Human Nature

Many art processes conceptually bundle their own systems of production and phenomenology into their execution. From Robert Morris's 1961 Box With the Sound of its Own Making to all manner of viral media interventionism, visual arts have explored the contexts that surround their own production, circulation, and reception, and have often exploited these systems to great effect. Some artworks reside in the performed actions of artists and/or audiences alike, from Bruce Nauman's 1974 instructional text Body Pressure to the inter-subjective encounters of 1990s relational art.

In music, mediation of a score by trained performers is the norm rather than the exception, whether it be a harpsichordist's embellishment of a Bach basso continuo, a pianist's nuanced tempo rubato in the performance of Romantic miniature, a jazz musician's improvised solos over a notated chord progression, or a performer's interpretation of Earle Brown's open-form score for December 1952.

Recent composers have extended the exploration of human engagement to involve people outside of a conventional stage ensemble. This section turns the spotlight on works that take audience or other human engagement as a significant aspect of shaping a project. The unpredictability of human interaction can become its own chaotic system, adding real caprice to the capriccio of a composition.

David Lang: No Pain

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In 2005, New York composer and Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang collaborated with the art collective spurse on their investigation of a historic Quaker meeting house on the grounds of the Abington Art Center in Pennsylvania. spurse, an interdisciplinary group of over 40 active participants, structured their installation on themes of “mediation” in everyday life. For this project, all means of accessing or structuring the world were assumed to be mediators, including tools, axis lines, the Bible, and notions of historical chronology.

David Lang based his musical contribution No Pain on words by William Penn: “No pain, no palm, no thorns, no throne, no gall, no glory, no cross, no crown.” The score was written and distributed to audience members and invited musicians alike, who performed the piece as a round on September 11, 2005 outside of the meetinghouse. The round was sung and performed for as long as the participants chose to continue it, with the instructions: "Musicians of any ability and on any instrument or kind of voice can come perform the music and then quietly go inside. All performers are encouraged to adapt, arrange, improvise upon, ignore or transcend this score." David Lang invites the audience of Perform.Media to sing or play along.

View the score.

Listen to a recording.

Brad Garton: jlooch

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For two decades, Brad Garton, a Columbia University professor and director of the university’s computer music center, has written generative software programs that can produce an infinite, and infinitely-varying, stream of ambient music in real time. The graphical interface of jlooch, one such program, encourages listeners to toggle layers on and off and adjust event probabilities, but it does not require ongoing interaction to create music. Listeners can simply leave it running in the background and tweak the dials when they are ready for a change.

With jlooch, people are invited to participate in altering the course of a composition, though they may feel frustrated by Garton's sarcastic interface and web site, which pokes fun at the poor design and inadequate documentation of nearly all software. In this respect, the project draws attention not only to human nature, but also to the ways in which user interfaces shape human-computer interaction.

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Karlheinz Essl: FontanaMixer

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Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl's software implements the chance operations of John Cage's Fontana Mix — which originally involved the placement of transparent sheets over each other to determine the parameters and timing of each sound object — as a computerized chance algorithm. This program generates a realization of Cage's work on-the-fly, visualizing the random decisions of the algorithm as they are made by the software.

Essl's recreation of the Cage work not only transfers it from the analog to the digital domain. It also crucially delays the execution of the chance operations from the moment of composition to the moment of performance (on each listener's own computer). And each performance is unique not only because of the different results of these chance operations, but also because listener-collaborators control the performance by determining its duration and by selecting the source soundfiles to be used.

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(Gallery visitors can run the FontanaMixer software on this kiosk. Others can download and install it from Essl's web site.)

Erik Bünger: Variations on a Theme by Casey and Finch


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While many artists have created sonic structures by attempting to play back damaged compact discs, the work of Swedish composer, musician, and artist Erik Bünger is unique in the way it integrates those results back into a live performance.

Bünger intentionally destroyed a compact disc of KC & The Sunshine Band’s disco hit “That’s the Way I Like It” beyond recognition, exploiting the fallible construction of a CD by making it the medium with which a new work can be produced. He then painstakingly transcribed its playback into a musical score, written in traditional notation for an ensemble of nine musicians. His band performs the score at live concerts.

The mediation of musical composition by human performers is commonly problematized in technology-driven works, where humans often provide input into a technological system but rarely mediate that system’s output. Bünger's work reintroduces human hands as the primary mediating practitioners — reinterpreting a pop tune recorded onto a digital device — linking the work back to traditional notions of human expression as the catalyst for musical composition and performance.

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Mediation Station is organized by Rebecca Uchill and Jason Freeman for the Perform.Media Festival.