Toward a Notation: The Pharmacological System in the Shadow of the Pharmaco-Aesthetic
Cabinets, Codices, and the Architecture of Belief
If the 20th-century artist once turned to the grid as a site of aesthetic order and ontological inquiry, the 21st-century artist-composer may be said to turn to the pharmacy. The shelves, the doses, the packets and capsules...symmetrical, seductive, and vaguely tyrannical form the contemporary altar of certainty. We find a profound and meticulously developed extension of this pharmaco-aesthetic tradition, now rendered through a new notational system: a compendium of circular, color-coded diagrams accompanied by invented pharmacological profiles. These are not merely visual provocations or poetic conceits; they are the structural glyphs of a musical language built atop the logics of compulsion and cure, diagnosis and transformation.
What I assemble, piece by piece, is the sonic corollary of a pharmacy shelf. It metaphoriclly translates to an immense, semiotic archive in which every diagram is at once a sign, a score, and a symptom. While I do not mimic the gallery-space-as-drugstore installations of my visual predecessors, the genealogy of this work is clear. It emerges in the long shadow of an artistic tradition that transformed the medicinal object into a fetishized symbol of faith, addiction, seduction, and the failure of reason.
We do not need to mention names to recognize this inheritance. There exists a well-known artist whose pill cabinets, pharmacy reconstructions, and seductive vitrines of drug paraphernalia have turned the act of medical consumption into a spectacle of aesthetic and existential reflection. Where that artist builds rooms out of dosage forms, I build an entire language. Where that earlier work invited the viewer to gaze into the spectacle of cure, mine invites us to perform it as an act of sonic inscription.
The Diagram as Dose: Score as Pharmakon
The circular notational diagrams that form the basis of my systems are more than visual devices. They are prescription objects, analogues to capsules intended not for ingestion but for interpretive release. Each one is layered with affective valence, its concentric color fields operating like chemical rings, each with its own temporal and physiological implications. Their titles, Azarthræquineticyn™, Glavendral™, Beurovenza™ echo the naming conventions of commercial pharmaceuticals: polysyllabic, vaguely Latinate, simultaneously authoritative and hallucinatory.
What Hirst achieved by stockpiling hundreds of manufactured pills into sterilized cabinets (inviting both fetish and critique), I achieve by transposing the logic of the dosage unit into the syntax of musical performance. In both cases, the viewer (or performer) is suspended between trust and doubt. The thing before them is a diagram, a promise, a warning. It does not say, “play this,” but “this is how the condition is structured.” The performer becomes a pharmacologist of sound, administering meaning through interpretation, dosage through gesture.
This shift from cabinet to codex is more than formal. Hirst’s works, particularly in Cathedrals Built on Sand, render pharmaceuticals as objects of religious devotion. They are altarpieces of addiction and misplaced belief. My systems internalize this structure and turns it outward again as process. The circular score is the shrine; the performance, the liturgy. Interpretation becomes a sacramental act: precise, ritualized, opaque, and absolutely necessary.
Clinical Erotics: Color, Repetition, and Semantic Overload
Both my lexicon and its aesthetic predecessors share a visual and linguistic logic governed by overabundance. In the cabinets: hundreds of pills, nearly identical, each alluring, mysterious, absurd in number. In my diagrams: infinite rings of color, some harmonious, others jarring are coded with invented afflictions and implausible protocols. We are offered not clarity but controlled excess: too many pills to comprehend, too many rings to parse, too many diseases to ever master.
And yet it is in this overload that a strange erotics of interpretation emerges. In Hirst’s displays, the temptation was literal, candy-colored pills arranged like offerings. In my scores, the temptation is hermeneutic. The performer is seduced by the complexity of the diagram, the possibility that, with enough time, one could learn this language. One could treat it not as an image, but as a functional grammar, a system of keys unlocking rare sonic truths.
Indeed, my naming strategy mimics the very cultural machinery of pharmaceutical branding of names that suggest efficacy, softness, potency, mystery. Like the Prozac and OxyContin of the marketplace, Evinectys™ or Bravencurialthrum™ draw the eye and mouth toward them, even before meaning is affixed. They beg to be said aloud, performed, tasted. Just as the pill is engineered to appeal to the consumer’s desire for immediate resolution, these notational compounds appeal to the performer’s desire for a fix which becomes a stable symbol, a totalized prescription for what the work “means.”
But no such fix exists. This is perhaps the most profound tie between my work and my artistic predecessor: we both structure our works as closed systems with no exit. You are inside the logic now. There are no translations. You can catalogue the pills, count the rings, say the names, but no revelation will come. The meaning lies in the act itself: to classify, to name, to administer, to repeat.
Rare Affliction as Genre: The Disease as Form
What I offer, ultimately, is a shift in what it means to compose. I do not write melodies. I names syndromes. I dos not orchestrate textures. I code regimens. Each diagram corresponds not to a piece, but to a condition...real, invented, or misdiagnosed. And in doing so, I place composition squarely in the realm of pathological poetics. What the cabinets suggest as symptoms (overuse, addiction, fetishism), I install as genres.
Every syndrome is a musical condition. Systemic Delay Echo Syndrome implies recursive, ghosted materials. Somatic-Lexical Reversal Syndrome demands confusion between text and gesture, between utterance and touch. Narrative Urine Saturation, despite its absurdity, suggests saturation as form (flow, blockage, flood). These are not metaphors for music. They are music, at the level of diagnosis. To play the score is to enter the affliction, to inhabit it as form.
Just as Hirst’s works demanded the viewer confront their own belief in medical certainty, while never actually providing it, my lexicon offers musical conditions that cannot be resolved. They must be endured. Interpreted. Played. Over and over.
The Score as Clinical Fiction
The most radical gesture of this system is its commitment to clinical fiction. It borrows the format, tone, and formality of medical documents. This is not a critique of medicine, but to propose that musical notation could be as prescriptive, as terrifying, as bureaucratically beautiful as a pharmaceutical label. Each diagram functions as both a fantasy and a warning: “This may treat your condition, but we can’t say how.”
In doing so, I implicate the composer in the same apparatus as the pharmacologist or the brand strategist (a curious analogy). The act of naming a new syndrome complete with invented therapy and regimen is not unlike naming a new musical form, with genre, idiom, and duration. My work suggests that composition is already prescription, that every piece of music is already a treatment protocol for a condition we may not yet have diagnosed.
From Vitrine to Lexicon
Where one artist offered vitrines filled with color-coded salvation, another has offered a lexicon filled with symbolic affliction. What was once displayed to seduce the eye is now encoded to seduce the mind, the body, and the interpretive drive of the performer. My pharmacological notation system is not a commentary on that earlier pharmaco-art, it is its mutation. It is what happens when the pills stop working, and you begin writing new ones yourself. When art ceases to display the object of desire and instead becomes the manual for how to administer meaning.
We are, in the end, left not with a cabinet but a codex. Not with belief, but with practice. This is not the death of notation, nor its resurrection. It is its reformulation as a speculative clinic, a registry of undiagnosable sound, a pharmakon of pure musical contagion.
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