Entoptic landscape and ijereja: music as an iterative process

entoptic landscape and ijereja are both works that can be considered as expanding collections of materials. They explore the spaces between composition, notation, performance and improvisation by considering all of these activities as equally ‘performative’. Each work comprises a set of materials that includes scores, fixed media audio and video, recorded live performances, studio-edited performances, and performance strategies. In the case of each piece, materials created in and by previous performances go on to inform future performances of the music. As such, there can be no ‘definitive’ performance or statement of the works, and nor can they ever be considered finished or bounded. This is how these pieces conceive of music as an iterative process: they are intended as statements of that process.

Nicholas Bourriaud (2010) identifies the creative artist as a ‘semionaut’: one who must navigate between signs and signifiers in order to negotiate, interpret, and create meaning. In the ‘work’ of music, the composer, performer and listener can all be thought of as semionauts; they take part in the same processes to create and re-create the ‘work’. In my own practices I embody and enact all three of these positions, and I seek to blur the boundaries between listening, performing and composing. Contemporary artistic forms in Bourriaud’s terms, then, are ‘journey forms’: they internalise and externalise an experience of movement through the work as a temporal and spatial territory. The music presented here offers an opportunity for the exploration of the journey form as a compositional strategy, a tool for performance and interpretation, and a framework for criticism.

Open Access