Event and its Double
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John Cage’s Black Mountain event (1952) staged what could be understood as the first “Happening”. Combining sound, text, images, and multiple performers, all circulating around a specially prepared seating arrangement, Black Mountain event aimed to “multiply” perspective through an excess of information. Such excess was amplified through the seating arrangement: four triangular sections, facing inward, and separated by small aisles, all the action located in the central area (to which the seats faced), the aisles, and beyond the audience. The architectural configuration created multiple perspectives, positioning audiences so as to complicate their ability to witness everything. |
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By
mirroring this configuration, Event and its Double stages the “stage”
of Cage’s original piece; it suggests links between Cage’s
music, and the architectonics of context; in turn, it aims to propose
possibilities for architectural design based on noise, and the multiplication
of social presence. Using the front courtyard to the Museum, 4 sets of
parallel walls were constructed, forming 4 "aisles" in an X
formation, each leading toward an open center, and away toward the far
corners of the courtyard. Perforations, or "doors" were cut
into the walls, at random points, thereby creating a labyrinthine space
where one perspective leads to another, displaces the other, then completes
it. |
In addition, 8 speakers were mounted throughout the structure, dispersed in and out of the "aisles", amplifying a prepared audio work. Using only recordings made from inside the Museum where construction was taking place (the refurbishment of the Museum's staircase), the prepared audio consisted of a series of "micro-bits" of sound - concentrating on those moments of hammer hitting, as the quintessential moment of construction, surrounded by envelopes of silence. The audio was amplified through the structure in a stereophonic intensity. |
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| Exhibited
as part of "Undercover: sound/art and social space" Museum of Contemporary Art Roskilde, Denmark March 22 - May 25, 2003 |