and learned from his collaboration that even abstract form can have a soundtrack if its put into motion. Cage said, ”the function of music is not to entertain or communicate, but to be a process of discovery, to become aware and sensitized to the environment sounds that are all around us, and to be free from personal taste and manipulation.” This freedom inspired some of the most predominant happening artists of the 1960s who studied under Cage such as Allen Kaprow and Al Hansen.
Media design research should be looked at in a deeper conceptual realm, not in physical mass. An Eames’ explosion is not a natural aura where viewers have the freedom to conceptualize their own interpretation. As a musician, artist, and designer it is more compelling to include in my work the absence of intention than it is to document blurry realism. Timing is everything and nothing at the same time; and omission is just as important as submission. For example, a silent film requires the emphasis on body movement and expression, something that most people overlook. Utilizing the news as another example, more editions do not make inventive news stories, but rather photocopies of the same thing that need to be edited out. “The proliferation of news networks and their accompanying websites was an expansion of form, not an addition of information and perspective.” John Cage gives us a freedom to create new ideas with the conceptual idea of time and natural noise, which can be translated into sound and object. He showed us that music can be created with found objects derived from natural objects, which destroys the traditional means of composition, playing or interacting and presentation. The Eames on the other hand, gave us a databank of their opinionated and perceived research, which is comparable to the Internet, where a child can retrieve hate speech and believe it to be a reality. The films of Georges Méliès can be compared to the work of Charles and Ray Eames; their work was a “kind of performative spectacle, or “attraction, “whose function was to present rather than to represent…” The Eames’ work created a spectacle which if there was an underlying theme, was whitewashed with confusion and synthetic distortion. Media design research should not be a biopsy of life, but a concept within it, which can include real sound, image and movement in a way that is not oppressive in space. John Cage never used other people’s music because it was not original and it didn’t come from the natural. Cage said it, ”destroys one’s need for real music and it substitutes artificial music for real music and makes people think that they are imagining actuality in a musical activity when they are not, which completely distorts and turns upside down the function of music in anyone’s experience.”

Media design research should be given the freedom from the cage and not solely rely on the puritanical research ideology. Human and natural noise should be included in order for the piece to have a direct impact on the viewer. John Cage’s concepts of chance and noise have no physicality, which breaks the bottle fed succulence of modern culture to consume only from understood concepts that are projected flat square screens. “To deny writers, ordinary citizens, or even filmmakers the right to think beyond the perimeter of the known and verifiable is to send us back intellectually into a fifth-grade world.” Cage breaks away from these restraints by implying that harmony should be rejected and rhythm should be adopted. Rhythm can be translated into human connections that don’t necessarily need to be seen in a physical presence, but can be felt on a conceptual level. The absence of intention is more profound than the direction of intention.

Work Cited

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968. (orig. 1955).

Busch, Akiko. “Eames to Please.” Print: America’s Graphic Design Magazine, European Design Annual 2002. vol. LVI, no.II (Fall 2002): 18.

Cook, David A. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd Edition. New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1996. (orig. 1981)

Cook, Pam and Bernick, Mieke. The Cinema Book. 2nd Edition. London: British Film Institute, 1999.

Corber, Mitch. “John Cage: Man and Myth.” 60 mins. (Monday/Wednesday/Friday Video Club, 1990) videocassette: VHS.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995.
(orig. 1967)

Greenaway, Peter. “John Cage: A Musical Circus.” 60 mins. (London, Channel 4
In England,1983), videocassette: VHS.

Kick, Russ. You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths. New York: The Disinformation Company Ltd., 2001.

Kirham, Pat. Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century.

Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Neale, Steve. “Genre.” London: BFI, 1980.

Plato. “The Myth of the Cave.” The Republic. Cambridge: Penguin Books,1995: 193-7.

Solomon, Larry J. “The Sounds of Silence.” 2002.
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