- Abstractive extensive studies
- Three situation studies
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Three measurement studies
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Greenwich House, 1957
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At every instant, seeing reason to believe as much, and not being able to satisfy himself of the contrary, he should conceive himself to be so.
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Timecode studies
- Postproductions
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[number of performers-date-abbreviated venue name]
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Edgar Varèse and the Jazzmen
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Piano Reductions
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Luftlinien
Contents (book)
366 text scores
2020 - 2021
366 text scores
2020 - 2021
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.