Designed for Me to Experience

I've been considering de Zengotita's ideas and wondering.

• What exactly does he mean by representational? That which represents the primary experience I might potentially have with an environment or context?


• Is a representational experience always designed to carry a message? Designed to create an effect?


• Is the mediated experience referring to a mediator as in a go-between, a middle man, as in some person or group that stands between us and what might be our primary experience with an environment or context?


• Or is the mediated experience talking about media, where some person or group arranges random elements from an environment or context with the intention to create a communicative experience?


• How many of our options are representational and how many are real?


• He says that if we remove the representational options from our choices, our real options are limited. What, then, are our limited options?

A bit heavy, no?

I need to finish the book, but on a lighter note, my friend, Missy, emailed me to say,

"I've been thinking a lot about your current open-sourcing project with music. Music moves my life in so many ways, so I wanted to share a couple of things with you.

First is www.pandora.com - created by the Music Genome Project to help people find music that they love.

And some suggestions to try once you get into Pandora (especially based on the list you have just created of new music you like):

• Sam Phillips


• Vienna Teng


• I would have said Damien Rice, but I see you have discovered him on your own.


• Counting Crows

These are people who speak to me with their melodies and their words."

The Music Genome Project started on 6 January 2000 with musicians and music-loving technologists analyzing the individual components of over 10,000 songs by popular and obscure artists.

Each song comprises unique 'genes' in areas of melody, harmony and rhythm, instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, vocal harmony, etc.

So, if you enter your favorite song into their gorgeous interface, these people give you a list of songs with similar gene patterns.

They say, "... now that we've created this extraordinary collection of music analysis, we think we can help be your guide as you explore your favorite parts of the music universe."

This is a mediated experience in both senses of the word.

In the mediator sense, The Music Genome people are my middle men designing a customized experience just for me.

In the media sense, music is an expression formed when some person or group arranges random sounds.

I don't know of what these might be representations.

In terms of my 'real' options, I guess a non-mediated experience might be to listen to the raw noise of the universe on my own, maybe hum along, make my own instruments, make my own arrangement of whatever sounds I could gather.

And not share that with anyone, lest I mediate them, stand between them and their own 'real' experience with their context or environment.

In open source terms, Missy, is one of the "thousand tour guides" I am seeking in refreshing and developing my perspective on life, in this case music.

Technorati tag: urban camping, zengotita, media, experience, music genome project, options, art, mediation, music, sam phillips, vienna teng, damien rice, counting crows