Much, if not all of my work, is in fact centered around the act of writing—whether in sound, music, language, visually on a surface, or three-dimensionally as sculpture. The act of writing is simultaneously a putting down of what one knows (or thinks one knows) as well as opening one up to the possibility of not knowing, of discovery, and ultimately of questioning. One of the fundamental forms of this, and certainly one of the older forms in the history of writing, is that of the dialogue. In this sense, each work, no matter the medium, is a written form of a dialogue both with, within, and through the mediums and subjects embodied by the work, but of course also with the audience, the spectator.
Below are some of the recurring motifs that have preoccupied my thinking and research over the past number of years and has provided both the infrastructure as well as the interwoven conceptual materiality of much of my work in one or a number of forms.
— In search of Ariadne’s thread: agency and subjugation in the contemporary spectacle
This title of this ongoing research was first used in a recent talk I gave to the Introduction to Sound class in the Media Arts + Practice (MA+P) in the Cinematic Arts program at University of Southern California but is an apt framing device for one of the main areas of research and practice I am currently engaged in. It is particularly concerned with the (in)visible materialities that are leveraged in contemporary media practice—how they either advance or subjugate a spectator’s agency. One such material which grounds my overall interdisciplinary practice, is sound, particularly as it is counter-acted upon by the image and by body. Thus, my work is grounded in the position of questioning, or rather, the questioning of position. My work, both in interdisciplinary installation practice and in cinema (and other contemporary media) is concerned with this sculptural notion of positioning and the role technology plays as a mediator not only within the work itself but in relation to us as spectators both to the work itself as well as to our social (bodily) frames. This mediation and perception of sound begins for me with the, ironically, visual metaphor of a palimpsest, a visual-aural link drawn from the use of palimpsest as a metaphor for memory which I first encountered in Thomas De Quincey [The Palimpsest from his Suspiria De Profundis (1845)]. Note how the above diagram, a vertical slice through the layers of a palimpsest, also resembles the interactions of ‘lines of sound’ in a composition and thus a compositional ‘score’—could this be a trace-extension in the legacy of Beuys’ social sculpture if it were to both mirror and embodiment of social trace today? A score for a still-unfolding present-tense performance?
What happens when this has folded in on itself many times over until it has acquired an even more contemporary form via the sign of a labyrinth**—indeed a palimpsestian one—to become Diagram 2…? I propose that it is in fact within this new form, and not its predecessor, that we find ourselves today, where our signifiers and signifieds echo and feedback, devolved into safe-guarded corners the way frequencies pile up in certain areas of any architectural space. It is in this new technologically-mediated space—Baudrillard’s hyperreal?—with which we must contend, always in search of Ariadne’s thread.
**It is interesting to note that the anatomical definition of labyrinth is “a complex structure of the inner ear which contains the organs of hearing and balance.” [Oxford Languages]
This overall research has and continues to find embodiments in many material traces across disciplines from the below seminar focused on composition in film and media—Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle—to solo exhibitions and installations such as …These Things That Divide The World In Two… at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (2024) and Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances at AOCF54 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, to the performance piece Mother […] Mother, to artistic collaborations such as circa ten to the ninety with Foad Dizadji-Bahmani and Luc Trahand, and an upcoming essay Who am I then? asks K. …Who are we?: A Composition in Three Movements for the upcoming issue of Spunk Art and Perspectives.
“The Reader scans the room and encounters an object—A—in itself a subject in the system of objects, visual and aural, that encompasses the Reader. This subject voices the disembodied sounds displaced through distortions and refractions, embodying a system of cities and myth, walking, playing, transforming perception into the perceived via abstractions…”
—from Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances, a solo exhibition which engaged with three novels by Italo Calvino—If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Invisible Cities, and Mr. Palomar—as well as the three cities which paved my own journey to the exhibition: Bangkok, Los Angeles, Rome.
— On Traces
The (somewhat ironic) anchor point of movement also necessarily brings about the subject of traces, themselves material objects of such a movement. I’m interested in the traces of these bodily (and sometimes non-bodily) frames—visually for example with the use of vinegar as an ‘invisible’ material whose material traces are seen, such as in my work with copper (for instance 16 Permutations for Copper) but also more surreptitiously in a work such as Extracción de la pier de locura (Extracting the Stone of Madness), which material surface is a visual trace of vinegar and bodily movement (the physical attempt at excavating the surfaces of paint). —There is a correlation to my work with sound such as in Avant le deluge, après les rêves, where I re-recorded layers of (sampled) sounds from the city and the Angeles Crest mountains through both of the Angeles Crest tunnels (constructed between 1940-1950) and the underground water tunnel beneath (and in between them), often moving the sound source in relation to the recorder thus ‘performing’ a bodily movement which we hear as disembodied traces, further dislocated through the performance made by the Genkii Wave ring within the MaxMSP patch I created for the work. —Translation as excavation then deals with traces on two levels, the traces themselves which must be excavated, and the traces of the excavation itself, which inevitably fall into the palimpsestian stratas which resemble itself pre-excavation, thus a [cybernetic] feedback loop.
——Ideas themselves as material trace-objects that both have their own agencies—their own trajectories—and also the possibility (indeed a certainty) of being acted (and counter-acted) upon by a subject, whose performance upon the trace-object, like that of a musician and an instrument, is always a simultaneous movement of reaching back and reaching forwards.
— Some Notes on Relational Modularity
· Relational modularity as the holding tension between Taxonomy and the Ideal, between our need for classification in order to comprehend as well as our need to elude that fixity, to be ever in flux, to be, as it were, infinite held within the finite. [1]
· Its parentage lies in the tradition and legacies of both relational aesthetics and Fluxus, and its origins for me began with Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (via my essay “…perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two… Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity, and nationalism’ which formed the basis for my solo exhibition ‘…These Things That Divide The World In Two…’. The naming of this mode itself is anchored (and counter-anchored) by both its halves: modularity, a term that we see echoed in areas as diverse as science, technology, operations management and music—a trait that reflects my own interdisciplinary nature; and relational, which brings to this modularity an inherently musical, non-bodily frame wherein the function of a module is fluid and shifts in relation to its neighbors—as a note shifts its function depending on where it is positioned, from root note to consonance, dissonance—Other. [1]
· Within modularity, there are three inherent components at play: 1) the idea of subsystems or units that form a whole, 2) the whole itself, the system compromised of subsystems, and 3) the movement within, which I refer to as an act of translation as excavation. [1]
In relation to Beckett’s Footfalls: “The movement of the modules whose functions are redefined with each movement is an act of translation which excavates within that interstice between us without and they within.” [1] — This pertains to my reading of both characters within the play whose position is relational. i.e. May, whom we first hear and see, eventually by Act III permutes to Amy, while V moves variously as Mother in Act I to “I” at the beginning of Act II, to a third person narrator, to silence, and later, through Amy, appears, perhaps questionably, as Mrs. W. —This also touches upon my interest in Beckett’s use of what I’ve been referring to as topological deformations to constantly shift the relationships between I and Other, outside and inside. His late television play Ghost Trio is another great (and incredibly moving) example of this.
Another work that has influenced my conceptual mode of relational modularity is Jannis Kounellis’ untitled Apollo piece (1973), which has been re-performed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2022 50 years after it was last seen. In the work, “Kounellis, seated behind a table strewn with broken statuary, holds an Apollo mask in front of his face, while a flautist seated to the right of the table plays a thirty-second excerpt from Mozart, pauses for two minutes, and then repeats the phrase. Completing the tableau is a stuffed black raven perched atop a plaster torso.” [2]
Various Writings
Embodied Disembodiments: Composition, Semiotics, Spectacle
…But the clouds… seminar
…These Things That Divide The World In Two…
…perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two…: Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable, relational modularity, and nationalism
Per/formative Cities Exhibition Text