Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Chapter 14, focus on the sound in that elliptics blank spots. This chapter invites you to touch the art installation and focus on it. Soundscape
Speaker 1 00:00:13 Facing the low square pedestal reached down to fuel. What is displayed on top of it? The pedestal is one by one meter and a half meter high. It holds six stacks of loose leaf paper. Each stack holds about 300 photocopies of one of the patterns from the canvas squares. You're welcome to feel how high the papers stacked afterwards. Spend some time listening to the soundscape that accompanies blank spots. What are the sounds, words and tones that you can identify sound is a critical element of this artwork. And in particular, the chorus of overlapping voices, sometimes speaking and sometimes singing the soundscape is broadcast from six speakers set on the gallery four. It creates an all encompassing atmosphere. Nadia is interested in expanding the ways that music is composed and performed the stacks of paper, actually record unique musical score. She has created their unusual. One side of the paper holds a reproduction of one of the patterns from the squares over each one.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 She has written words, trace the outlines of some of the shapes or overlaid typed text. The other side of the paper is divided into two, an excerpt from a text that the artist is drawn towards and instructions for a song based on that excerpt, here's a description of one of the scores on the pattern side of the paper. Nadia has outlined the main splotch with a dotted line so that it looks like a map of a country. She has drawn straight lines at different angles from one side of the paper to the other along each line is a word in cursive though. The words are difficult to discern. The word that appears most often is breath. The excerpt of the text on the score is from a book by Karen Barad, entitled meeting the universe, halfway quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning published by duke university press in 2007.
Speaker 1 00:02:09 Here's what the text says to be. Entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent self-contained existence, existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions. Rather individuals emerge through and as a part of their entangled interrelating, which is not to say that emergence happens once. And for all as an event or as a process that takes place according to some external measure of space and time, but rather the time and space like matter and meaning come into existence are iteratively, reconfigured through each interaction, thereby making it impossible to differentiate in any absolute sense between creation and renewal, beginning and returning continuity and discontinuity here and their past and future.
Speaker 1 00:03:06 And here's the score or instructions for the composition that is inspired by this text. It takes the form of a mathematical equation to be entangled for the lines, indicating words, apart from breath, singing each word, following its line. The intonation and pitch is varying depending on the size of the square. The line is crossing the smaller, the higher for the lines indicating breath, breathing quicker for the line, crossing smaller square, breathing slower for the line crossing bigger square interchanging X to Y to be repeated and times X plus S two plus a creation breath, breath, beginning breath, continuity, breath, breath here. Breath past breath, breath. Y T plus B one plus B two renewal breath, breath returning breath, discontinuity, breath, breath there. Breath. Future breath, breath creation, renewal breath, breath, breath, breath. Beginning returning breath, breath. Continuity, discontinuity, breath, breath, breath, breath. Hear their breath. Breath pass. Future breath, breath, breath, breath creation, renewal breath, breath, breath, breath again. Giving breath, breath, breath, breath, breath here. Breath past breath,
Speaker 2 00:04:56 Breath, create new breath. Breath, beginning breath, continuity. Nuity breath, breath, breath, future breath.
Speaker 1 00:05:11 Right. How would this song sound to you? These instructions are for voices like soprano and tenor, but no instruments. It can be interpreted in many different ways, depending on how the equations are filled. Can you imagine it, even though you might never hear it, how would you compare the work by Joel Toms and this one by Nadia there's resonance in the way that each artist combines and recombines and Lares modes of representation of unknown matters and intangible experiences. Can you relate these skills to how scientists explore invisible phenomenon? What other ways do you see the work of these artists intersecting with ideas of dark matter or of the search for things that can't be easily detected.
