Can place be something that no longer exists? Returning to Tim Cresswell’s commentary on defining place, an interesting point is made when considering place as more than a physical location, but a preservation of space and time. In speaking of changes made to New York City’s Lower East Side from the 1960s to the early 2000s, Cresswell speaks of place as something rather more than simply a physical location:
The museum is an attempt to produce a 'place of memory' where the experiences of immigrants will not be forgotten. The gardens are the result of the efforts of immigrants and others to carve out a place from a little piece of Manhattan for their community to enjoy nature. Some of the community gardens — often the first to be leveled — are the sites of Casitas-little houses made by the Puerto Rican community to replicate similar buildings from 'home'. They are draped with Puerto Rican flags and other symbols of elsewhere.x
The pivotal point of this commentary is the notion that placemaking is not always just about making a better future out of the present, but it can also be about building a better future through direct reference to the past, accessing our so-called “places of memory.” This is of extreme importance for why I do what I do as an artist. My work is nostalgic and sentimental — my work is a testament to the good things which I have experienced and a desire to bring them with me as I build my future.
Of course, these experiences are not entirely just personal, and many topics allow for a space where personal sentimentality stretches deeper into a shared cultural experience. Exploring the past as part of the future became the focus of Untitled.exe, a 2022 work based entirely on sonification of the installation files for the Windows 98 operating system and inspired heavily by cultural nostalgia for the late 1990s and early 2000s.
As journalist Günseli Yalcinkaya puts it, a recent cultural reemergence in early-2000s media could be seen as driven by the freedom originally found in the nascent days of the internet:
A World Wide Wild West, the 2000s marks an innocent time in internet history where Geocities and online forums served as global villages, where like-minded people could gather en masse for the first time ever…Piracy file-sharing services like Napster and Limewire revolutionised and democratised the way we consume media, while platforms like Second Life and Habbo Hotel responded to the onset of new technologies with bold metaverses ripe for exploration…For many of us growing up, the internet was our first chance to experience the world outside the limits of our immediate surroundings. Dialling up to the internet felt like entering a magical world removed from IRL.x
This is a major point of my interaction with the past in my art: Where are the places in time (‘places of memory’) that brought us the most security and happiness? What brought us these feelings then, and how can we bring them with us now that the time has passed?
My first experiences with interactivity and freedom in technology came when I could have been no more than five or six years old by way of an unwieldy beige Gateway PC running Windows 98 in my mother’s work studio. From time to time I would get the opportunity to play a select number of CD-Roms, generally educational titles. I sincerely remember a large number of them, and very fondly: Jumpstart Spanish, Winnie the Pooh: ABCs, Finding Nemo. Eventually that huge monitor got moved into my bedroom when my parents upgraded their main desktop — at night my darkened room glowed in the harsh light of cathode-ray interlacing. This ‘memory place’ is pivotal to me not for any specific reason, but simply because I had gained a small bit of freedom of exploration — as in the words of Günseli Yalcinkaya, finally a world outside my immediate surroundings.
Over time this nostalgia has creeped into my enjoyment of art as a daily event, as well. The rise of the vaporwave genre — which incorporates aspects of late-1990s pop culture and manipulated recordings of late-20th century smooth jazz and lounge music — occurred when I was a teenager in the early-to-mid 2010s, periodically making its way into my listening over the subsequent years. Artists of recent years have often referenced the nostalgia for an era of nascent technological expansion in their work, whether in the fine art-focused projects of multimedia artist and composer Samson Young (such as in pieces like 2008’s Ageha.Tokyo) or less academic works like musician and comedian Gabriel Gundacker’s 2017 Unofficial Wii Sports Soundtrack. In reference to Thomas Meadowcroft’s 2021 Another Children’s Television — a piece which presents itself as an archive of invented children’s television jingles from 1970s Australia — American music theorist Judith Lochhead singles out key aspects of music which access these “places of memory”: The processes of “hearing memories become now” and “hearing the sound-things of memory.”1 In speaking about the piece, Meadowcroft notes that the process of “hearing memories become now” contains a duality about the way in which we handle nostalgia through art, dealing with both the feelings of freedom and acknowledgment of naivete that come with the nostalgic experience:
On the one hand, these musical blocks of Anglo-American cultural memory induce a melancholia for a lost time, when daily routine was shaped by free-to-air television, and not everything was privatized. On the other hand, to quote Walter Benjamin, 'in waste products, children recognize that the face of the world of things turns towards them, and towards them alone.'2
How do we recover this freedom and these “memory places” through our work? Finding an answer to this question for myself and a small group of collaborators became the goal of Untitled.exe, which was written for the Konstruct.23 project organized between the Royal Conservatory and percussion group Slagwerk Den Haag. This project allowed me to collaborate closely with a percussionist (in this case my fantastic colleague João Brito) in the development of a new work, which grew into a piece for quartet with live and fixed electronics and video in December 2022 (receiving its premiere in Korzo Theatre in The Hague).
The first step of this process centered around developing a translation from the concept of Windows 98 into a sonic experience. Since early 2022 I had been experimenting with alternative, fairly unsophisticated methods of sonifying data, and sometime after the summer I stumbled upon the least sophisticated and most fitting of all of them: the direct translation of .exe files — executable files often used in the Windows operating system as the main launch point for computer programs — to audio. I wish that I could tell you this process was difficult, but it was almost ridiculously simple; in fact, the freeware program Audacity allows one to import raw data files (such as .exe files) into the program and have them translated into audio. This process mainly results in bursts of complex noise, sometimes detailed and intricate, yet mostly overwhelming and incomprehensible. I chose to work with an original Windows 98 installation file3 as a sort of toolbox for sonic extraction.4 The file ended up being just over 55 minutes long, mainly consisting of long stretches of white noise with slight interference present here and there. However, there was a significant divergence from this material, as well, with moments of acrobatic, exciting bursts of pitch and moments of short irregular repetitions that easily remind one of glitches. Easily the most exciting part of the sonification is what I call the “sound compression” section: Seemingly, every sound used in the program, from start-up noises to alerts to clicks, was compressed into 43 seconds of material, creating a fascinating sonic experience as the sonification seemingly “cycles” through every sound in the entire program while being briefly interrupted by bursts of noise. The “sound compression” is one of the most amazing things I’ve found in my searches for these types of sounds, a moment where an object is able to say “here is all of me — and presented in a very digestible bite.”
This audio fascinates me because it contains a duality — there is something aggressive and unexpected (the harsh noise) beneath this concept I have so much nostalgia for, yet at the same time, it contains something so clear and direct as a representation of itself (the “sound compression”). It challenges what I thought I knew about the inner workings of this experience which I have so much connection to while simultaneously reminding me that some aspects will remain warm and inviting — perhaps even a bit comical. In a way, its duality contains the same experience as Thomas Meadowcroft describes as part of Another Children’s Television, where sentimentality is balanced by an acknowledgment and reminder of commercialization.
The final aspect of the process focused on finding the links between the material, myself, and my collaborators. Though I approached this concept for personal reasons, I also felt it provided a healthy space for others to connect with it. Many people of my generation — especially those with enough privilege in life to be attending a conservatory — grew up with a similar experience to mine in terms of introduction to technology and resulting nostalgia over the technological aesthetic of the early 2000s. This proved itself in this process, as when João and I approached the other three members of the quartet involved in the project — João Borralho, Maria de la Calle, and Ludovica Ballerino — their reactions to the concept were extremely personal. Finding the “character” of the sonification and its relationship to percussion and the act of sound-making was an integral element of their contribution to the collaboration. As performers, we conducted sessions of exploration between the sonification and different instruments, but also exploration between the sonification and purpose of interaction — as we built the piece, João, João, Maria, and Ludovica all each made suggestions and musical decisions based on their memories of technology from the past.=
This continues with the form and the use of repetition throughout the piece. In phantom islands, saltwater superstructures, recursion and stasis were featured elements of the piece at differing timescales, but in this piece, they alternate in patterns of rooting and uprooting. At its core, Untitled.exe considers where we have gone since the period of this technology’s heyday, close enough to be remembered vividly while at the same moment so different from our current place in time and technological development, and the structure of the piece relies upon this conceit. A simple repetitive pattern — four roto-tom strikes repeating in different rhythmic configurations — finds its way as a key structural landmark of the piece throughout. The treatment of this pattern is important for establishing and reiterating this process of rooting and uprooting in the music. Formally, Untitled.exe consists of a video-and-electronics-only introduction, four musical sections, and a video-and-percussion epilogue. This roto-tom pattern begins the piece proper and serves as its main musical material for the first section (a minute and thirty seconds of the performance duration) before being left behind by the switch to the piece’s second main section. In this way, it exists as the stasis disturbed by the moments of change, the rooted uprooted. However, it returns twice more — in the middle of the third section of the piece and as the main material of the epilogue — to interrupt firmly-established sections, turning the role of the pattern from the representation of stasis to an agent of transformation and disruption, all the while making it clear that structural relationships in the piece are not restricted to their existence in only one form.
This piece also hones in on the element of repetition in electronic music. This is a more complicated proposition than repetition in acoustic music; you can’t actually repeat something as a performer, as slight variation will always exist and always keep any repetition tense with the feeling of change. But repetition can be literally reiterative in electronic music, leading to completely different implications for the material. However, this serves the conceptual material well, as repetition in the piece’s electronic music components is focused on glitch and timescale variance — elements that are very present in this current cultural nostalgia for late-90s and early 2000s technology. These elements create their own relationship of rooting and uprooting throughout the piece, working both in tandem with the piece’s larger structure and in contrasting timescales. For example, the percussionist’s opening material, which is heavily reiterative in the acoustic structure (mm. 2, cue 2 in the score), live-triggers different glitch samples drawn from the data sonification, creating a relationship of multiple recursive timescales occurring simultaneously. This element continues in sections such as the third main section of the piece (marked at mm. 179, cue 37) which finds electronic samples triggered at different speeds in contrast to the performers’ material, which is repeated verbatim at the beginning of each reiteration, creating shifting timescales within repetitions.
Since this piece’s performance, I’ve reevaluated its message and methods of dissemination in conversation with a number of other composers and artists. I am not convinced that the piece needs to be performed exclusively with video, and this depends on the audience — American audiences have shown a preference for the video’s presence, while European audiences have shown a preference towards removing it altogether. However, I think it’s important to note this mainly because their reasons for this opinion have revolved around its power as a placemaking piece of art: For some, the presence of the video helps them reconnect with the virtual place, while for others its presence as an audio-only work allows for a more open interpretation of the place — perhaps more in line with the consideration of this previously-mentioned nostalgia for the open and free possibility of technology in the late 1990s. I achieved a personal recreation of place with this performance, reconnected to a pivotal part of my experience and younger existence, but I also helped to create a place that reached others (at the very least, my collaborators). At the same time, we reimagined this existence within the growing context of modern technology: a constant push and pull between growing freedom and restriction, and opening boundaries of sound-making, bringing the past with us into the future.
