1. Introduction
This text is grounded in two conceptual pillars that orient my artistic research.
The first is the concept of “being-with” (Mitsein), briefly introduced by Martin Heidegger ([1927] 1962) and later critically reinterpreted by Jean-Luc Nancy ([1996] 2000). For Nancy, ontology is relational—we exist only in relation to others. Moreover, these relations, conceptualised by Nancy as dispositions, are only made possible by our inherent distinctness. Taking this as a premise, my works aim to explore and articulate previously unexposed relations among audience members through their commonalities and differences newly brought forth during the acts of listening.
The second concept is Rancière’s (2004) “redistribution of the sensible”, which holds that artworks intervene in the established perceptual order of society by enacting dissensus, a rupture that exposes the contingency of what counts as perceptible (Rancière 2010). For instance, artworks that blur the line between music and noise (Cachopo et al. 2020) challenge the prevailing distribution of what may be seen or heard and reshape our sensory experiences. In my works, dissensus is enacted across multiple dimensions. Most notably, redistribution is actualised directly within the micro-sociality of the concert audience, challenging the existing order on both what is perceptible and who can perceive in the immediacy of the situation.
At the intersection of these two concepts lies the focus of my work. To articulate and foreground previously unexposed relations among beings, my compositions seek to motivate reconfigurations of the distinctions among them in terms of what they can sense and make sense of.1 It involves perturbing what can be sensed and perceived by whom among the audience in relation to a world shaped by a multitude of intersecting established orders, while using artistic means to foreground these newly emerged distinctions as they unfold in real time. To this end, I consider the concert listening practice, with its peculiar social dynamics gathering a specific group of people, a favourable setting to do so. Its many hallmarks, such as focused listening and formal etiquettes in a controlled environment, lend themselves to the exploration of distinctively nuanced and qualitatively new social and perceptual experiences.
The pursuit of this aim gives rise to my research question: What are the new compositional strategies that can acknowledge concert listeners’ differing preconditions and redistribute the commonalities and differences in what can be sensed among them, so as to expose their hidden relations?