Brainstorm Series: Jad Abumrad "Word Fail Me"
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Free tickets to see Jad Abumrad "Words Fail Me", will be available through The Center Box Office at JHCenterForTheArts.org.
Words Fail Me is a deeply personal meditation on what it feels like to live inside information overload — and what we can learn from the last few times humanity went through this. It opens with a memory: a shortwave radio pulling in a chaotic jumble of voices from across the globe, everything from Chinese talk radio to garbled Cold War transmissions. That sensation of being "pulled apart" by simultaneous signals becomes the doorway into a bigger question: what happens to our minds when we're bombarded by thousands of channels, frequencies, and timelines at once?
From there, I dive into Virginia Woolf's writing on time and consciousness (Mrs. Dalloway, written as the telegraph and radio first scrambled people's sense of "now"), Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, Delia Derbyshire's electronic music, and Chopin — building toward a meditation on how earlier technological shocks (the telegraph, the radio) reshaped human perception, and what that history might tell us as AI does the same thing again, faster. It's part personal essay, part sound-and-music performance, part philosophical detective story — built for an audience that wants to feel something about the chaos of modern attention, not just think about it.
Words Fail Me is a deeply personal meditation on what it feels like to live inside information overload — and what we can learn from the last few times humanity went through this. It opens with a memory: a shortwave radio pulling in a chaotic jumble of voices from across the globe, everything from Chinese talk radio to garbled Cold War transmissions. That sensation of being "pulled apart" by simultaneous signals becomes the doorway into a bigger question: what happens to our minds when we're bombarded by thousands of channels, frequencies, and timelines at once?
From there, I dive into Virginia Woolf's writing on time and consciousness (Mrs. Dalloway, written as the telegraph and radio first scrambled people's sense of "now"), Henri Bergson's philosophy of duration, Delia Derbyshire's electronic music, and Chopin — building toward a meditation on how earlier technological shocks (the telegraph, the radio) reshaped human perception, and what that history might tell us as AI does the same thing again, faster. It's part personal essay, part sound-and-music performance, part philosophical detective story — built for an audience that wants to feel something about the chaos of modern attention, not just think about it.
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Where is it happening?
Center for the Arts, 221 S Cache St, Jackson, WY 83001-8690, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
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