Non-Intentionality
| The music or sound of the various
installations documented on this website has a structure based on
physical principles, the inherent resonances of the space. It is
what the composer Alvin Lucier has described as non-intentionality,
rather than chance or indeterminacy. Lucier makes a comparison with the ordering structures behind of a flock of birds in flight or a school of dolphins, the innate processes of the ecological or physical world. This way of working allows a process to take its natural course, not to force something on to or out of the work - thereby allowing the content and the process to be the same thing. |
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A comparison of how this could work is the act of looking at a tree - you don't look at every branch and leaf individually but they're all there if you want to look closer, you can enjoy a very different sense of ordering (in comparison to a man-made artefact) just by recognising the generality of tree and the variations of the generality and the specific. The idea of trying to work with natural complexity in a musical situation interested and frustrated me for a long time until I realised that I'd been working with it for a long time. In sound, natural complexity is acoustic reflection, resonance, air moving in space and the generation of harmonics.
return to:
Kanazawa Installation
Installations
Activated Space
see also:
Alvin Lucier information