Donkey Kong @ Neues Museum, Weimar
Posted in: Current Speculations on July 13, 2010
Saturation in music means a flattening of the dynamics and affect of a sound. The depth and perspective of the sound disappears, leaving a smooth one dimensionality. The use of drones in contemporary music is based on an essentialist reduction which traces the contours of what is immanent to music, duration being one of these borders. In contrast, saturation works by operations of indiscriminate inclusion and intensification, revealing less about the essential qualities of music but more about it’s circumstances.
Saturation in vision is something close to extreme brightness and the saturation of any sense faculty can be described as the intensification of that faculty to the point of uselessness. At the saturation point of sound we are no longer able to hear difference. At the saturation point of vision we become blinded by brightness, unable to distinguish objects from one another. Staring at the sun has been known to induce such disability.
Saturation is the point at which everything is shown and everything is heard. Everything is sensible, the faculties open to such a degree that difference vanishes and becomes a state of disorientation. An individual or subject at a point of total saturation may experience the liquidation of the following:
faculties of judgement
intersubjective awareness
temporal awareness
memory
embodied sensibility
expressive capacities
If we can describe the experience of sensual saturation for each of the senses than what of the sense that endows us with synthestesia, the sense that bridges the differences between the others. The haptic sense, the sense of touch but also of touch touching itself. That sense which grants spatial awareness and internal awareness of the interelatability of all of the senses. What is it to experience the saturation of this faculty? What is saturated space?
