Fabric

Fabric will play a significant role, both metaphorically and technically, in the production of the Ravel. Metaphorically speaking, we intend that development of various narrative threads will result in a tapestretic quality, or a quality of narrative completeness. Technically, we intend to employ fabric as a means of creating threshold devices, threshold environments, and costumes. We are excited about using fabric to help create the Ravel for a variety of reasons.

Fabric can be deployed quickly to drastically alter the character of large spaces.

Fabric is often deployed in simultaneously functional and decorative (symbolic) capacities. The production of the Ravel will similarly rely both on technical and symbolic achievement.

Fabric, in the form of costume/clothing describes the boundaries of our beings, and is a significant way we all communicate with society about who we are and what we value. In the Ravel, building elaborate and sensitive costumes will play major role in becoming sensitive to and eventually becoming other-beings.

We all interact with fabrics every day of our lives. Learning how to manipulate cloth to describe volumes – on the scale of the body – and on larger architectural scale – is a valuable and significant technical skill that can be employed (both within and outside of the Ravel) towards functional and cultural ends.

Energy

Many of the threshold devices that will be built to probe the Ravel will require harnessing sustainable energy. Since a significant portion of our activity about breaching the Ravel will be ritualistic and narrative – which is to say energetic – it makes sense that a significant portion of our technical endeavoring will also be about energy. Or, to be more specific – about the creation and application of energy for the sake of of adorning and transforming physical environments (primarily via light and sound).

Another way of saying this is: Allen and David are not expert dimension breachers, but from their initial research it seems clear that most inter-dimensional transport and communication requires energy (Many of the gates we have seen include illuminating runes). Dimensional borders are more sensitive to intent and process than other kinds of material. So, in order to power many of our Portals, campers are going to have to learn how to produce/harvest energy in a way that will not be offensive to the inter-dimensional borders.

David’s and Allen’s Roles at Camp

Concept: Narrative, collective fiction

Here, Scott McCloud talks about the space between comic book panels:

The Ravel is an experiment with the generative potential of ellipses.  Our project takes “the gutter” and makes it the center of the narrative.  We are creating and discovering bits of evidence that amount to a relationship with another dimension which cannot be fully accessed or seen.  Somewhere between the cards, rituals, masks, and transmissions there are other-beings and The Ravel.

Empathy and Other-Beings

Throughout this blog, our references to the existence of other-beings are made exclusively about beings from the Ravel. This naming convention is purposefully general.  We want to give campers a maximum amount of license to create and encounter these beings.

It is also purposefully essential. All of us are other-beings. When we ask campers to lucidly imagine – in order to encounter – other beings (from the Ravel) through drawing ravel cards and fabricating masks, we hope that in so doing we are also giving them tools that they can employ when encountering/imagining one another.

Camper’s access to other-beings is partial, but our access to one another is always partial. And though their empathy towards other-beings is primarily an act of lucid imagining, so too is our empathy for one another.

We are telling a story about the numinous: an uncanny sense of presence and otherness.  The numinous is often felt when no one else is around.  It is a type of fear, but it is not a sense of danger.  Rather, it is a sense of vulnerability to otherness.

Levinas:

Before this obscure invasion it is impossible to take shelter in oneself, to withdraw into one’s shell.  One is exposed.  The whole is open upon us.  (There is: existence without existents, The Levinas Reader, p. 31)

This feeling is related to the kind of vulnerability kids feel when they come to camp.  Coming to camp can mean leaving comfort zones behind.  Campers are asked to participate in a collective much bigger and with different rules than the family they know at home.  This can make campers feel alone and sensitive to the presence of otherness – other minds, other bodies, other rules, other schedules.  Time, space and relationships are experienced in a new way.  This is also true for the darkness campers experience at night.  It’s scary.  And yet, the desire to make contact is what compels kids to come to camp.

The Ravel provides a quasi-fictional performance mode for campers to play with the production of boundaries, to renegotiate comfort zones, and to take responsibility for the way they contribute to the comfort and discomfort of others.  By encountering other-beings through creative visualization, playful ritual and by building boundaries and gateways to the Ravel, campers will learn to encounter otherness with confidence and care.

Activity: Reading surfaces with homemade gramophones.

From here:

In 1919 Rilke decided that he had been tormented long enough by a fantasy he had nurtured since his school years. It dealt with sound, and now he sat down and wrote the short text “Ur-Geräusch” (Primal sound). At some point during the 1890′s, his science teacher had showed the students how to construct a simple phonograph from cardboard, paper and wax, and with a bristle from a clothes brush serving as a needle.

…

The dream to be able to listen to sounds that were unintentionally preserved, has been dreamt from time to time. About thirty years ago there was some talk about the possibility to listen to potters from ancient times. The sound of their voices, while working at the wheel, were supposed to have been led through the body’s bone structure to the fingers digging into the clay surface, where they engraved a sound track.

This is a cool idea, but can it be adapted to a camp activity?  I’ve seen some pretty simple solutions for creating homemade gramophones:

The tricky part is that, of course, gramophones rely on a particular groove pattern to be played back.  We would be trying to find examples, as in the quote above, where we can uncover some sort of primal or numinous sound embedded in objects we discover.  It’s sort of like revealing another dimension through using the microscope cameras, but with audio.

Ectoplasm; Definitive Traces

Initial evidence of the Ravel’s existence needs to be both definitive and partial – a definitive trace. We want campers understand and believe that action/response is necessary – but we do not want to prematurely define what sort of response or activity is required. Ectoplasm seems, initially, a possible solution to this problem. The existence of ectoplasm is clear evidence of a dimensional breach – but it does not indicate the nature of the Ravel or of the Other-Beings.

Other-Being: Aulos

Aulos is a type of Other-Being formed entirely out of sonic material.  Aulos is incredibly sensitive to the sonic environment.  Whereas human beings can hear and produce many types of sounds, the Aulos is dependent on very specific harmonic relationships and arrangements.

Object: Transfiguration Tunnel

Threshold Device: Dimensional Vane

The dimensional vane is a very complicated, but very important device. It is used to detect the direction and speed of inter-dimensional flow. The dimensional vane is used in conjunction with the dimensional sextant to establish the appropriate orientation of the main gateway.