http://www.tibetronica.com 2007年の2月〜3月にかけてモーリー・ロバートソンが中国のチベット自治区・新疆ウイグル自治区を訪問。現地からのポッドキャストと映像をお楽しみいただけます。 ja Copyright 2008 Wed, 02 May 2007 20:55:47 +0900 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/ http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 2007年の2月〜3月にかけてモーリー・ロバートソンが中国のチベット自治区・新疆ウイグル自治区を訪問。現地からのポッドキャストと映像をお楽しみいただけます。 2007年の2月〜3月にかけてモーリー・ロバートソンが中国のチベット自治区・新疆ウイグル自治区を訪問。現地からのポッドキャストと映像をお楽しみいただけます。 ja Copyright Morley Robertson A low resolution sketch with scanned photos, moving footage, and the title track. Makeshift sound track was thrown together to fill in the silence. Narration was recorded in a room where other people were working, so is not a real take. There are going to be a lot more like this one coming. http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/05/opening_sequence_study_no1.html http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/05/opening_sequence_study_no1.html 旅行 Wed, 02 May 2007 20:55:47 +0900 Morley Robertson The departure date is now very close. To give you an idea of where I want to take this journey in audio and video, I am uploading the video which I made in 2002, after travelling to China's Xinjiang Autonomous Zone. The main rhythm pattern of the sound track was synthesized from an actual recording of street drummers in the city of Urumqi. http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/02/video_work_from_2003.html http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/02/video_work_from_2003.html 旅行 Sun, 04 Feb 2007 22:46:48 +0900 Morley Robertson Happy New Year! There is only one month left before departure. The yoga lessons have continued, with a four-day break over the year’s end. I just went back to my first lesson today, only to discover that my body had re-set its stiffness. I am now back at where I first began. I must have performed over a dozen “dog poses” during the last lesson. I just hope that this starts to sink into deeper levels. The Mandarin Chinese lessons are progressing at a more satisfactory pace. I have amazed my native Chinese teacher with my ability to absorb Mandarin. She commented that we already covered “a year’s worth” of Chinese, in just five weeks. If I have an inherent head-start for Chinese, which I do not have for yoga, it might relate to the fact that I have put an effort into balancing Japanese and English inside my mind, for the good part of my life. These two languages are very different in syntax, grammar and nuance. Balancing them requires a determined effort. Thanks to my perseverance, I may have developed a kind of inner flexibility, which permits rapid absorption of new words and pronunciations. Knowing how to write thousands of Chinese characters in Japanese format also give me a boost, because Chinese script is often an abbreviation of its Japanese counterpart. So in Chinese class, I am not only doing cool “dog poses”, I am doing head stands. The purpose of this entire venture, of course, is to harmonize these disparate “yin” and “yang” elements. A favorite dish following the heels of yoga lessons has been sushi, which is available on belt-conveyor servings in sushi shops. The raw fish offers quick energy charge, and also cools down the body. My favorites are tuna and sea urchin. Tuna is great and can be had in many forms; but it may become more scarce over the coming months, because sea stocks have been rapidly declining. http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/01/more_agile_in_language_skills.html http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2007/01/more_agile_in_language_skills.html Fri, 05 Jan 2007 03:23:31 +0900 Morley Robertson The rewiring of a human body can happen very slowly. It probably has to do with talent, but coming from an IT and cerebrally intensive career, the switch-over to yoga practice can be a very different kind of challenge. Right now, I am confronting my past -- how I had amassed problems inside my body over the years, without even noticing it. The issue here is that the human body is not a linear collection, that can be broken down into parts. Rather, it is a continuum, and always functions as an integrated whole. I have pitted myself against that simple truth, again and again for a week now, with each iteration of the “Downward Facing Dog Pose”. My hope right now is that this early stage is just a transit point, which will open up to something more pleasant. For the Downward Dog Pose, you stand like a dog on all fours, and stretch out in a way reminiscent of a dog that is yawning. Dogs can do this without thinking about it, but people can go through a devil of an ordeal, just trying to get all the parts right. Wherever it is in your body that is tight, that is where the pose will fail. Right now, my back is too rounded, and my knees don’t stretch all the way out. On the first day, I had assumed that this was a matter of getting the details right; meaning, that if my knees would stretch so I could make my legs straight, I would be getting that much closer to a real “dog” pose. But after five or six lessons, I came to the frustrating realization that this “linear” approach won’t help me. This is an “all or nothing” pose. The back muscles, at least my back muscles, are made up of overlapping and interconnected segments, none of which are independent. The muscles underneath my shoulder blades connect to the neck above, and the small of my back below. My shoulders are the tightest locus, and it turns out that the rest of my back muscles, which are the muscles that make up my posture, had compensated for the shortfalls of my shoulder muscles. Everything is co-dependent, and so it will not work to just smooth out one section. What is needed is an overall re-alignment. My posture is a result of a long period of adaptation. It can’t change too quickly, and it can’t change one piece at a time. I want to shift the entire balance towards a “higher state” or harmony. This is going to involve working with each separate locality of my back, probably down to the cellular level. And it has to be gradual. If reform is too drastic, it could end up being a deferral of pain into the future. Traversing the ordeal of the “dog” again and again, I keep thinking about how President Bush mismanaged his policies in Iraq. I believe the reasoning went something like: “The Middle East lacks democracy. The US will remove the axis of evil, and free the local population. Democracy will spring up from among the liberated masses.” The approach turned out to be over-simplified. Without going into details, I would like to remark that the administration ignored the interdependence of the various parts and groups within the Middle East. Simply removing an undesirable regime or “bad elements” will not “fix” or “democratize” the region. It seems like the administration is now trying to apply one fix after another, to a campaign that was ill-conceived from the start. Fortunately, my body is more compliant than Iraq. But like Iraq, it is a “non-linear system”. I have to be humble and patient in my attempts at persuading all the localities to change together. I must win over the “hearts and minds” of my body’s infrastructure. I want to redistribute the stress of upholding against gravity, as evenly and justly as possible along my back. Both the local muscles and the integrated whole will have to be worked on at the same time. The goal is to reach a harmonious “coalition force” of musculature. At least, that’s the plan. And without a plan, the pain of repeating the dog pose can become an upward climb, which is too steep for an IT kind of guy. http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2006/12/slow_change.html http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2006/12/slow_change.html Sun, 10 Dec 2006 19:57:18 +0900 Morley Robertson Welcome to the "Tibetronica" web site. I am your host, Morley Robertson. Polaroid has supported my endeavor to visit Tibet. This web site will document the entire voyage, from early preparations to the completion of an art work, in real-time. This web site "Tibetronica" will also be a journey along the time axis. Various ideas will evolve from scratch and become embodied through experimentation and research, finally into a complete (or incomplete) piece. I aim to make the entire process as transparent as I can. Trying to break away from clichés and my own preconceptions about Tibet, I will carry on with my experiments. The early phase of this project will be an attempt to travel to the "Tibet within". If there is indeed a secret land inside, I would like to look for it, before I leave home for the Tibet that is far away. Many have pointed out that there are mysterious, primitive powers in the human mind and body. In fact, Western science, which taps into a very specialized channel of human capability, has come to dominate our lives, particularly in the developed countries. Convenient living has also come to mean boredom. It is ironical that after centuries of mighty efforts, people at the top of the ladder are finding less and less thrills and surprises, and are disconnected from their own life-force. Waking up to notice that most of the day is spent in front of a computer terminal or television… unattractive. In the last decade of internet evolution, keeping up with the excitement and dazzling breakthroughs meant that you had to spend long hours at a computer. So lots of people just stayed home, while reaching out to the world of information. But now, to put information technology to the real test, I want to focus my IT know-how in the direction of Tibet. Here is a brief self-introduction. I have always been, at the core, a musician. Because I moved back and forth between the United States and Japan from infancy, I developed bilingual abilities, and a bicultural perspective. My work in radio broadcasting has been well-known in Japan. In the last year, my personal broadcasts in the form of podcasts, outside the framework of traditional mass media, has also gained a following in some corners. I have always preferred experimental music. My quest has been to discover sounds that I had never heard, and to hear the sounds in their primordial state, outside of the cultural framework of musical scales or theories. It might be more accurate to describe my search as "experimentation through music". I have been at it from the 1980's. However, at this juncture, I notice how I have seemingly settled into a particular "method" of delivery. I could, if I wanted to, legitimize my various moves by theorizing what I do, catalog myself, and build a mold of repetition and predictability, so that eventually, I am "parodying" myself. I suppose that with the right packaging, I could even hope to sell off some of my works which used to be considered un-marketable or far-fetched, as collector’s items. But I do not want to "grow up" in that way, because it will defeat my purpose. A scenario for success like that would amount to premature senility. Overlap here the image a wealthy person who gradually loses control of bodily functions and the ability to imagine, through the passivity of convenient living. So I have decided that my first endeavor would be to make things inconvenient. I intend to go looking for the "inner Tibet". Unchartered regions within the individual; there must be some. I have hints leading to those inner places, but at the same time my mind tries to bounce me off-course when I go in that direction. My body and mind have already adapted to their fixed routines, and neither want to really change. So I have to find a way to break through this lethargy. I need to "re-wire" my insides. Physically and psychologically. My life has become, when you look at the bigger picture, a series of routines and repetitions. I am clever with my tricks to earn a living, but they just aren’t enough. So now, I want to bring in unpredictable elements into daily life, and create situations where my reflexes won’t work. I am going to knowingly immerse myself into activities in which I "do not excel". In that way, maybe I can galvanize my nervous system and psyche. I hope to metamorphose, out of the old mold. Somewhere along my fifteen-year-long chase of the computer revolution, I left my body behind. Physical stuff is low-priority. IT and science keep extending my physical capabilities, so in the end, I won’t have to leave my home, and I can remote-control robotic forces far greater than my own. But what happens when I start drowning in that power? I could become seduced into thinking that the scientific toys given to me are manifestations of real power. And that would be when my mind and body start to fall apart. Or just become stupid, while thinking that I am creative. So now, it is important that I enter a place where computers cannot assist me. The non-digital tool of choice is yoga. I signed up for a yoga school. http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2006/12/the_tibet_within.html http://www.tibetronica.com/eng/2006/12/the_tibet_within.html Fri, 01 Dec 2006 10:57:18 +0900