Music Composition & Experimental Systems

Music Composition & Experimental Systems

My compositional processes involve experimental research into systems that have the potential to transcend typical boundaries. At the onset, I view the objects and the conditions of each system to be inextricably linked with each other in a given unit. However, due to the resultant bifurcations of the scaled manipulations of objects within dynamical systems, the outputs are mandatorily underdetermined.

Within my research process, epistemic (of or relating to knowledge or knowing) bits of one system may be translated crossmodally into technical tools and used to build the syntactic conditions of the system. Likewise parts of the technical system can acquire epistemic status and thus impact the semantic underlay of a system. Such dialectics between epistemicity and technicity is at the inner core of an experimental system; it is its driving force. Simultaneously, experimental systems must be able to undergo ruptures, fissures and all manner of alteration in order to unlock the potential of dynamical systems – to release the unanticipated. In order to become vital, experimental systems must generate meaningful differences that extend in time as emergent, then vanishing phenomena. It is my contention that meaning exceeds those units within which knowledge is produced. In other words those uncertain epistemic topologies do not always neatly remain within spaces of representation. Rather, the recorded, articulated, dislocated, rearranged, reinforced and substituted traces may expand beyond confined spaces of representation while still proposing a continuity of systemic experimentation. The development of such procedures is pursued with the desire to continue experimental culture in order to learn from the past – conceptually similar to the scientific necessity of the historically obsolete. The idea of experimental culture as an articulated ensemble of systems could allow histories to be written without the burden of specific disciplinary constraints – to impact not only systems of thought, experimental procedure and artistic insight, but also a real-world approach to civics.

(From: Intitulata Fontegara #93, 2016)

Such a comparative investigation of complex structures will help us to understand how new knowledge arises in the process of research. The argument is that experimental systems derive their dynamics from the digressions and transgressions of smaller units embedded at lower levels. Viewed structurally, novelty appears to allow for the generation of singularities that transcends our capacities of anticipation, yet one that may be produced in a regulated manner.

The reality of an epistemic thing explored within experimentation resides in its resistance, its resilience, its capacity and obstacle of practice, to reveal the dynamical basis of the biophysical world – the unexpected and unprecedented.