Bricolage and Gesamptkunstwerk

Re: Rickert, T., and Salvo, M. “The Distributed Gesamptkunstwerk: Sound, Worlding, and New Media Culture.” Computers and Composition 23 (2006): 296-316.

Rickert and Salvo posit erasing the binary between real and virtual worlds altogether with their concept of “worlding.” The “prosumer”—a consumer + producer—participates in the creation of art. Romantic and Modernists privileging of the artists has morphed into a postmodern celebration of the audience as artist in the new media landscape the authors describe.

We’re at the beginnings of understanding how new media affects our perception of the world, according to Rickert and Salvo. Exploring our experiences with sound will help us understand “worlding” and how new media texts influence production and reception.

Rickert and Salvo argue that creative use of sound can offer new opportunities for invention in the composition classroom, a “bricolage-like aesthetic of merging different idioms, such as transforming noise into signal and finding new sources of input” (300). This idea of bricolage is vital to their argument, a “do-it-yourself” mantra that’s repeated in the online text we read (…And They Had Pro Tools at http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/rickert_salvo/start.htm).

It brought me back to a wiki entry that Katie and I made last semester on bricolage, available at http://courses.kathiegossett.com/fa07/engl801/index.php?title=Bricolage. In particular, we wrote that “[i]ntuitive thought processes, rather than reason, guide the bricoleur in his or her construction—the building of problem-solving,” and that bricolage “can be seen as a reaction to traditional—that is, masculine, empirical, and positivist—reasoning.”

END OF POST