COMMUNICATION (2013)

installation/performance

created for the Composition Beyond Music workshop at the 2013 Impuls New Music Academy in Graz, Austria, then featured as part of the group show Seelenwäsche (9 March - 9 June 2013) at the Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten, Graz, Austria. 

In Communication, I wanted to address the issue of sound as a social signifier. Originating from the idea that "no sound is innocent" and that no noise can be heard in social or cultural isolation, I believe that the idea of an "absolute music" seems, to me, to be decrepit and out-dated. "Everything is a found object," as Feldman said. 

By participating in the Composition Beyond Music workshop, the compositional process is fully self-aware and self-conscious. This work EMPHASIZES THE IMPORTANT CRITICAL ATTITUDE OF THE COMPOSER AS AN ARTIST AND SOCIAL CREATURE. For instance, what are the social power dynamics between composer and audience, one which is dominative or submissive?

I can compose perception, attitude, memory, listening, attentiveness/attention by manipulating auditory as well as visual and tactile signifiers. By working with sound and visual as cultural signifiers, I've come to more intensely realize the power of these symbols and the ethical imperative of ART to be aware of connotation and to resist hegemonic, colonial, or persecutive uses of these signifiers. In the end, they are ideas and ideas are immensely powerful.

My piece is called COMMUNICATION, a term used by French philosopher and mystic Georges Bataille to describe the state achieved through ecstatic meditation, a state where all physical divisions are dissolved and one becomes conjoined with a  greater "whole" or "unity." Therefore, the project became intensely biographical. I explore the larger role of religion, prayer, and meditation in my life, in my personal history, in my family.

Profile in Kultum: Zentrum für Zeitgenössische Kunst & Religion in Graz

Materials:

Sound samples of me praying the Rosary, Filipinos in prayer on Good Friday, colored silence/drone, sex (piped through small amplifiers)

Rope

Sack Cloth

Barbed wire

Performance::

In order to complete the biographical component of the piece, I knew that the project required bodily dedication. By placing my body within the piece, the piece achieves a sense of physical as well as psychic vulnerability and personal truth. My body and my actions provide a physical locus for the sound environment I have created for the piece. During the performance (approximately 2 hours in duration), my naked body is engaged with the act of writing, an act often intended to record and keep information for posterity, to be used as an aid in memory, an act which implies a degree of permanence. However, the white chalk on the white wall conveys a sense of loss and disappearance, the "truth" and "belief" conveyed through my thoughts and fingers falling away as dust at my feet, the meaning and permanence of what I had written invisible and thus, intelligible and nearly worthless. It is only the act which remains. The vigor and force of an inextinguishable inner drive and focus is all that is experienced in the performance. What visually seems hopeless is in fact utopian.