The very first of all the gods she devised was Love
(Parmenides, Plato’s Symposium)
WHAT IS THERE, WHERE THERE IS NOTHING?
(Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time)
Sound, being a wave emerging only through the dynamic relationship with the other, an effect without a stable cause, has such an intriguing quality that doesn't allow it to be attributed solely to immanent or transcendental realms: it traverses both. As a material element it can propagate only by means of time and space, as an indexical sign it always presents a trace of something else, yet it neither possesses its own material property nor occupies a defined terrain: strictly speaking, it doesn’t exist on its own.
For musique concrète pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, sound objects are constituted through the act of perception. This resonates with physicist John Archibald Wheeler’s premise that no phenomenon is a phenomenon until it is observed.
Taking such assumptions as the basis for an open experiment, this performance creates a situation in which something appears out of nothing - without a particular material sound source - through directed attention. And by doing so, it manifests the very process of listening as action.
U” is an ongoing research project and an acousmatic multichannel performance coiling with and around streams of feedback, both technically and conceptually. As a system that never resolves into a finished state, the feedback loop presents a framework through which reality itself may be seen as an open ontogenetic process.
The title of this inquiry comes from an iconic U-shaped diagram, created by Wheeler to inscribe his provocative idea of the procedural and always becoming Participatory Universe as a self-synthesising system, which actualises itself on the fly in a closed loop through the eyes (and the ears, I believe) of observers.
“The Universe is a self-excited circuit”,
as he famously noted.
Drawing on the ideas of autopoiesis and quantum mechanics, “U” pushes a traditional acousmatic route to its limit: from unseen sound source to its “lavish absence”, taking attention as the basis for both creation and transformation.
If art can have any purpose at all, it may appear as a drive to transform and to be transformed.
A scenography, as it is conceived, places a six-channel microphone array on an inner circle at the centre of the performance space with the seventh positioned at the midpoint of the circle. Each microphone is aimed outward towards its corresponding speaker, while the seventh is directed inward - to a subwoofer set nearby.
Seven acoustically and tonally distinct microphones are assigned to the seven channels, each occupying a specific, non-overlapping frequency band, providing natural isolation. Yet, each microphone inevitably receives some of the acoustic artefacts from the others, transforming those into new signals that re-enter the system.
Sound travels from the speakers back into the inner microphone circle, where it is processed in real time and returned to the same speaker within a controlled, spatially distributed Larsen effect.
The system is listening to itself, and crystallising itself in this very process.
All events are occurring through recursive relations.
A composition unfolds through an open narrative arc, from a slow oscillation of low hum, recalling a sense of a “cosmic womb”, as a time-honoured start of the ritual in many traditions. It evolves, growing gradually from minimalistic gestures - frequencies rather felt than heard, into an intense autopoietic spectro- and spatiomorphic polyphony.
The magnitude of the piece, though neatly prepared, is not predetermined - it strongly relies on space, time, chance, and those present. My role here is operational.
The actor appears in the process of listening.
We are here to hear
what can happen.
