Thursday, September 25, 2008

What are words worth?

I've always thought I was reasonably good at words. Not Shakespeare, not Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings - somewhere in between. Never a main flavour in the great cooking pot of literature, but perhaps a small spice near the edge that adds minutely to the overall taste.

But no more. How can I hold a candle to - how can I even live on the same continent as - the composer of this masterpiece?
"A key problem in the academic field of dance is how to capture and document the incremental development of ideas and their material manifestation in the creative process within practice-led research. In improvisational, embodied investigation, the mode of engagement is generative, pre-verbal, intuitive, experiential and fluid. This militates against types of cognitive engagement necessary for analysis, critique and reflection. The problem is most acute in the context of dance: however it is pertinent to all arts-based disciplines. This project is predicated on dialogic processes between dance and e-Science and the fluidity of concepts as they transverse the two domains, making use of recent advances in the visualisation and representation of spatio-temporal structures and discourse."
If you want to know more - how it ends, whether the boy gets the girl - it's the first paragraph of a research description here.

I will now retire to a small monastery and consider an alternative career. I've always fancied myself as a bit of a pop star if I ever learned the guitar properly. Maybe a bit like Roger Waters but without the ego or the whining.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:30 am

    As academic text goes, that's pretty impenetrable. I've actually worked with some of the people behind that project (specifically the ones at the Open University).

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  2. Heavens. I thought dance was more about the moving that the cognitive engagement versus generative, experiential, pre-verbal fluidity.

    This was not written by a human. Clearly.

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