Artist Statement

Lately I’ve been giving some thoughts to developing an artist’s statement that would unite my various artistic endeavours.  Given my seemingly disparate output, I thought this would be a lot harder to do, but the statement wrote itself…  I rapidly discovered an underlying theme in (almost) all my artistic interests and it just fit and felt right.  I really believe this is what I’ve been doing all these years, but, for the first time, I’ve now described it with words.

What I’ve realised is that, in my art, I explore the distinction between the symbol (word, image or sound) and the object it represents.  By scrambling this distinction, the symbol can become artistic building blocks and objects can acquire meaning.  My approach draws inspiration from the works of Magritte and Gödel's theorem on the incompleteness of mathematics.

In Les deux mystères, Magritte depicts a painting of a tobacco pipe on an easel. Below the pipe we can read the phrase: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (this is not a pipe).  Besides the painting, there is another pipe (the presumed model for the painting).  In this painting, Magritte brings our attention to the distinction between the symbol (the pipe on the easel) and the object it represents (the “real” pipe besides the easel).  However, this last pipe is no more an object than the pipe from the painting on the easel.  They’re both images of pipes…  With this realisation in mind, we can read once again the phrase on the painting and become aware that, just like these pipes are not really pipes, the words are not words.  Rather, they’ve become coloured shapes on the canvas.  The symbol is objectified and manipulated to create art.

In his famous theorem, Gödel shatters the distinction between the discourse about numbers and the numbers themselves by producing an equation that talks about itself.  This equation tells us that it is part of the mathematical domain, but that it cannot be demonstrated.  The object of mathematical discourse participates in the discussion… the object is elevated to symbol and acquires meaning.

In my artistic practice, I explore this movement from object to symbol and from symbol to object.  I do this by producing self-referential films, images (films and comic books) by manipulating other images or words, music from language, music where the notes are both musical material and control signal to change parameters and computer assisted poetry.  Recently, I’ve also created a game that sends control messages to change musical parameters based on what’s happening in the game.

Where I propose to go

These last few months since Y2KX+2 have seen much development on my meta-trombone.  The first thing I wanted to do after those performances was to replace the first instance of Mobius in my signal chain.  I think the way I was using it (as a sampler, rather than a looper) caused it to crash in performance.  After some research, I opted for Expert Sleepers’ Crossfade Loop Synth.  I was able to recreate the functionality I was getting from Mobius by expanding my Bidule patch, which turned out to be fairly painless.  This new sampler does add some interesting possibilities such as:

-          Note polyphony;

-          Built-in filter, pitch modulation, LFOs;

-          Different loop play back modes (Forward-and-backward being my favourite).

The other area of development was the addition of midi effects.  Whereas I only had midi note delay for my performances in California, I have now added Xfer’s Cthulhu to my patch.  This nice little plugin consists of two independently selectable midi effects: a chord memorizer and an arpeggiator.  The chord module allows me to assign a user-defined chord to any midi note.  Sending chords rather single notes to sampler plays back the sampled phrase at different playback rates all at once (something I find very satisfying).  The arpeggiator takes the output of the chord module and sequences the chord notes according to a pre-defined pattern.

The next aspect to see development will be the post-looper effects block.  Presently, I think I want to add both delay and tremolo slicing, but I may come up with other options as I work on this (suggestions?).

After that, I will concentrate on developing the iOS performance software component of this system.  Presently, I’m using TouchOSC to display system status information (such as what the looper is doing to what track or what performance mode I’m in), but I intend to build on the technology I’ve developed for my OSCNotation app (version 2.0 forthcoming) and display notation on my iPhone.  Since the system can already determine the notes that I’m playing (or have played recently), I’d like to use that information when deciding what notation to display.  For instance, the system could suggest new rhythmic or tonal material that either follows what I’ve played or that contradicts it.  Ideally, I’d like to build some game mechanics into it that would react to whether or not I accept these suggestions.  For example, the “game” could start with only a few functions available to the performer and advanced function needing to be “unlocked” by advancing in the game (i.e. playing what is suggested).  I’ve already explored this music game idea with my app BreakOSC!, but the idea still inspires me.