Throwing is a performance and installation that was created to be staged at Heap is Full, the 2023 UCSC Digital Arts and New Media MFA exhibition. The performance is a three-part, three-and-a-half-hour durational audiovisual reflection on the act of pitching in the wake of Major League Baseball (MLB) adopting a pitch clock in order to speed up the pace of play during the 2023 season; it considers the previously less-bounded temporal nature of baseball as queer through an affective depiction of a training pitcher. The installation displays the documentation of the performance in varying forms and at varying durations to gesture at the compression of temporality in baseball and its media; it also includes an elapsed timer that shows the amount of time that the gallery has been open for that day, calling attention to the communal temporal experience of the exhibition in which gallery attendees are taking part. This paper provides context regarding the personal history, research, and ideas that led to the creation of this work. First, I discuss my personal relationship to baseball. Then, I trace a brief history of temporal developments in baseball and Bananaball, along with a recounting of baseball’s race and gender segregation. I then touch on formations in queer temporal theory and pieces of experimental art involving athletics that influenced Throwing. I describe the performance and installation of Throwing in detail, before highlighting theoretical connections and syntheses that are explored in the work. I conclude with reflections on the success of the project and future directions I can take in my work.

ABSTRACT

Dayna Diamond: Bluestockings—Exploring Tabletop RPGs and Pandemic Social Connection

Bluestockings is a tabletop role-playing game designed to be playable remotely. During its development, I engaged with the context of the pandemic, as well as game design theory on: (1) how to intervene in social games spaces, (2) layers of gameplay, (3) tabletop role-playing games specifically, particularly indie and queer. This was for the purpose of creating social connection between players and reducing anxiety and isolation during the pandemic. The game focuses on qualitative and social mechanics in order to create a deep sense of interpersonal connection between players, although it may be somewhat inaccessible for players new to tabletop role-playing games.

Abstract

Transcendence and Son Jarocho as Practiced in the San Francisco Bay Area

Robin Sacolick

People of emerging or non-dominant ethnicities in multicultural, diasporic societies need ways to establish identities, merge strengths, and transcend difficulties. This study explores one way: community practices, by Latina/os and others in the Bay Area, of son jarocho, a centuries-old genre of Mexican music, dance and poetry. While their project revives traditional folklore, it also offers experiences in processes of transcendence that help to overcome challenges posed by Western modernity. Materially, participants together may transcend cultural barriers or gender expectations. Epistemologically, traditional values may provide refreshing respite from capital's demands. Affectively, ritual performativity may yield joy or identity transformation. In light of the considerable energy practitioners seem to reap from participation, this study investigates questions and hypotheses as to how and why:

--What empowers this genre to transcend centuries, borders, and even disuse, and become popular again? Perhaps today’s multicultural sonera/os face issues similar to ones that caused the original creators to imbue son jarocho with subversive, syncretic, timeless modes of transcending that still work. Chapters 3 and 4 trace how this occurred.

--Are transcendent experiences attributable to the music and/or the surrounding practices? Chapters 4 and 5 gather scientific research, testimonials, and new materialist theory that suggest that aspects of both the music and its rituals evoke affects that some participants call magical.

--How do community practices impact son jarocho’s success? Chapters 4, 5 and 6 show how context influences musical structure, affective power, and meaning, foregrounding the importance of tradition for maximizing individual and group benefit.

My interpretive methodology privileges informants’ own words, hearing them through frameworks devised by Chicana feminists and scholars from the African, Mesoamerican and Spanish cultures that first informed son jarocho. Perhaps the most striking differentiator of the Bay Area from sonera/o scenes in other locations is that most Bay participants have learned, at some point, from Mexican Maestro Artemio Posadas. His longstanding prioritization of indigenous values, community, and womens’ artistic potential have shaped local traditions that are especially conducive to transcendent outcomes.

This work may be viewed as a processually-centered approach to attention, cognition, and consciousness as they relate to composition, pedagogy and musicking. Through this approach— which is deeply resonant with streams of Deep Listening— we will seek to apply methodology which focalizes both exterior processual observation (in terms of dynamical systems analysis, neurobiology, musical process, etc.) and internal attention to unfoldment as it is enacted through the activity of musicking (1) [see footnotes below] and the embodied experience of the auditor, in a synthesis, towards comprehensive understanding of the entirety of the processual unfoldment underlying musicking.

An approach which preferences the direct experience of sound and the ‘irreducible’ dimensions of musicking as the primary praxis of complexity unfoldment (and counterbalance to a perceived privileging of artifacted forms of complexity historically, intimately interlinked with the historical realization of phenomenological research cross-modally) is employed towards outlining a laboratory environment which ferments a broader order of understanding than traditional approaches can facilitate.

Central to my argument is an engagement with implicate and explicate process, as well as what these can mean across various dimensions of expression, through a strategy which reveals multiple refractions of a prism of observation which includes ontology and musicking, but is not limited to/by them. Thus central will be orienting the reader within this landscape. PHI X 174, one of two musical compositions submitted, emerged primarily from a process of explicate (and artifacted) complexity, and thus acts as a bridge in my own personal compositional history between the explicate and implicate processual emphasis, in parallel with the historical gesture unveiled in the first chapter of this text. PHI X 174 results from a software-created dynamical system in which the human genome unfolds in iterative complexity. Algorithmic music is generated as resultant of the dynamical activity of the system as a whole (2), and not as resultant of linear generative process. Thus it approaches an ecological approach, but not an implicate approach.

The second composition, Piece for Non-Local Butterfly, is deceptively simple on the surface; in answer to the question: “how can I ferment the implicate activity compositionally, with an ear towards the leading edge which forms of complexity interlinked with Deep Listening and other emergent streams point towards?” (which I’ve explored for several years now), I developed a process which exploits the unique complexity fundaments of consciousness as the implicate stage of musical unfoldment and enactment (parallel to the unity at the level of consciousness explored in Husserl’s work, and in alignment with a deconstruction of the generative roots of artifacted complexity and process), psychology, the conscious observer, and an understanding of the leading edge of complexity exogenation alluded to above, all of which the reader will find unfolded in this text.

As observed operating in Piece for Non-Local Butterfly (which does come from an implicate approach), this process of complexity exogenation is further analogous to the intrinsic activity of the brain, the exponentiation of brain activity spiking corollary to it (in direct contradistinction to traditional [and primarily linear] notions of action and unfoldment in cognition) (3), and serves as a metaphor for the shift in musical, pedagogical, and ontological activity which this work invites a rigorous and active (re)-exploration of, and (re)-engagement with – primarily in the domain of attentional inquiry, and the dynamical activity it unveils as process unfolds. This understanding expands from there into all domains to the degree that they are in praxis to it.

(1) Not making of experience a fetish, but considering it meaningful dynamical unfoldment by which to induce and explore dynamical properties, as the experiential unfoldment is a dynamical system in operation.

(2) It thus outlines explicate process not exclusivated to the human realm: it is a sort of collaboration between the explicate processes of nature, and those of man.

(3) A unique performer was found to be required to rigorously perform this piece, eschewing stereotypes that instruction-based pieces are simplistic in nature. Instead, the forum for, and nature of, their complexity must be understood – in praxis to the complexity habitus out of which it has emerged historically, an inquiry which this text facilitates.