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impaired contact with reality
for ten instruments and electroacoustic sound

Duration: 6:47

The Argento Chamber Ensemble

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(program notes written in 2010)

This was going to be (and maybe still is) a piece about psychosis, about the interweaving of technological mediation into every aspect of our lives, about trying to control uncontrollable forces. At the time that I began composing impaired contact with reality, I was thinking about the quasi-ritualistic, quasi-psychotic relationship I have with technology. It seems that before the Industrial Revolution, the mechanisms of even the most complex technological innovations could be understood visually (even the clock - possibly the most complex pre-Industrial machine - could be opened and its gears examined) and the great mysteries that perplexed humans concerned the natural world. Rituals (i.e., complex practices designed to produce a desired outcome without requiring the practitioner to fully understand how) were developed to solve problems that we now tend to fix scientifically (e.g., medical treatments). But while scientific and technological innovations since the Industrial Revolution have greatly clarified our understanding of the natural world, it seems we've replaced these mysteries with a technological environment whose mechanisms can not possibly be understood visually and we've developed new rituals accordingly. (Just think of the highly personalized ways we debugged the original 8-bit Nintendo - blowing on the cartridge, resetting the console repeatedly, unplugging it for a precise duration before plugging it back in - which generally worked but we never knew why.) The title of this piece comes from the Random House Dictionary definition of psychosis: "a mental disorder characterized by symptoms ... that indicate impaired contact with reality." In a way, my complete dependence on technological systems that I don't remotely understand is kind of psychotic, but this is just part of the anxiety toward/fascintation with technology that underlies my work. This is not a well-researched (or even well-reasoned) argument. But I'd rather provoke than persuade; I'd rather compel people to think than tell people what to think.