Contents — Raphaël Belfiore

Contents (book)
366 text scores

2020 - 2021

Contents is a collection of musical text scores written daily over the span of exactly one year, between May 22nd 2020 and May 22nd 2021. Among the resulting 366 scores, some can be realized as music, sound and various other media while others are abstract sketches and spatial arrangements of typographic symbols.

It was not originally intended as an art project, but started as a personal writing practice similar to a notebook. It remained untitled and largely ignored for some time after its completion and its meaning was only found in retrospect. The title "Contents" is the result of this retrospective interpretation and describes different aspects of the collection.

Firstly, it refers to the way the writing process changed over time. During the first weeks, the scores occurred every day spontaneously. Naturally, this situation did not last and the decision was eventually made to keep writing under any circumstance. One consequence of this was the appearance of graphic scores made only with typographic signs. They were an emergency solution to keep the flow of scores going. This decision led to a extensive change in mentality, from a quality-oriented thinking to a quantity-oriented one and the final principle of the collection was thus fixated: at a regular daily rate, a text score with a certain degree of novelty should be written. As a title "Contents" expresses minimally this idea: the simple presence of some content is more important than its precise character.

Secondly, the collection was written during the period of lockdowns, in which all information available was formatted as "audiovisual content" on the Internet. Despite its extremely vague meaning, online content exists and behaves in specific ways. Notably, it is organised in streams, flows, lists, etc… and has often a specific function: catching the attention of the viewer. Moreover, since each element co-exists with a lot of other in a series, it must not be too intense or too complete in order for the flow of content to be consumed ideally endlessly. It must therefore be short, fragmentary and easy to understand. Moreover, its is quantitatively evaluated: the quality of content is equal to the number of people who interact with it. "Content creation" involves therefore a sort of logistification of creativity in order to deliver specifically formatted productions at a consistent rate.

Many scores in the collection refer to online content in a way or another. Some of them use it as a source (like using content from specific social media or platforms) while others demonstrate principles traceable to it (like "reaction" or "commmentary" videos). More generally, a lot of scores also deal with general topic of art in the age of the internet like advertisement, copyright, surveillance and behavioural control as well as their counteracting. It is even reasonable to consider the very principle behind the writing of all of these scores as being closer to content creation than traditional art-making.

The collection’s coming to existence can be seen as the reaction of a particular subject to encountering an extreme amount of content. Writing the collection was thus a way to order and incorporate a part of this quantity into manageable units. In hindsight the collection can be understood as an accidental and indirect documentation of a situation which does not only concern the pandemic, but more generally the actual state of thinking and maybe even the fate of art in general. It should however not be considered a critique or a pure refusal of "content" or "content creation", which would maybe be a further step in the project. The aim is at this stage is to survey aspects of the contemporary transformations in thinking at a pre-critical level to outline it and possibly understand something from it.

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excerpts

Contents (exhibition)
Multimedia exhibition from the text score book “Contents”

2024

Contents is a collection of musical text scores written daily over the span of exactly one year, between May 22nd 2020 and May 22nd 2021. Among the resulting 366 scores, some can be realized as music, sound and various other media while others are abstract sketches and spatial arrangements of typographic symbols.

The collection has previously been presented partially on several occasions, either as book prototype, a lecture-performance, a film or a public reading. On the occasion of the collection’s publication in book form, it was presented in a more exhaustive way in the Druckereihalle im Ackermannshof in Basel. It involved not only the scores themselves, but also their implementation in various forms such as audio or audiovisual works, prints and a multi-media installation.

Some of these scores were realised for the first presentation of the project in 2022 while others have been created specifically for the occasion. The initial choice of scores to be presented here has been made without trying to reduce the heterogenous collection to a single unified topic or narrative. It presents scores involving a variety of topics and strategies that somehow relate to each other through the notion of "content".

The exhibition comprised scores 65, 77, 86, 130 (paper) and 97 (four versions on large-format plastic sheets) were on display in printed form. The following scores were also shown as videos on screens and projections: 56, 61, 87, 125, 129, 174, 203, 263, 283, 283, 284, 304, 310, 327, 343 and 353.

The exhibition’ vernissage also included a concert by violist Frantz Loriot, in which he performed a selection of the book's “textual-graphic” scores. This was followed by a reading-performance on the collection by Raphaël Belfiore.

presentation: 20 - 24.03.2024 / Druckereihalle im Ackermannshof, Basel

concept, realisation: Raphaël Belfiore
exhibited works with: Canberk Duman, Frantz Loriot, Killian Perret-Gentil, Tatiana Timonina & Maxine Yolanda
technical and exhibition design support: Lea Pusch & Dakota Wayne
Technical support: Beat Burkhardt
poster + flyer design: Tristan Bartolini
Acknowledgements: Philippe Kocher, Micha Seidenberg & Theo Gada

exhibition leaflet

Contents (performances)
various performances related to the text score book “Contents”

2022 / 2024

Contents: lecture-performance (first version) / 15.06.2022

On the occasion of the first public presentation of the book "Contents" in prototype form, a trial version of the lecture-performance around the collection was presented. It involved some realizations of scores from the collection as short videos. These videos were presented according to a strict sequence during the lecture. This sequence was proportionally correlated to the position of each realized score in the book. The discursive part of the performance involved explaining the process and proposing an interpretation of its more general significance. The end result was a relatively standard artist presentation interspersed at seemingly arbitrary moments with video pieces. As the presentation unfolded, the videos and their order of appearance seemed decreasingly arbitrary.

Around the exhibition “Contents” in Basel in March 2024, several performances were organized

Frantz Loriot interprets “textual-graphic scores” / 21.03.2024

scores 37, 48, 56, 65, 77, 86, 107, 126 and 130

The performance comprised the first and the last one in the collection and proposes a sort timeline of their evolution. Some of them were performed for the first time while others already were presented as video performances on a screen in the exhibition. The already played scores are given a new interpretation, differing from the ones recorded. In order to preserve the “textuality” of these scores, they have been adapted to become surtitles during the performance.

Frantz Loriot, viola

Contents: lecture-performance / 21.03.2024

This lecture-performance aimed to propose a survey of the collection exactly 1400 days after its writing started. It implied looking back at the conditions of creation of the piece and building step by step a actualized interpretation on the collection. While mostly a lecture, it is also a performance as it is also realisation of at least three scores in the collection (133/162/207). It also contains materials that were prepared for the exhibition but eventually not included in its final form.

Raphaël Belfiore, speaker

Contents: public reading / 24.03.2024

To close the exhibition, a selection of verbal scores was read in public.