I have already described how my improvisational practice evolves over time, by anticipating each subsequent incremental sonic gesture based on the elements of the current momentary state. Each gesture aims to introduce the slightest variation in rhythm, intensity, timbre, or pause, distinguishing itself just enough from the previous one to keep the listener in a state of attentive focus. A significant change, however, would disrupt this focus and be perceived as a transition to another state.
Using this mobility, the improvisational quality and the precarity of the smallest variations as the driving force behind the emergence of larger forms, lies at the core of my practice.
Kate Bretkelly-Chalmers on Time, Duration and Change in Contemporary Art describes such practices posing questions on the ‘intimate relationship between time and human experience’ as microtemporal. She writes about Dan Graham’s video installation Time Delay Room (1974-76):
"Graham’s exquisitely perplexing work triggers the fine-grained perceptual processes that contribute to the sensation of time passing: incremental shades of experience referred to here as ‘microtemporal’. Time Delay Room comprises a pair of closed-circuit surveillance cameras that capture footage of audience members in adjoining galleries. This footage is simultaneously displayed on two monitors mounted to the far wall of each room. One monitor relays images in ‘real time’ while the other plays at an eight-second delay. This eight-second interval is significant because it sits on the cognitive threshold between immediate experience and the mechanisms of short-term memory. The viewer thereby encounters a video image of herself captured in a ‘past’ that is so recent that it could be perceived as ‘present’. Simply put, Graham’s video only just separates the viewer’s perception of what is ‘now’ from what was ‘then’."
This mechanism of short-term memory allows past, present and future to coexist rather than unfolding linearly. Depending on the gestural properties of each piece, I often work with events ranging between to 3-5 seconds or 7-10 seconds. At times, however, gestures may be much longer, extending up to 30 seconds. I aim for these durations to emerge naturally in real-time during improvisations, and to achieve this I practice extensively using a stopwatch, for become aware of the durations of different gestural events. Often times, I also use conscious breathing to measure the time-span of events.
In my compositional practice, this granularity is applied through careful editing of recorded material. Ten seconds happens to be the longest high-quality sound that the language-audio machine learning models I have been working with can generate, a limitation that has proven unexpectedly aligned with my artistic practice in interesting ways.
In the heart of this granular practice is variation within repetition. The nature of my material renders repetition without variation practically impossible. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze argues that even the simplest imitation still involves a differential:
“The reproduction of the Same is not a motor of bodily movements. We know that even the simplest imitation involves a difference between inside and outside
…
Learning takes place not in the relation between a representation and an action (reproduction of the Same) but in relation between a sign and a response (encounter with the Other)."
“…it is essential to break down the notion of causality in order to distinguish two types of repetition: one which concerns only the overall, abstract effect, and the other which concerns the acting cause. One is static repetition, the other is dynamic. One results from the work, but the other is like the ‘evolution’ of a bodily movement. One refers back to a single concept, which leaves only an external difference between the ordinary instances of a figure; the other is the repetition of an internal different which it incorporates in each of its moments, and carries from one distinctive point to another.”
I can relate to the idea of dynamic repetition, carrying my improvisations from one distinct point to another by involving the listener in an act of active listening. In the artistic research project Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic Encounters, repetition is associated to practices of attention:
“Repetition increases sensitivity to difference, to the proliferation of multiplicities. It is a practice of modification and variation, for working-through a set of propositions that unfold each time anew. To render sensitive — means to augment one’s mental and emotional sensibility, become more readily affected by external forces, aware of and responsive to the feelings of others. Beyond cultivating elemental awareness of vitality affects, the Practices of Attention also heighten states of empathetic attunement; radical receptivity with shared spontaneity even the arising of communitas. Sensitive to the weakness of collectivity, yet still striving towards it, the attention practices support an opening up of self to others, they increase one’s awareness of one’s capacity to affect and be affected.”
To create the feeling of the repetitive yet ever-evolving in my microtemporal improvisational (and in extension compositional) practice, I need to constantly reflect on what constitutes
The tiniest variation,
The barely perceptible,
The incremental,
The ephemeral,
The differential.
Erin Manning, introduces the concept of the minor gesture in her homonymous book:
For Manning, the minor gesture is in-the-act, improvisatory, precarious, ungraspable, mobile, speculative, omnipresent, its significance lying in its capacity to modulate relations as they unfold. This understanding closely mirrors my one improvisational practice, in which form is neither predetermined nor retrospectively imposed, but emerges through the accumulation of microtemporal variations through repetition. Here, each gesture does not aim toward resolution, but rather participates in an ongoing process of differentiation: differentiation becoming attention and attention becoming differentiation. Within this framework, improvisation becomes an attunement to the conditions under which variation can occur. The minor gesture functions as a primary motor, carrying the work forward through continuous modulation rather than linear progression.
Manning further elaborates on the concept of the minor gesture in relation to her installation Weather Patterns, in a way that also directly connects the differential to the complexity of weather patterns :
"Every weather pattern includes a minor gesture. The minor gesture is the pulse o a differential that makes experience in its ecology felt. It is the generative force that opens the field of experience to the ways it both comes together and subtly differentiates from itself.
…
A weather pattern is brought into experience through a minor gesture. When the artwork exceeds its status as an object when the work becomes relational rather than simply interactive, when there really is a sense that what is at stake is more-than the sum of the artwork’s parts, a minor gesture has been generated."
