Mapping Noizart: A Cartography of Imperfection, Tactile Memory, and Performed Absence
(2025)
author(s): Diego Piñera
published in: Research Catalogue
This artistic research stems from a sound archive of profound personal meaning: the damaged recording of a friend’s last recital were she played the second movement of Mozart's C Minor Sonata. This corrupted file is a central material in my composition Concerto for an Absent Performer, a work-homage exploring absence and remembrance. My inquiry addresses: Considering the particularities of this archive, how can the iterative creation and modification of an audiovisual artefact, taking the imperfections (corruption or fragmentation) of the recording as its starting point, function as an artistic research method to analyze relationships between archival materiality, tactile memory, and what perceptual qualities and meanings around an absent-presence could be revealed or generated through this new mediation? Furthermore, what reflections on my compositional practice, the recontextualization of classical music references and systems (Mozart's Sonata, the use of scores, etc.), and the nature of mediated memory emerge from this process?
The hermeneutic approach is practice-led, involving an iterative creation/development of the different audiovisual artifacts. This process also serves as a post-compositional and post-performance reflection, aiming to reflect on pre-existing compositional solutions within the Concerto, particularly its engagement with found sound material and the performance of 'tactile memory' via the piano automaton. Visual strategies employed in the audiovisual artefacts include the alternated illumination of Mozart’s score excerpts and individual note heads; an emergent constellational network visualizing tentative connections within this mnemonic field; and a direct audiovisual correspondence where the archive's sonic noisiness visibly degrades the musical score's legibility. The distinct visual characteristics of each iteration, and how they might engage principles of Gestalt perception in organizing or disrupting form, will be key to analyze the different interactions with the concept of performed memory.
These audiovisual explorations are approached as a mode of experiential inquiry, investigating whether such artistic practice can function as a non-standard form of music theory by generating open-ended cognitions rather than definitive analytical statements. Within this framework, errors and glitches within the archival materials—central to the Concerto's sound palette—are framed as events that reveal the archive's material substrate and its haunting nature. Each visual configuration aims to transfigure these imperfections into expressive elements by making, as Arthur C. Danto says, the medium “opaque”, thereby reflecting on the work’s original aesthetic/compositional choices. A subsequent cartography, composed of screenshots from the audiovisual artifacts, will analyze these visual iterations, articulating how the tactile medium (the piano automaton) activates imperfections and how each artefact might distinctly modulate perception and understanding.
This research, while engaging with the work of artists who have explored archival degradation in the past (e.g., William Basinski), focuses on how this specific iterative audiovisual process can illuminate my own compositional engagement with what Mark Fisher called Hauntology. It seeks to provide a deeper understanding of how the artistic re-framing of a broken archive could open avenues for reflecting on the cultural resonance of performance, the figure of the absent soloist, and the persistence of memory in technologically mediated forms.
Multiplayer - Softenings and Inquiries into Matters of Toxoplasmatic Ectoplasm
(2024)
author(s): Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard
published in: Rhythmic Music Conservatory, Copenhagen
This project investigates Western musical instruments as being critical and even dangerous sites, which should be approached with the greatest of caution.
Approached as liminal interfaces between the living and the dead, suspended between past(s) and present(s), turning these instruments into both paranormal and parasitic sites, which should be treated as such.
Instruments as pathological contaminated bodies of parasitic discourse ready to jump at you and embed themselves in you, sedimenting within you and, subsequently, playing you.
Instruments as haunted sites saturated with ghostlike matters of toxoplasmatic ectoplasm, fostering ghosts with the capacity to possess and inflict pain on to other bodies, active in the past as well in the present.
With an interest in the notion of instrumentalization and what instruments can mean, control, and do to bodies, instruments are approached from a safe(r) distance through different (group) interventions, raising questions on how best to emolliate and soften the instrumental body?
How to soften the big silent? How to soften the sedimented?
Pandemic performance: A Haunting of Haunts
(2022)
author(s): Garrett Lynch IRL
published in: Journal for Artistic Research
During the COVID-19 pandemic that started in 2020, galleries, theatres, and performance venues closed in accordance with social distancing, lockdown, and confinement policies. Art practice, and in particular performance art, faced an existential crisis: adapt its form or cease to exist for audiences. To adapt, performance art adopted video on the internet as a means through which to perform posing immense challenges to its understanding of performance, liveness, and what is considered physical or ‘real’. As a response, I started to create a body of work employing the methodology of practice as research (PaR) during periods of confinement of the pandemic.
Titled A Haunting of Haunts (2020–ongoing), the practice is designed to be situated within networks and is therefore classified as networked performance. The practice aims to enable artists to create performance under conditions of social distancing, lockdown, and confinement, to explore the idea of transposing performance from ‘real’ spaces to ‘virtual’ spaces, and to critique video as the dominant and largely accepted visual form employed in networked performance. This exposition proposes that while A Haunting of Haunts facilitates practice and assists in the development of a visual language specific to networks that consists of what are termed as networked images, thereby contributing to networked performance as a field of practice, it also highlights the hauntological condition of such a practice.
Tracing ghosts: documenting and conserving the performative
(last edited: 2020)
author(s): sian Hutchings, Samuel Barry
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
Can an interpretation behave as a synergy of a performative act through its documentation and its conservation?