“…And thus the human intellect produces, of its own accord, all conceptual differences, and is thus the source of that harmony which has forever been the conciliator of opposites. It generated the astrolabe in Ptolemy, in Orpheus the lyre: the discovery did not come from the outside but is just the realisation of the concept in a sensitive subject.” (Ernst Cassirer)

The series of five events curated by Xing as part of the T Zero programme involve artists who, from different disciplinary perspectives, use a variety of techniques to approach the phenomenal world of sound.

T Zero could be the title of a composition by Cage in which Time coexists with Absence. A musical “nothing” or silence.

It can never be truly perceived if not as a tension, an infinite approach towards the static, soundless absolute. A reconnection, therefore, to the ancient tradition in which – prior to the emergence of modern science – art and mathematics stood side by side in the venture of being able to achieve absolute harmony between cosmos and psyche.

Music is often referred to as the most mathematical of the arts. It has accompanied human civilisation since its beginnings and stands as the primordial attempt to give a form and structure to an intangible and invisible entity: sound. A wave, a rippling of the air that may modulate or form a melody, before and beyond language. Thanks to huge technological and scientific progress, from the Twentieth Century, sound – no longer ‘music’ – became a subject addressed by various art forms, blurring interdisciplinary confines and indefinitely amplifying the musical phenomenon, from the microscopic fluctuations of the biological world to today’s listening to social metadata or digital disembodied voices.

In terms of listening, nothing changed with the advent of the computer, inside which data meanders from track to track, replicating the machinic in machinic, the percussion in repercussion, brushing against a recursive fugue. Externally it is commensurate to fact, to event, perturbing the matter of real which we then perceive as sound. Whether it issues from the copper or carbon fibre cones of speakers, or from a glass trumpet, sonic information is retransformed into air, acoustic wind… sound. Data becomes fact again, although on a sensitive plane. It transforms into a perceptive act, reintroducing the suspension between faith and uncertainty.

The five artists who have been invited are representative of approaches that combine, albeit in different ways, the various attitudes towards sound. Some accentuate its mathematical or speculative aspect. Others the phenomenological and perceptive. For the listener, they open the field to the difficult art of interpretation.

The proposals for these listening moments at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni will also raise the issue of psycho-acoustic space, highlighting those most elusive phenomena that run between ear and brain: acoustic chimeras or aural hallucinations, effects verging on the magical which question the nature of things, allowing us to sense that the real is perhaps the product of a situated multi-agent.

The cycle of sound performances curated by Xing to accompany the T Zero exhibition features contemporary artists who operate in the visual, sound and design fields, both on a performative and theoretical plane. In their live performances they will offer different perspectives and treatments that entwine art and science, from humanism to synthesis, using generative processes or playing on the indistinct, to the point of verging on the fantastical and auditive hallucinations.
 

 Sound performances Ti con Zero - Downdload the brochure (in Italian)

Xing is a cultural organisation based in Bologna. It organises, designs and supports events, productions and publications characterised by an interdisciplinary approach around issues relevant to contemporary culture, with a particular focus on generational tendencies associated with new forms of expression.

www.xing.it

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