Machinic propositions

Henrik Frisk (PhD) - Professor of music

The duo Mongrel, consisting of Anders Elberling and Henrik Frisk have worked together for several years on numerous audio/visual projects. The overarching ambition is to critically examine the nature of the relation between audio and video. Their works have been performed in United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Belgium, France, Germany, Vietnam and Lithuania.

Il se tourna (2013)

The experimental attitude

There is a "need to approach artistic research from an experimental perspective, not as a stylistic measure but as a quality in the artistic aims. A core value in artistic research is, as far as we know it from our own work, the possibility to amplify artistic processes that aim at creating a change in one’s own practice, a change that, when it is described and thoroughly documented, can effectively communicate new knowledge."

Frisk, H., & Östersjö, S., Beyond validity: claiming the legacy of the artist-researcher, Swedish Journal of Music Research, 2013(), 41–63 (2013).

The traditional notion of the work

"These perspectives reveal music to be a medium that makes mutable some of the central dualisms of Western metaphysics: the separation of subject from object, authentic from artificial, present from past, individual from collectivity. Routinely, as I have indicated, music forms hybrids and transitions between these ‘pure’ states. In the face of such complexities, it is unhelpful to divide the study of music itself from the study of its social, technological and temporal forms."

Born, G., On musical mediation: ontology, technology and creativity, Twentieth century music, 2(1), 7–36 (2005).

The extent to which the artistic work in Western culture is often still seen as an immutable object and the product of one single originator is striking. Even relatively distributed artistic practices such as film production is often referred to as the work of a director. The perspective of the originator is guiding the apprehension of, and also, to some extent, the understanding of the work of art.

Georgina Born points to several important aspects of this developmeant relating to, among other things, the destabilizing effect that music in itself may have on common dualisms such as those between subject and object, and production and reception, and through the analysis of three different examples of digital creativity.

She suggests an approach that incorporates understandings of the social, technological and temporal dimensions of music.

Machinic propositions, is simultaneously an artistic project and an attempt to critically examine Deleuze and Guattari’s theorems of deterritorialization as found in chapter seven and ten of their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus.

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

Like much of our other works Machinic propositions is part of the attempt to counteract the predominance of one medium over the other, in particular, video over audio, which is not to say that we do not necessarily strive for their integration into one another. Instead the ambition is to allow one to become the other under certain conditions

Anti-Oedipus: social body, earth, body

Material flows are thus “territorialized,” that is, traced onto the earth, which is credited as the source of all production. The signs in tribal inscription are not signifiers: they do not map onto a voice, but enact a “savage triangle forming … a theater of cruelty that implies the triple independence of the articulated voice, the graphic hand and the appreciative eye” (189). Empires overcode these tribal meaning codes, tracing production back to the despot, the divine father of his people. Material flows in despotic empires are thus “deterritorialized” (they are no longer credited to the earth), and then immediately “reterritorialized” on the body of the despot, who assumes credit for all production.

Stammer

Our working process is, like most other artistic process, situated in our personal conditions and flaws but in Machinic Propositions we specifically use them to gain access to the ability to stammer in language while avoiding it in speech, metaphorically speaking.

Theorem two

"The fastest of two elements or movements of deterritorialization is not necessarily the most intense or most deterritorialized." (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, p. 193)

Live session

Image illiterates

"Sound and image are essentially different, they operate in different dimensions. What we uncovered, however, was that the solution lies rather in the attempt to move away from trying to synchronize the perception of sound and video, and instead focus on common processes that bind the elements together."

project diary, March 11, 2015

Etude

Machinic propositions

Artistic method

Composition and improvisation

Performing and composing are different but complementing modalities

Improvisation as method

A largely conceptual mode of working ends in an improvisation
The result may be satisfying from a performing point of view
Looking back at it, however, additional edits are needed, often at the level of synchronization

The improvisation dynamic

Perhaps self evidently, the context of improvisation appears to require the performance, and the act of listening/watching detached from the performance require the composition.

This is the observation we did in Mongrel: our improvisations had a very different logic to them when performed than when listened to as if the performativity of the improvisation was not encoded in the recording. As a consequence, and as a consequence of also other reasons, we heard these improvisations as compositions. Our assessment of the improvisations was generally more positive based on our impressions during the performance than when we listened back to them. This discrepancy between what it ’feels like’ in performance and what it sounds like listening back to it is consistent with my experience ever since I started playing. What was striking in this case, however, was that only very little had to be altered in order to ’fix’ the issues we had with the improvisation. A few edits, primarily concerning the timing of events and the temporal synchronization between the audio and the video was all that was needed in order for the expression in the performance to work as a non-performative piece, that is, a fixed media playback, or a composition.

The rhizome

“a map and not a tracing”

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1980, p. 13)

Mapping the patterns we are creating, our individual as well as each other’s, is a process that may be seen as the attempt to reduce the number of possibilities in our project, while at the same time attempt to increase the number of possible connections.

Conceptual deduction

"Benjamin suggests the practice of philosophy is not the conceptual deduction (deduction into concepts) of research but is also somewhat distinct from the metaphorical determinateness […] in the artwork"

Rrenban, M., Wild, unforgettable philosophy: in early works of walter benjamin (2005), : Lexington Books.

start with a general story or concept that we explore together
dissect and analyze it
create a conceptual framework (Olofsson, 2018, p.199-201)
improvise

Media and intermediality

"there is a strong tendency towards treating a medium as a medium, or an art form as one form of art, only when certain qualitative aspects can be identified"

Elleström, L., The modalities of media: a model for understanding intermedial relations, In L. Elleström (Eds.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (pp. ) (2010). : Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Self referentiality

Contributing "to the self-referentiality of digital art is the emphasis artists put on the very process involved in producing art by more or less smoothly integrating the various media into an intermedial whole."

Ljungberg, C., Intermedial strategies in multimedia art, In L. Elleström (Eds.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality (pp. 90) (2010). : Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Becoming composition

the editing is mainly concerned with the intermedial relations between the sound and the video rather than the individual parts.

If the performance is the structuring of an event entangled with the performer and the listener, perhaps a preliminary definition of a composition, presumably mainly valid in the context of this paper, is the organization of material in preparation for a performance. The particular situation described above where we in Mongrel would improvise in the studio in order to generate material brings the differences between the logic of performance and that of composition.

Summary

The interaction between conceptual development and deduction, the construction of conceptual frameworks and the relation between improvisation and composition are central aspects for us.
The narrative interaction between sound and image grows out of this interaction
The editing of the material is based on the structure of the material rather than the respective media

Summary

Musicians commonly go beyond the purely musical realm and consider aspects such as
- the interactive potential in the sociopolitical realm
- the differences between the modes of listening to the development of material
- the complimentary listening to the result of the same process
Partly, artistic research is the attempt to extract the implications of the knowledge development in those and similar processes
In this sense artistic research is transformative: It opens up new perspectives on the roles of the various agents in the field of performance such as the audience and the cultural and social contexts.

For the musician to go beyond the purely musical realm and consider, for example, the interactive potential in the sociopolitical realm, or the differences between the modes of listening to the development of material, and the complimentary listening to the result of the same process may be second nature. Partly, artistic research is the attempt to extract the implications of the knowledge development in those and similar processes, collect the data that may be acquired, and then go back and develop the musical possibilities as well as attempting to apply the results also outside of the field of artistic practices. In this sense artistic research is transformative. It opens up new perspectives on the roles of the various agents in the field of performance such as the audience and the cultural and social contexts.

Future

My hopes for a future development of artistic research practices are that the complexity of the various configurations of the acts of performance, composition and listening are continuously explored and reframed, and that the methodological development that is a result of these studies will be further evolved in interdisciplinary contexts.

Machinic propositions - narrative interaction between sound and image

Il se tourna (2013)

The experimental attitude

The traditional notion of the work

Machinic propositions

Stammer

Theorem two

Live session

Image illiterates

Etude

Machinic propositions

Artistic method

Artistic method

Artistic method

Artistic method

Artistic method

Artistic method

Artistic method

Composition and improvisation

Improvisation as method

The improvisation dynamic

The rhizome

Conceptual deduction

Media and intermediality

Self referentiality

Becoming composition

Summary

Summary

Future

Thank you.