In search of Ariadne’s thread: agency and subjugation in the contemporary spectacle

This title of this ongoing research was first used in a recent talk I gave to the Introduction to Sound class in the Media Arts + Practice (MA+P) in the Cinematic Arts program at University of Southern California but is an apt framing device for one of the main areas of research and practice I am currently engaged in. It is particularly concerned with the (in)visible materialities that are leveraged in contemporary media practice—how they either advance or subjugate a spectator’s agency. One such material which grounds my overall interdisciplinary practice, is sound, particularly as it is counter-acted upon by the image and by body. Thus, my work is grounded in the position of questioning, or rather, the questioning of position. My work, both in interdisciplinary installation practice and in cinema (and other contemporary media) is concerned with this sculptural notion of positioning and the role technology plays as a mediator not only within the work itself but in relation to us as spectators both to the work itself as well as to our social (bodily) frames. This mediation and perception of sound begins for me with the, ironically, visual metaphor of a palimpsest, a visual-aural link drawn from the use of palimpsest [Diagram 1 right] as a metaphor for memory which I first encountered in Thomas De Quincey [The Palimpsest from his Suspiria De Profundis (1845)]. Note how the above diagram, a vertical slice through the layers of a palimpsest, also resembles the interactions of ‘lines of sound’ in a composition and thus a compositional ‘score’—could this be a trace-extension in the legacy of Beuys’ social sculpture if it were to both mirror and embodiment of social trace today? A score for a still-unfolding present-tense performance?

What happens when this has folded in on itself many times over until it has acquired an even more contemporary form via the sign of a labyrinth**—indeed a palimpsestian one—to become Diagram 2…? I propose that it is in fact within this new form, and not its predecessor, that we find ourselves today, where our signifiers and signifieds echo and feedback, devolved into safe-guarded corners the way frequencies pile up in certain areas of any architectural space. It is in this new technologically-mediated space—Baudrillard’s hyperreal?—with which we must contend, always in search of Ariadne’s thread.

**It is interesting to note that the anatomical definition of labyrinth is “a complex structure of the inner ear which contains the organs of hearing and balance.” [Oxford Languages]

This overall research has and continues to find embodiments in many material traces across disciplines from the below seminar focused on composition in film and media—Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle—to solo exhibitions and installations such as …These Things That Divide The World In Two… at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (2024) and Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances at AOCF54 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome, to the performance piece Mother […] Mother, to artistic collaborations such as circa ten to the ninety with Foad Dizadji-Bahmani and Luc Trahand, and an upcoming essay Who am I then? asks K. …Who are we?: A Composition in Three Movements for the upcoming issue of Spunk Art and Perspectives.

Embodied Disembodiments: Semiotics, Composition, Spectacle

It is part of the universal process through which we experience (and consume) narratives (and their traces in art, music, literature, films, television, games, literature, etc.) that we ourselves as subject becomes an object, a sign disembodied from ourselves and yet still tethered who, like Theseus in the Minotaur’s maze, gets lost in the labyrinth of signs of the Spectacle. The ability to deconstruct and therefore comprehend these signs is thus for us a contemporary thread that links back to Ariadne which not only situates us positionally in the simulation of signs but also in the world today…

This seminar project focuses on composition (of both sound and music) in contemporary media, which both distills and clarifies much of my practice and ongoing question, particularly of how we are positioned within the contemporary Spectacle, and the shift to thinking of ‘com/position’ itself as an act of structuring and positioning both signs within a work as well as us in relation to the work, triangulated via the illusory yet no less tangible ‘cultural object (subject) trace’.

“The Reader scans the room and encounters an object—A—in itself a subject in the system of objects, visual and aural, that encompasses the Reader. This subject voices the disembodied sounds displaced through distortions and refractions, embodying a system of cities and myth, walking, playing, transforming perception into the perceived via abstractions…”

—from Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances, a solo exhibition which engaged with three novels by Italo Calvino—If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Invisible Cities, and Mr. Palomar—as well as the three cities which paved my own journey to the exhibition: Bangkok, Los Angeles, Rome.

—Traces. The (somewhat ironic) anchor point of movement also necessarily brings about the subject of traces, themselves material objects of such a movement. I’m interested in the traces of these bodily (and sometimes non-bodily) frames—visually for example with the use of vinegar as an ‘invisible’ material whose material traces are seen, such as in my work with copper (for instance 16 Permutations for Copper) but also more surreptitiously in a work such as Extracción de la pier de locura (Extracting the Stone of Madness), which material surface is a visual trace of vinegar and bodily movement (the physical attempt at excavating the surfaces of paint). —There is a correlation to my work with sound such as in Avant le deluge, après les rêves, where I re-recorded layers of (sampled) sounds from the city and the Angeles Crest mountains through both of the Angeles Crest tunnels (constructed between 1940-1950) and the underground water tunnel beneath (and in between them), often moving the sound source in relation to the recorder thus ‘performing’ a bodily movement which we hear as disembodied traces, further dislocated through the performance made by the Genkii Wave ring within the MaxMSP patch I created for the work. —Translation as excavation then deals with traces on two levels, the traces themselves which must be excavated, and the traces of the excavation itself, which inevitably fall into the palimpsestian stratas which resemble itself pre-excavation, thus a [cybernetic] feedback loop.

• ——Ideas themselves as material trace-objects that both have their own agencies—their own trajectories—and also the possibility (indeed a certainty) of being acted (and counter-acted) upon by a subject, whose performance upon the trace-object, like that of a musician and an instrument, is always a simultaneous movement of reaching back and reaching forwards.

Extracción de la pier de locura (Extracting the Stone of Madness) close-up. 2023. 60” x 96”. Oil, acrylic, shellac, cement, gold leaf, cheesecloth, vinegar on canvas.

Left: Interior view of …These Things That Divide The World In Two… at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary. The installation consists of a 9-channel sound installation (5-channels via aural exciters on 5 of the gallery walls, and 4-channels within the (4) hanging sculptures) which are controlled by a MaxMSP system engineered by Luc Trahand incorporating the spectators movement via Eye (webcam in the ceiling) and Ear (a microphone mounted outside the gallery walls listening to the sounds of the city, the environmental (as well as sociopolitical) system within which the gallery is situated). Within this audiovisual architectural system, the spectator encounters the embodied traces of permutations (Mother […] Mother i-iv) and the permutational copper wall piece, 16 Permutations for Copper.

Right: Score for [0-I-RI-R] which incorporates the fragmented trumpet lines with the ‘empty’ staves of the historical witnesses whose presence in the work is their voices constantly in flux around and in resistance to their ‘musical’ counterpart which seeks always to frame them but is continually dislodged. [Wende Museum, April 27 - Sept. 15, 2024

[0-I-RI-R] within the ADN East German Guardhouse at the Wende Museum

In a similar preoccupying investigation of the cybernetic loop that is the subject-system dynamic, this installation [0-I-RI-R] at the Wende Museum consists sonically of 1 trumpet and 12 historical witnesses (whose recordings are from the museum’s archive) of those who’ve lived through the Eastern Bloc. The trumpet, performed by Ilya Serov, performs a composed deconstruction and reconstruction of the East German national anthem within Schoenberg’s twelve-tone compositional technique (which is where the work gets its title: each refers to a permutational side of the twelve-tone matrix). The sound is once again ‘living’ within a MaxMSP systemic architecture (engineered again by Luc Trahand) where the interrelation of the two, the system which the trumpet represents, albeit deconstructed, and the historical witnesses that lived through such a system, are ever in flux: when there are more voices speaking at the same time—a collective strength—the trumpet recedes, becomes a bit duller, when there are fewer voices the trumpet is a little sweeter, it gains more power.