The present exposition pertains to the sonic and conceptual development of what I refer to as ‘material composition’. The meaning is two-fold: on the one hand, it calls for compositional and performative tactics that address the materiality of the digital, metaphorically but also corporeally, and, on the other hand, it outlines a more general stance towards sound and media, whereby material transformations take place by pairing up ones that are not necessarily perceived as substantial, thus blurring the encoding-decoding processes across media.In this sense, composition means both the arrangement of sounds but also a more literal arrangement of matter itself. To that extent, performances are understood as more densely packed compositions that take place in real time in response to materials and their transformations. Certain developed techniques in modal synthesis make that approximation to real-time transformations more palpable, at least sonically, if not physically.
The following works make up a series that best illustrate how my practice changes the more I look at matter, computation and sound, whilst backdropped with a critical question: how does one maintain a materialist position while producing work through digital and computational means?
These works and their development are informed by previous academic research questions in philosophy and mathematics; in particular, materialism, the challenges that digitality poses to any materialism (‘historical’, ‘new’, and so on) and the relationship of Riemannian geometry to Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical work.
From more recent investigations in the revival of materialist thought, one of the possible solutions to address the problem posed resonates with a strand of new materialism put forward by Gamble, Hanan and Nail in ‘What is New Materialism?’ which they refer to as “performative or pedetic materialism”. In a nutshell, if all that there is, is matter and even an observation of matter is implicated and co-constituted with matter itself, any engagement with algorithms must also be co-constitutive and transformative in the ongoing process that matter is.
With this in mind, please listen to the following contextualizing audio and feel free to navigate along through the works that follow.
{kind: paragraph, function: introduction, keywords: [materialism, material, materiality, composition, performance, ecoding, decoding, process, transformations, matter, digital, computation]}
Univocal:Univocal:Univocal, exhibition-specific performance, Volks, Nicosia, 2016
35m tape loop, reel to reel, single-voice synth, mouthed hydrophone, rocks
Money Riddle, live performance at record label Moneda's IPO, Nicosia, 2018
Old void copper coins, copper sheet, copper speckles, transducer, effects, AI-modelled voice narration and laptop.
Sediment Versions (I-IX) in collaboration with Andrés Saenz de Sicilia, part of group exhibition Memory Games at Villa Lontana, Rome, 2020.
Nine tracks cut on 10" dubplate to be played during exhibition, at various intervals.
