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.
