Did a useful exercise with Ai, Yiyang, and Siri where they workshopped a thesis issue for me. I talked about the challenge Rothberg and Zurkow brought up about the potential of cultural appropriation / extraction with my project.
It seems like the concern was about using meditation, which could be seen as extractive of Eastern religions, and psychedelic experiences, which plant medicines and rituals with repetitive beats are associated with indigenous cultures, like Mayan.
It was interesting to speak to 3 students of Asian background about this. Some of the feedback was they didn’t consider it as extraction, and didn’t even consider that until I brought it up. If I were doing something more directly Asian, like showing a large Yin Yang symbol or was demonstrating Tai Chi or Chi Gong, that would be cringier. They seemed to see some usefulness of bringing up that my dad taught be about Taoism and Buddhism when I was young, and learning about meditation from my rave friends who grew up in the Transcendental Meditation movement. But overall they didn’t see that type of extraction in my presentations and aesthetic to date, so they hadn’t considered any of this.
An interesting distinction came up about my own experiences with hallucinogens: they were largely with LSD, which is not an indigenous drug but rather created by Albert Hofmann a Swiss chemist. So my reference point for the chemical experience is lab-based rather than plant-based (I disliked mushrooms and psilocybin, and haven’t done any other plant medicines).
However, the repetitive beats is something from Mayan culture and is something I easily already cite when I present my repetitive beats research.
One standing question coming out of this discussion is the idea of obviously using a cultural influence (and risk appropriation) versus something I’d call perhaps “extraction” or “distillation.” In my mind is what happened with the transition between jungle music to drum n bass music: jungle music’s rhythm used samples from Black jazz musicians (which itself may have been appropriation /extraction), creating one of the most innovative new genres in the 1990’s. Over time, UK artists dropped the samples and distilled the rhythms into simple, easily repeatable drum machine patterns. Optimized, extracted, systematized, not sure the exact word, but it was renamed drum n bass and became a “new” genre. Is this process of optimization a normal artistic practice of inspiration and evolution or is it self another layer exploitation where all the original forms are stripped out? I consider this because if when people see my presentations and don’t think of the history of meditation or the history of repetitive beats, is that a success of my art, or a practice of stripping out the history of my influences?