Interview with Adam

[nfotxn]

Wow, this one was a toughie. Thanks goes to Adam (ultrabithorax) for some very challenging and insightful questions!

1. Do you have a favorite musical period or periods? Include the last 1000 years but restrict yourself to Europe and Asia Minor. Are there periods in that interval where you just don't give a fig?

   Well, as a viola player I don't really have an specific period that I like the best although Baroque and Romantic period classical music tends to be the nicest. In fact that's the primary question a viola player asks: how nice is the part? Will I just be playing a harmony to the Violin II? Maybe there'll be a two bar solo?! Ok, some people would question the choice of Baroque as 'nice' but I enjoy being a rhythm robot.

   Now in a modern context it's so hard to define periods because history is fairly well documented. Well, I guess that's outside off the European and Asia Minor restrictions.

2. I posed this to Henry Mensch first: you wake up tomorrow and it's 1975: you work at Xerox PARC. You're at a development meeting where they're announcing the operating system interface for the ALTO: it will involve bitmapped displays exclusively and documents, terminal emulators, controls, everything will appear in independently-placeable objects called windows. You, being intimately familiar with the next twenty-five years of GUI-OS development, immediately leap to your feet and cry . . . what?

   Evangelistic marketing!!

   Actually I'm not particularly sure how I'd go about it but definitely as potential problems arise I'd be more savvy to the destiny of an object oriented GUI OS. I don't think the ALTO was really at all positioned as a consumer product so taking it into that realm would indeed change history. I guess having a knowledge of at least basic usability concepts would be very helpful.

3. I posed this to Henry as well: how should medical care be distributed? Is the best possible medical care a right or a privilege? Basic care? Essential medical intervention? Preventative care? At what point does "medical care" become "social infrastructure"?

   That pretty much is the role of health care, in my opinion and I'm sure most Canadians would be likely to agree as health care is major point of national identity. I believe that the best possible care is a human right and a nation's ability to care for it's sick and disabled is a gauge of it's overall socio-economic prosperity. The problem is that socialized health care implies, well, socialization which is some sort of dirty nasty word in North America. In the wake of an international conflict as the extreme right takes political control both domestically and abroad the likelihood of any sort of social programs of course become minute.

4. Is there an artistic avant-garde in any sense anymore? Or, after 1942 (Pollack, whitewashed canvases, aleatory music, serialism, relativity, the atomic bomb) did we hit a conceptual wall, swerve around and start plummeting back toward the Pre-Renaissance? If so, what happens when we hit?

   Pre-Renaissance is a very dignified way of putting things! I think it's nearly impossible to put the state of contemporary art in context of the past. I say this because due to advancements both in the egalitarian nature of society since the 14th century and the speed of communication. The net difference of these two factors is, ideally, a much more chaotic and diverse artistic universe. There are enclaves and eddies of groups both connected and disconnected by varying dynamic degrees in a complex social disaggregate. So is there a pre-renaissance going on? Probably somewhere and most likely in more than one place. But there's also the avant-garde and the downright derivative present in what is an increasingly complex social universe.

   I see this as a predominantly positive thing.