May 17th, 2020
For my senior degree project, I’m exploring the role that digital deterioration has played in my recent work, and work to come. My first drawing professor, Tom Mills, encouraged erasure in our work. He taught us constantly about how pentimenti can add energy and narrative to artwork. These processes have stayed with me ever since. Recently, I have begun to think about deterioration from other standpoints. Two main turning points for me include reading “The Aesthetics of Failure” by Kim Cascone, and a project where I had to research and present the history of the aestheticization of ruins.
“The Aesthetics of Failure” focuses on discussing musicians who use the sounds produced by the technical failure of their instruments, which, in the case of digital music, is referred to as post-digital music. An example of post-digital music would be Yasunao Tone’s “AI Deviation.” In this work, Tone worked alongside a programmer to create software that featured several different artificial intelligences that represent different aspects of Tone’s personality. During performances, the AIs would attempt to fix corrupted MP3 files that Tone would feed them in real time. He would then attempt to deviate the AIs during this process, resulting in a huge variety of abrasive digital sounds. Another example (however of physical deterioration) would be William Basinski’s “The Deterioration Loops”. Basinski found that his cassette tape recordings of his classical compositions would deteriorate over the process of being played, as they were not stored well. He then recorded the process of all of these tape loops fully deteriorating to create the final work.
In reflection of my recent work, I became particularly interested in glitches and malfunctions that would occur throughout the process of audio programming and editing. Glitch aesthetic in and of itself is not something that I’ve ever been particularly attracted to. However, the process of failure itself interests me. Artist Eugénie Shinkle wrote that “[i]n a failure event, the unimaginably large, extroverted, operatic sublime – which many video games attempt to simulate visually – is replaced by an unimaginably complex ‘introverted’ sublime that is incapable of presentation to the senses.” She continues by describing how this fits into Kant’s idea of the sublime, writing, “it is not the object that is the source of sublime sensation, but our inability to comprehend its inner workings.”
When I read this, my mind went to kill screens in classic arcade games. The game Galaga has a kill screen that represents Shinkle’s argument best. The developers did not anticipate that anyone would ever be able to make it past level 255. At level 256, the code ends and the game breaks. The screen reads “Level 0.” The text then disappears and the player is left with a screen of the rocket ship drifting through an empty galaxy, with no enemies to shoot at, no goals, and no way to finish the game. The user is now stuck here in what writer Joshuah Bearman describes as an existential void. For me, this existential void illustrates Shinkle’s argument of the introverted sublime in a failure event.
In the canon of noise music, musicians use failure events in a similar way to Yasunao Tone, William Basinski, and Galaga. In my performance piece “On This Night”, I drew connections between noise and Christmas music. For me, both function very similarly, but are seen publicly as complete opposites. Noise can often be compared to nihilism. The noise musician Vomir describes his aesthetic as “no ideas, no change, no development, no entertainment, no remorse.” In contrast to noise music, Christmas music is religious, celebratory, entertaining, and commercial. On the outside, they are opposites, but internally they share similar ambitions.
I find that noise music has so much happening in its dense and textural layers of sound, that my inability to comprehend it becomes a sublime sensation. In contrast, most Christmas songs, be it old or contemporary share similar song structures (going from dominant chords to diminished chords) as well as similar instrumentations (such as sleigh bells and glockenspiels). Despite this opposition in structure, I find that Christmas music is often sublime through its use of harmony to create a narrative. In “On This Night” I collaged both sounds together to depict these oppositions and similarities. The original piece was performed in a space where 25 speakers were set up in a perfect dome. In the piece, around 3:20, if you were to stand in the middle of the space, you would hear nothing but a wall of noise. However, in each of the 25 speakers was a different famous Christmas song, so that if you were to walk towards an individual speaker, you’d begin to hear each song clearly. This part of the piece owes a debt to Janet Cardiff’s “40 Piece Motet,” in which 40 speakers play Salisbury Cathedral Choir singing “Spem In Alium,” composed by Thomas Tallis. Each of these 40 speakers has an individual vocalist of the choir, altering the way in which one could physically interact with the recording.
In moving back to my hometown due to Covid-19, my thinking about failure and deterioration has shifted towards the aspect of reconstruction. Often, the process of deconstructing something can lead us to a better understanding of it’s inner workings. In “Untitled,” I programmed an algorithm that uses the brightness of my backyard to control a Seed function which continuously reorganizes all of the notes of Bill Evan’s “Peace Piece.” Evans originally wrote this song to convey a feeling of loneliness. In performing this song, he romanticizes the idea of loneliness into something beautiful. For me, it is his harmonies which accurately portray loneliness, and the composition which romanticizes it. In recomposing this song, I aimed to more accurately represent what separation during Covid-19 meant for me. In “Peace Piece,” Evans was heavily inspired by the impressionist classical musicians I mentioned in the beginning of this statement. In “Untitled,” I refer to impressionism in the use of a mundane landscape. The primary difference is that this landscape is very matter-of-fact, and does not attempt to romanticize or overly compose what it is, in ordinance with the continuous results of the audio. It is now only time and location which controls the composition.
Bibliography
Shinkle, Eugénie. “Video Games and the Technological Sublime.” Tate, 2010, www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/14/video-games-and-the-technological-sublime.
Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Subsol, MIT Press, 2002, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/10.1162/014892600559489