"The pleasure of space: This cannot be put into
words, it is unspoken. Approximately: it is a form of
experience --the "presence of absence"; exhilarating
differences between the plane and the cavern, between
the street and your living-room; the symmetries and
dissymmetries emphasizing the spatial properties of my
body: right and left, up and down. Taken to its extreme,
the pleasure of space leans toward the poetics of the
unconscious, to the edge of madness."
Bernard Tschumi, Architecture and Disjunction
On Space reflects on the texts and ideas of a painter, a writer and an architect that shaped Art over the last century.
In his transcendental book "On the Spiritual in Art" (1910), Wassily Kandinsky wrote:
1. The Artist, as a creator, has to express what is of himself.
2. The Artist, as a child of his time, has to express what belongs to his time.
3. The Artist, in service of Art, must express what belongs to Art.
Kandinsky's ideas, especially those of space and expression, made their way into the piece, embodied as sound trajectories in space that behave as points and lines to plane.
Related to the form of the piece is a text by Borges: "La muerte y la brújula" (1942). Along the pages of this fascinating story, a detective (Erik Lönnrot, "an Auguste Dupin" of detectives) finds his own destiny within an infinite labyrinth that is his own city. A series of mysterious deaths equidistant in time and space are the clues that help him find his own death at Triste-le-Roy (south of a mythical Buenos Aires). The music of On Space is deployed in different spaces that are all perspectives of the same urban landscape from the four cardinal points (North, West, East, South). As in the text, the same things are replicated ad infinitum, and the idea that we only need three points to find a fourth becomes obsessive.
Years before designing the folies for La Villette in Paris, Bernard Tschumi wrote in his essay "Questions of Space" (1974):
1.0 Is space a material thing in which all material things are to be located?
1.1 If space is a material thing, does it have boundaries?
1.11 If space has boundaries, is there another space outside those boundaries?
1.12 If space does not have boundaries, do things then extend infinitely?
In On Space, percussion and electronics are combined to sculpt sound in space, somehow trying to answer these questions in terms of sound poetry. The program for the piece was developed as a dynamic urban design where each section is constructed to show a virtual perspective from different vanishing points.
On Space closes a cycle of pieces that explores the materiality of percussion sound: metal (Métal Hurlant), wood (Toco Madera), and skins (Skin Heads). On Space uses the sound materials created in all these works to shape space as a continuous matter, capable of inflexions and changes.
On Space was realized at the Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), University of Washington, Seattle. I'd like to thank the center's director, Richard Karpen, for his support. I'd also like to thank Les Percussions de Strasbourg for comissioning the work.
Project Credits