Buffered Daemons (2023)

The work titled Buffered Daemons(2023) is a sound installation with a performative activation that attempts to explore the concepts of translation and non-local interaction in the sound realm. It does so by playing with the idiosyncrasies of audio representation/playback and mobilizes them through the creation of an expanded musical situation. The work is inspired by the concept of daemon and non-locality explored by Timothy Morton in his reading of Plato’s Ion as well as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.

In the piece, three different containers of sound are presented: acoustic(Sound diffusion in the architecture), digital (computer based sound algorithms) and analogue (electromagnetic tape and analog processing). These containers, or buffers, are then being intertwined by the performer creating thus sonic textures that interplay with the resonances of the space.

The strategy for the sound performance is to articulate a metaphor of a circular-buffer, a data structure used in Computer Science, to the idea brought upon in Derrida’s interview with Ornette Coleman, in which Improvisation practice in music is understood as a reading in which the borders between reading and writing are obfuscated.

The materials are the following: Reel-to-Reel Analog tape recorder, ~15 meter long tape-loop entangled to play with the physical space, a Raspberry-pi microcomputer with bespoke software written in supercollider, analog mixer, microphone preamp, audio compressor, omnidirectional microphone, speaker.

The work was presented in:

1: the 2023.06.17 in ‘Ne Menge Schnitt’, MMiii Kunstverein Mönchengladbach, Germany. 
2: 23.12.29 - 37C3 Unlocked, Hamburg, Germany.