SAPAAN: Vol. 2 Fall 2003 - (de-)facing "mirroR facing Blankness" by Jon Sakata and Christopher Jones



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	SAPAAN Vol.2 Fall 2003

(de-)facing "mirroR facing Blankness": essay and notes by poet and composer
Jon Sakata and Christopher Jones

"This is indispensable if one does not want to fall into REPRESENTATION. See beings and things in their separate parts. Render them independent in order to give them a new dependence." -Robert Bresson

How to avoid having a reader imagine what may or may not be there, but rather see without depicting anything? How to encourage an unbiased reading? An undirected reading? In what way does this approach shape the nature of a(n) experience/confrontation with the work of art?

Problem: force the reader away from habitual reading environment and have to actively search for "beings and things"...see words by effacing spaces, punctuation, syntactic habit...

"a lingual-life which purges imagination...not stuck in an imagined life wishing another life...nothing to interpret...a poetics without interpretation"

The expressive power of reading is heightened through the fractures and abutments created by the musical landscape, creating tension between the poetic and musical syntax. The objectification of language in the text is intensified by the interference of the music.

This work brings fragmentary objects into contact with one another to create resonances, juxtapositions, rifts, networks. mirroR facing Blankness uses reading and seeing as techniques for assembling. The text is an assemblage of words that are connected to one another on different functional planes (meaning, sound, repetition, proximity), and the readers experience becomes an assemblage of images derived from attempting to parse the text. Procedural readings applied to this labyrinth emphasize the artifice of the combinations, and create new sets of connections.

"efface the cracks...heighten an artificial sense of connection...a zone of determined and undetermined elements...multiple readings...multidirectional vectors and loopings of seeing and reading"

The mutual opposition/inclusion of things within "a zone of determined and undetermined elements" is central to the experience. The difference between these approaches leads to a heightened sense of the finite boundaries of that which 'belongs,' as well as to an infinity that the gaps open onto. The linguistic and musical materials are symptomatic of the larger, infinite sets these particular configurations belong to. Openness of interpretation, however, allows the finite set to explode into an infinity beyond the limits of the work.

The idea of "object" is central to the material properties of this project. Objects in this context are entities that are described by a particular set of features, but lack a definitive form. Objects belong to categories. Motives are defined as having a defined form that may be altered, making us aware of the alteration. Objects deliver a set of attributes, without relying on a specific imprint or formal trajectory as a strategy for evolution. Gilbert Simondon's investigation concerning individuation: not form/matter
(motives exist in a closed, totalizable formal system as constituted units) but
material/force (objects as potentialized materiality in an open relational field of
composition). Inasmuch as this project eschews narrative, it is imperative that the fundamental materials are conducive to building non-directed forms.

Objects make us aware of the boundaries, rather than the content of entities. Identity is the recognizable imprint of an object, allowing us to quantify and qualify our experience with the object. Recognizing is image-making. How does the audience make images when starting with as little as possible? How does the work provide the blankness necessary to bring the audience as close to zero as possible?

Steven Connor on Michel Serres: "Between the two, in the musical transition, there is the body, not an object, but a work of sensation, neither shade nor dismembered corpse, but a complex knot, niche or enclave within flux."

The spatial components of the poetry provide the point of contact between the text and the zero of experience. How is this transferred or reflected in the music? The page is a container for the text; the spatial disposition of the initial block with four exploding/exploded fragments flowing away is an essential defining feature of the text. The block is a knot to be untied by the audience, parsed by whatever means necessary. The margins surrounding the block are a void upon which this linguistic artifact has been imposed. The music reflects the block through the use of measures imposed upon silences. The audience must repeatedly confront and parse the container unit, just as the reader confronts the page. Why, then, is the sound perforated by silences, whereas the text is without spaces? The internal silences are brought into relief with the densities of the musical gestures, making the audience aware of the void. The lack of a visual component in the music necessitates that the spatial container of the text be replaced with temporal containers of sound.

"Build your film on white, on silence, and on stillness." -R. B.

If spaces and punctuation are effaced, will a reader then desire them all the more out of habit? Will voidness be felt as much in the compressed block-text (even more?) than in the literal emptiness of the mostly blank page? Disjunctive synthesis: the greater the sense of disjunction the more powerful the need to create (manufacture) for oneself connection, continuity, dependence... the gap opening onto an infinity of possible experiences... what is the relation of Bresson's "new dependence" and disjunctive synthesis?

The question in setting this to music is how these two faces of the act of reading may be intensified through the act of composition. The reversal of the qualities of syntax and material is central to this question. The musical materials consist of objects assembled according to a fundamental syntax. The application of a musical structure with its own syntactic structure (not derived from the text) and a set of material categories to a poetic structure containing words in a fuzzy syntactic context creates tension between the two things. The musical structure forces the words into an unfamiliar, sometimes nonsensical syntax, thereby leading the interpretation of the text away from the domain of consistent meaning and heightening the senses of collision and fracture that are central to the poem.

The text is assembled without a fixed syntactic regime: punctuation, word order and even spaces between words are avoided. Boundaries between words have been disguised, destroyed. The integrity of the word is called into question, and the act of reading becomes an attempt to reconstruct these elements. The poetry places certain phonemes into a state of tension through multiple belongings to different (word) formations. It potentializes the expressive materiality of phonemes, creating a state of potensionalization. A vowel or phoneme is emancipated through its spoken/sung atomization. Atomization and decentering of the elements of the language provides an opportunity to discover other types of connections (sonic, structural).

How are lines of force established in an environment stripped of many conventional expectations? How does the mystery of identification motivate the audience?

Problem: to heighten the urge of searching: a line of force, a looping line, a zigzag labyrinth of memory and forgetting...

"seeing, reading, writing without interpretation, reflection, imagination? absolute speed: dizzying proliferation of multiplicary relations before the reductive retardation of reflective..."

Problem: to write as to see and feel movement directly...sens - not only as "meaning" or "sense," but trajectory, vector, directionality, line of force.

echo: "a new dependence"...without metaphors, symbolism, depiction, representation...just the flesh of sight and sound...(this is not a metaphor)...

The structure of the text implies and invites multiple readings. How is this reflected in the piece? Reading is transformed into procedure. The multiplicity of available experiences in this text necessitates multiple readings, nullifying a definitive reading. The readings used for the setting of this text were, necessarily, insufficient. A series of passes through the initial block of text were used, each incomplete and shorter than the previous, thereby excluding more of the text on each pass. The most complete reading included all of the text block except one word. Eventually the entire text except one word is omitted, creating a kind of vortex centered on a single point of focus.

This process is a bit like combing a beach where every past visitor has lost something: it is not oriented toward discovering a particular thing, and is not intelligent with regard to the location of the discoveries. It is designed to yield a maximum of accidental discoveries. It is also a reflection of the sheer pleasure of searching.

Why is the principle of nonhierarchical structure central to this project? This type of structure is designed to reduce, as much as possible, the listener's (reader's) past experience. A given performance of the piece reveals one possible reading as well as the potential for others. It is not designed to make a single point, but rather to cause the audience to experience the word as a multiplicity, as a work that can be interpreted in many ways, depending how it is viewed.

At the same time, the artist must make a stand as to how to position the image in conjunction with the blank canvas. What language? What properties? What mode of communication? In which culture?

Poetry:
     English.
     Free verse.
     Spatial disposition (margins, page).

Music:
     Indeterminite pitch.
     Non-iterative rhythm.
     Temporal disposition (barlines, silence).

These materials suggest maximum flexibility, and/or minimum cultural weight. Inasmuch as these materials avoid specific references (or perhaps emphasize generic references: materials that are known but divorced from a specific use), they invite the audience to inscribe a personal history upon the work through rememberings, rereadings, rehearings.

The act of writing in this project is as much about destruction as it is about invention. The artist must embrace the boundaries of the object prior to attempting to deface, or somehow reshape it. How much of the work lies IN the rubble of its origins, and how much of it IS the rubble?

S.C. on M.S.: "Serres had evoked the gymnastic condition of the body-become hand as the image of blankness, an indetermination, and thus a readiness to be absorbed...the hand is a flight of forms from possible to possible."

"The hand is no longer a hand when it has taken hold of the hammer, it is the hammer itself, it is no longer a hammer, it flies transparent, between the hammer and the nail, it disappears and dissolves, my own hand has long since taken flight in writing. The hand and thought, like one's tongue, disappear in their determinations."
-Michel Serres

Problem: a mental ecology of reading and writing?...to see/feel language nonhierarchically and as nontotalizable...an open circuitry of difference-making poised toward anarchical vectors within limits...

"What is - face to face with the real - this intermediary work of the imagination?" -R. B.

For further information about these works, or copies of the poetry, or score/recording of the piece please contact the authors.

Jon Sakata and Jung Mi Lee
sakalee publications
email: deleuze54@yahoo.com

Christopher W. Jones
email: cwjones@stanford.edu

Christopher Jones has presented his music in numerous places in North
America and Europe, including recent performances in Boston, Baltimore,
Calgary, San Diego and San Francisco. Currently, he is completing a doctorate in composition at Stanford University where he studies principally with
Brian Ferneyhough.

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