Shades of Cogs - an essay at a hyperessay

Music

Not knowing much about music, though always haunted by its insistence, I cannot but answer to its urgency.

Imagine a solitary saxophone meandering through the empty streets of a deserted city. Imagine a soul lost, dwindling in a space forlorn. Add a rhythm section of polyphonous rhythms, let it encircle the vibrant tones of a solitary saxophone, of the void, catching a soul lost in its midst, incorporating it, bodying it forth….

...sense its swelling, its growing, its potency coming into being as the polyphony gives leeway to the body, sets the body dancing in a plastic space, creating its own rhythmic pattern. You are in the sacred, in the presence of the absent, where the body exists in its absolute otherness…

...suddenly you hear the throbbing, pounding delicateness of the kora, ancient instrument and precursor to our lyre, weaving stories out of memories unheard-of, like Penelope weaving the tapestry of the story of Ulysses on her loom, and you hear your own story being told in the infinite text into which you’ve submerged…

Shades of Cogs shows an array a mapping a new media reading of texts published in the 'old' media print. The readings speaks about the indeterminacy and ex-stasis of signs, of mappings and structural frameworks. And music.

By happy coincidence, and despite his ambivalent relation to music, the string instrument kora resounds in Plato’s concept the chora, which he sees as a receptacle for the soul.

By happy coincidence, the string instrument kora resounds in Julia Kristeva’s rereading of the chora as the semiotic chora, a receptacle for the unconscious that embodies our being in the world. And this chora, this otherness, can be heard in the rhythms of our language, in the body’s movement…, and in the compositions we create.