On the mediated experience

I was singing in a
choir concert at the weekend - and we were awesome, thanks for asking. Britten
and Tippett aren't the most easily digested composers, and a whole concert
unaccompanied was pretty scary, but damn me if we didn't drop a semitone in an
hour and a quarter, and we - well, we kicked ass, frankly. We were
fantastic.

But that's not what
I wanted to talk about. I was listening to the girls singing their girls-only
bit, and it struck me that I never go to choral concerts as audience. I just
don't find them exciting. I love singing, and I love performing - there's a real
rush to be had from being in amongst a group of great singers when you just know
there's a big moment coming up - but as something to experience from the
stalls... well, not really my bag, thanks. So I was wondering why this was,
and how I'd change the performance to make it more interesting, and I came up
with an interesting concept:

If you built a big
wall between the choir and the audience, I'd find it a lot easier to empathize
with the choir and get excited about the music.

As a spectacle, you
see, a choir is essentially a bunch of people standing still, with just their
mouths working. There's immense effort going on, but it simply doesn't
communicate visually. At least an orchestra looks like it's working a bit - all
those violinists with their elbows pumping - but a choir is a very boring thing
to watch. And if you get it right, choral music (especially churchy stuff,
which it mostly is) is supposed to sound transcendent, ethereal - other-worldly.
Beyond the experience of medieval peasants. Inhuman, perhaps. For me, that makes
it a difficult thing to empathize with, and if there's no empathy with the
performers, then there's no performance.

So the pure
unexpurgated experience of watching a choir sing is pretty dull. I need
something extra to mediate the experience - in my case, a six foot high wall. My
ears and my imagination understand the effort and skill going into the
performance; my eyes just don't believe it.

So it's only just
occurred to me that this is what mediated experience is - it's removing stuff
from the original (leaving bits of movies on the cutting room floor, retouching
colours, cleaning paintings, digitising sound) in order to enhance the
experience. It's reductive. It's distillation. It's funny, but I've never
thought of it in those terms.It's not the only way, though - I was discussing
this with one of the other guys in the choir, and he was telling me about a
singing group he belongs to who make a point of moving around while
they perform. That sounds like a good option - a way of energizing the
performance, of humanizing it.It's also additive - movement gets added to the
singing to enhance the experience.

But I'm drifting.
I wanted to talk about one particular form of mediation which some of us
experience twenty-four seven. I'm talking about those people who wear glasses.

It's always a shock
to me to take my glasses off. Being very shortsighted, I wear glasses* all the
time, and most of the time I don't notice that my experience of the world is
mediated by two bits of glass (and a light misting of dirt and grease - I'm very
lazy about cleaning them). But it does mean that my view of the world has a
frame around it, and sometimes this can be a bit of a surprise. Wearing glasses
puts a distance between you and the world, as any psychologist will
confirm.Obviously they enhance my visual experience (which is otherwise
a wobbly smear). But the point is, they're a form of mediation of the visual
experience, and I'm wondering: what other effects does this mediation have on my
view of the world? How does it make my experience different from someone with
20/20 vision? I dunno - does it perhaps make movies more believable (after all,
my world normally takes place in a square frame already)?

*Contact lenses make
my eyes hurt, okay? Don't think I haven't tried.