{RK, 05-feb-2018}

The desire to escavate the loss of any need to represent. You don’t need the complete representation. And in fact, escavating the system of representation becomes of immediate interest. It defines one category of sensibilities, which you can oppose to those that provide complete worlds or complete forms, where the desire is in its totality. Its total detail becomes the pleasure. Maximalism and minimalism become really distinct threads. And I think we’re all talking from a perspective that’s a little bit queasy about a maximal estrope in relation to digital media. And that’s an interesting bias. We’re tending towards minimalist strategies, focused in a particular way and we can see a lineage of that also in fragmentation. The other way is to be completely overstuffed. 

{RK, 12-Jan-2018}

[talking about the subtheme of refined sensibility] Part of your challenge as a listener is to find your interest and, if you’re able to find your interest, that makes you more of a participant in the cultural project. One of the early rejoinders to Cage is La Monte Young, and that is completely about cognitive processes: the idea of listening to a drone, discovering that you are experiencing the drone changes. Part of his art is to reveal to the listener cognitive processes that would otherwise go unnoticed. Minimalism is the removal of distraction. I’ve never seen that formulation. I use that as an efficient way to describe what minimal strategies are. Then you can see that, from that perspective, minimalism doesn’t have to be thought as a formalist exercise at all, because it really wasn’t anyway. It’s involved in exposing something by removing  distractions.

{HHR, 05-feb-2018}

I don’t know if I would describe my approach as minimalist, or my kind of aesthetic tendency as minimalist. Maybe fragmentary is a different thing. I associate minimalism with a sense of completeness: if you think about the removal of distractions, that idea includes the reduction to necessity. 

{RK, 05-feb-2018}

That’s probably true, although I was trying to use it in a more expansive way. But I think it’s right that I have to accept the elimination of distractions becomes a major feature of the form of the work. It’s explicit in that. One of the real problems here is that the term algorithm has within it the ability to absorb all of these extremely distinct themes.