Der Lauf der Dinge

The most immediate relation "Der Lauf der Dinge" bears to noise music is that it is art (with a distinct sonic component) made of cast-off materials, or "junk" as we  have been discussing in class.  The piece makes this apparent from its first image - a dangling, full trash bag.  No effort has been made to aestheticize the components of the subsequent Rube-Goldberging.  Cans are rusty, bottles stained, wooden components visibly singed, presumably by previous runs of the chain reaction.  While the cinematography renders many of the apparatus beautiful - bubbling foam surging across a metal surface, dancing flames on a spinning tetherball - the individual objects are as-is.  Many of them are the cast-off products of industry, though this possible link to "industrial" music is tenuous because the sonic result is so different from what we would recognize aurally as examples of the genre "industrial." Luigi Russolo, however, might approve of the use of only sounds generated by industrial materials.

If "noise" as a broad concept contains connotations of perceived threat or danger, those elements are present here as well.  Many of the materials used - trash, fire, spilled petrochemicals, fuses, saw blades, etc. (is that bubbling stuff toxic?  Did they use dry ice?) - present a real danger to humans in other, less controlled circumstances.  "Der Lauf der Dinge" is thus sound(ing) art made with potentially dangerous junk; that sounds like noise to me.

Additionally, the artists do not adopt a clear position toward their use of dangerous junk - are they valorizing the danger?  Taming it?  Finding a subversively aesthetic use for the waste products of industry? Doing something cool with stuff that is cheap and suggestive?  All of the above?  The inherent ambivalence of message encoded in the choice of materials and method of deploying them relates this work strongly to other forms of noise.

Individuation and Aura

Scott Short's painting begins along the same philosophical and processual lines that Glitch music does, but goes a step further than Glitch by re-creating digital residue in a pre-electronic medium, i.e. painting.  The musical equivalent would be taking a piece of electronically produced and recorded Glitch music and scoring it meticulously for performance by acoustic instruments (which I'm now tempted to do).  But what does/would this extra step mean?

Glitch, raku pottery, etc. - the uncontrollability of materials is certainly a huge factor in both of these categories of art.  And one important result of uncontrollable materials is that most often, different instances of "the same" work end up radically different.  Running the same Max patch produces different sonic results each time; minute variances in the raku-making process can result in extremely different glaze crackling patterns (or explosion).  Even Short's xerox process, I would venture to guess, does not produce the same result from machine to machine or even in two uses of the same machine.  Thus uncontrollability of materials circles us right back around to the Benjaminian concept of aura - upon close examination, digital reproduction processes actually produce unique, irreproducible works each time.  Glitch musicians recognize this ultimate individuation as a philosophical basis for their work, as made clear in Ben Borthwick's "The Perfect Storm." Carsten Nicolai expresses suspicion of the political tendency to group people into blocs as represented by the phrase "we the people:" "The 'we' doesn't exist. It is individuals...the 'we' never existed.  It was just a phrase."

But raku pottery does not use digital production methods, and Glitch uses them exclusively.  Scott Short's work, on the other hand, conflates the digital and non-digital, the machine-like nature of his faithful painted reproductions of the "human" imperfections produced by the xerox machine, simultaneously acknowledging and questioning the possibility of Benjaminian aura existing across digital and non-digital media equally.

The Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi seems integral to much of the art in question this week - whether overtly, as in haku pottery, or implicitly.  Finding beauty in the imperfection and transience of things, often small, simple, everyday things - xerox machines, digital residue, vegetables - is a common theme.  Any artistic medium or working process will inevitably have limitations and conditions that lead to the individuation of individual works, performances, and even (as Glitch and Scott Short make clear) purportedly identical reproductions.  Art that embraces and foregrounds these limitations and conditions seems to me to fulfill a basic human need to acknowledge (and perhaps find meaning in) both the transience and conditionality of all human life and the tragically transient uniqueness of each individual person.