Preliminary Notes on Relational Modularity

• Holding tension between Taxonomy and the Ideal, between our need for classification in order to comprehend as well as our need to elude that fixity, to be ever in flux, to be, as it were, infinite held within the finite. [1]

• Its parentage lies in the tradition and legacies of both relational aesthetics and Fluxus, and its origins for me began with Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable. The naming of this mode itself is anchored (and counter-anchored) by both its halves: modularity, a term that we see echoed in areas as diverse as science, technology, operations management and music—a trait that reflects my own interdisciplinary nature; and relational, which brings to this modularity an inherently musical, non-bodily frame wherein the function of a module is fluid and shifts in relation to its neighbors—as a note shifts its function depending on where it is positioned, from root note to consonance, dissonance—Other. [1]

• Within modularity, there are three inherent components at play: 1) the idea of subsystems or units that form a whole, 2) the whole itself, the system compromised of subsystems, and 3) the movement within, which I refer to as an act of translation as excavation. [1]

• In relation to Beckett’s Footfalls: “The movement of the modules whose functions are redefined with each movement is an act of translation which excavates within that interstice between us without and they within.” [1] — This pertains to my reading of both characters within the play whose position is relational. i.e. May, whom we first hear and see, eventually by Act III permutes to Amy, while V moves variously as Mother in Act I to “I” at the beginning of Act II, to a third person narrator, to silence, and later, through Amy, appears, perhaps questionably, as Mrs. W. —This also touches upon my interest in Beckett’s use of what I’ve been referring to as topological deformations to constantly shift the relationships between I and Other, outside and inside. His late television play Ghost Trio is another great (and incredibly moving) example of this.

• Another work that has influenced my conceptual mode of relational modularity is Jannis Kounellis’ untitled Apollo piece (1973), which has been re-performed at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2022 50 years after it was last seen. In the work, “Kounellis, seated behind a table strewn with broken statuary, holds an Apollo mask in front of his face, while a flautist seated to the right of the table plays a thirty-second excerpt from Mozart, pauses for two minutes, and then repeats the phrase. Completing the tableau is a stuffed black raven perched atop a plaster torso.” [2]

• —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 are also 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.