Broke and Broken Cogito

 

Broke and Broken Cogito

2024

40” X 30”; 101.6 X 76.2 cm

Ink, Graphite Pen, Charcoal, Ash, Color Ink on C-Print

Edition of 5 with 2 APs

Sound Morphology Learning Lab - Inside the Score: Agostino Bonalumi and the Mito-Notational Field

Sound Morphology Learning Lab

Inside the Score: Surface, Pressure, and the Mito-Notational Field

In this score, I am not using the page as a neutral support. I am using it as a pressure field. I want the work to begin acting before it is performed, before the eye organizes the symbols into anything legible, before the performer decides what counts as event and what counts as atmosphere. The score has to function first as a condition.

That is where Agostino Bonalumi matters to me. What I take from him is not simply a visual reference. It is a structural lesson. His relief works turned the surface into an active spatial body. The plane was no longer passive. It was stretched, stressed, pushed outward, made to hold tension. That logic is central to what I am doing here. I want the score to behave the same way. I want it to feel as though it has been forced into visibility from behind.

The matte-black receding relief in the background establishes that immediately. It is not there as backdrop or mood. It is the first layer of behavior. The protrusions make the page feel swollen, pressured, bodily. They interrupt the fantasy of flat readability. Even before notation appears, the score is already telling the performer that this field has depth, resistance, and stored force.

I think of the black relief as compressed energy. It recedes, but it also insists. That contradiction is useful. It makes the eye work. It slows down the act of reading and turns perception into part of the composition.

The Scuduri font in the upper right reinforces that shift. For me, it is not a decorative flourish or a title marker. It acts as a local code block, a signal that the score operates under its own internal law. It announces a notational jurisdiction. Once that font appears, the page makes clear that it may borrow from conventional systems, but it is not governed by them entirely.

That is the role of what I call the mito-notational system. It borrows from Western notation, but it does not remain obedient to it. Staff fragments, noteheads, beams, rhythmic densities, and gestural clusters all appear, but they no longer behave as parts of a continuous linear syntax. I break them apart, suspend them, compress them, and redistribute them so that they begin acting less like instructions and more like charged objects.

This is the essential move. I am not rejecting notation. I am turning notation into material.

Across the score, the fragments do not form a single sentence. They form a dispersed topography. Some are dense and blackened, almost architectural. Some are thin and unstable, more like tremor bands or residues. Some hover as isolated capsules. The performer does not simply read through them. The performer has to move among them. The score becomes archipelagic. Meaning is produced not only by the symbols themselves, but by the tension between them, the distance between them, and the pressure of the relief field underneath.

That is how the score functions. Each element bends the space around it. A compressed cluster thickens the silence beside it. A stretched line changes the temporal character of an empty zone. A suspended fragment may carry less literal instruction than atmospheric or tactile pressure. In this system, notation is not just symbolic. It is topological.

The purple variant makes that even more explicit. The field becomes more synthetic and less recessive. The metallic circular forms read like resonators, valves, apertures, or pressure discs. The staff lines extending outward from the clef create a sense of projection or transmission, as if notation is being routed into a device. At that point the score stops behaving only like a page and starts behaving like an interface.

That shift matters to me because it shows how the work moves between identities without settling. It can be relief painting, score, symbolic artifact, and apparatus at once. I do not see that instability as a problem. It is the engine of the piece.

For the performer, this changes everything. The score does not ask for passive decoding. It asks for navigation. It asks the performer to decide what is foreground and what is field, what is sounded directly and what remains atmospheric, what behaves as rhythm and what behaves as texture. The page distributes pressure, but it does not close off interpretation. That balance is important. I want the work to remain unmistakably itself while still requiring thought, judgment, and risk from the performer.

So when I say this score functions and acts, I mean that quite literally. It functions as a relief system, a hybrid notational script, and a symbolic object. It acts by delaying legibility, by turning surface into force, by making notation tactile, and by forcing performance to begin as interpretation rather than execution.

That is the larger aim for me. I do not want a score that simply tells a performer what to do. I want a score that changes the conditions under which doing becomes possible. I want a page that thinks spatially, a notation that behaves like matter, and a surface that carries its own internal tension into the room.

That is where this work begins. Not as document, but as pressure.

What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

 

What Tools Do I Use to Create My Scores?

A musical score is, at its most basic, a set of instructions. But what if the page itself were also a participant? What if the materials that constitute the score, not just what is drawn on it but what it is made of and what has been done to its surface, were themselves carrying meaning, generating behavior, and asking something of the person who encounters them?

This is the question that has driven my practice for the better part of a decade. What follows is an account of how I actually make these works: the digital infrastructure, the physical materials, and the thinking that holds them together.

The Digital Foundation

My digital workflow is built around the Adobe Creative Suite, but the suite functions less as a production environment and more as a set of distinct instruments, each with its own role.

Illustrator is where the glyph families and proportional grids live. It is the most architectural of the tools, responsible for the structural logic of the page and the relationships between notational elements. Photoshop handles what I think of as the surface weather: the abrasions, the accumulated micro-histories, the sense that a page has been through something before the performer ever picks it up. Substance 3D Designer, Stager, and Dimension allow me to model notational elements with genuine spatial depth, to cast shadows from one symbol onto another, and to proof how a mark reads when it begins to behave like a three-dimensional object rather than a flat inscription. InDesign assembles the final folios and maintains structural legibility across multiple pages. Fontographer is close at hand for the letterforms I cannot find anywhere else.

The Astute Manager plug-ins extend the work in two directions simultaneously, toward precision and toward chance, which is not a contradiction but a productive tension that I rely on. Topaz Gigapixel enters the process at the finishing stage, when a plate needs to scale to wall dimensions without surrendering its grain and surface particularity.

To this toolkit I have added Dassault Systemes' CATIA, the aerospace and industrial design platform that most people associate with the engineering of aircraft and complex mechanical systems. In my practice, CATIA provides something that no conventional design application offers: the ability to model notational elements as genuine engineered forms, to subject them to structural and spatial logic borrowed from industrial design, and to bring a kind of technical rigor to the construction of visual forms that would otherwise remain purely intuitive. When a notational symbol in one of my scores appears to have structural weight, to occupy space in a way that feels load-bearing rather than decorative, CATIA is often where that quality was developed.

The Physical Materials

The analog bench is where the work becomes irreversible, and irreversibility is part of the point.

Conventional oils, pastels, and pencils go down first, establishing the initial surface relationship between mark and substrate. Then I bring in materials that operate by different rules.

Mica flakes and molten salt, used in works such as Luxtrapathy, Capitalocene and the Logicade, introduce a crystalline, mineral quality to the surface, something that catches light differently at different angles and refuses to settle into a single resolved appearance. Conductive ink and xylene appear in the same work, the conductive ink carrying an implicit charge that is not merely metaphorical, and the xylene as a solvent that opens the surface to further intervention. Colored pencil worked into metallic spray foam creates a layered density that reads differently at different distances, intimate at close range, almost architectural from across a room.

Liquid metal under a wash of gilding adhesive, as seen in The Criminality on the Staircase, produces a surface that is simultaneously precious and industrial, the gilding adhesive holding and also slightly obscuring what lies beneath. In the same work, thermochromic metallic paint and photochromic metallic paint introduce genuine instability to the finished object: the surface changes with light and warmth, which means the score is not a fixed thing but a responsive one, different in a cold room than in a warm one, different under natural light than under artificial.

Methylene chloride, when applied as a sculpting agent, attacks the substrate in controlled ways, creating depressions, textures, and surface events that could not be achieved by addition alone. The page is not simply built up but excavated.

Other works introduce entirely different material logics. Sky and Dye incorporates carbon fiber, PLA filament, copper tubing shavings, graphene-based superlattice, and black phosphorus alongside more conventional oils and inks, all on Hahnemühle Deckle Edge paper. These are not randomly assembled materials. Carbon fiber carries associations of engineered lightness and tensile strength. Black phosphorus is a two-dimensional semiconductor. Graphene-based superlattice is a material of extraordinary electronic properties. Their presence in a musical score is a statement about what kinds of knowledge and what kinds of material culture belong together on the same surface.

Legends Carved into the Void's Mantle uses Replexium, doped graphene, Tyvek, infrared charcoal, turmeric paste, and moss pulp together, each material bringing its own temporal quality: some stable, some fugitive, some transforming slowly over years. Entangled Dreams in the Concrete Mirage, the viola score, combines acrylic, Cupuacu oil, shape-memory polymer foam, Criollo tobacco, French Poudre B, and Blue Tansy oil on Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique, a substrate chosen for its photographic archival quality. The shape-memory polymer foam has the property of returning to a previous form when stimulated: it literally remembers. The tobacco carries centuries of cultural weight and a particular quality of slow combustion. These are not decorative choices.

Interiority uses liquid europium, a rare earth element with luminescent properties, alongside burst charge powder, neem oil, and piezoelectric foam, materials that respond to electrical pressure, to biological chemistry, to force. Reality Bends to the Whim incorporates azurite, rhodium, and graphene oxide alongside more conventional graphite and pencil, the azurite a pigment with a history stretching back to ancient Egypt, the rhodium one of the rarest and most reflective metals on earth.

Proproxasant uses nicotine, salt crystals, aerodynamic foam, elemi oil, and Pyrodex, the last a smokeless powder propellant, on Hahnemühle Sugar Cane and Legion Colorplan Vellum. Calavist, Opreach, Revune and Trayke, among the largest works, incorporates spider silk, bioluminescent bacteria, and magnetized iron filings alongside sand, crushed circuit boards, and resin. These are not materials borrowed from another context for their associative value alone. They are chosen because of how they behave: the spider silk for its tensile strength and near invisibility, the bioluminescent bacteria for its capacity to produce light through biological process, the magnetized iron filings for the field lines they make visible.

The substrates themselves are chosen with equal care. Fujifilm Crystal Archive Maxima, Ilford Galerie Prestige Gold Fibre Silk, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, Kodak Professional Endura Premier Metallic Paper, Moab Entrada Digital Rag, Canson Infinity Platine Fibre Rag, Bergger Prestige Variable CB: these are photographic and fine art papers chosen not only for their archival stability and surface qualities but for the specific way each one receives and holds the materials applied to it. The conversation between substrate and substance is not incidental. It is compositional.

The Underlying Principle

I do not treat any of this as special effects, surface decoration, or the application of interesting materials to an otherwise conventional score. The piano is wood, felt, steel, and air working together. The page should answer in kind. Every material decision is a decision about what the score is asking and how it is asking it. The score that incorporates a shape-memory polymer is a score that has built memory into its physical substance. The score that uses thermochromic paint is a score that changes its appearance with the conditions of its reading. The score that carries rare earth luminescence is a score that produces its own light.

This is not notation enhanced by materials. It is notation constituted by them.

The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

The Telephone Does Not Ring. It Radiates.

There is a telephone at the center of this score and it has been ringing since before you were born.

Not ringing in the way a telephone rings when someone wants something from you, when the world outside intrudes upon the world you have made for yourself inside the four walls of your practice and your solitude and your accumulated private shame. This telephone rings the way an altar rings, the way a wound rings, the way a thing that has been consecrated to a purpose it did not choose rings when the ceremony that surrounds it has already begun without asking whether you are ready.

Look at the radiating lines. They do not emerge from the telephone. They have always been there and the telephone has simply arrived at their center, the way a saint arrives at the center of a crowd that already knew it needed one. The lines are not sound waves. They are something older than sound. They are the condition that makes sound possible, the tension in the air before the first note, the held breath of a man who has decided something irreversible and has not yet spoken it aloud.

Around this center the score arranges its beautiful criminal objects.

To the left, a treble clef of such authority it seems to have been written not by a hand but by a history, surrounded by its colony of modified note heads that have submitted to alterations they did not request and wear their accidentals the way the condemned wear borrowed clothes, with a dignity that belongs entirely to them and nothing to the clothes. The yellow labels hang from their assigned positions like the identification tags of the disappeared: FLO 0.98. BYE 6.12. TOJ 5.71. Each one a name. Each one a duration. Each one a person who was somewhere for a measured amount of time and then was not.

To the right, the colored bands do not illustrate music. They are music in the form that music takes when it has been liberated from the obligation to be heard. Burnt gold. Pale aqua. The particular pink that exists only in the memory of things that were once warm. And at the bottom of this column a target of concentric circles in colors so violent they seem to be confessing something, the way violence always confesses something, the admission that precision and destruction are the same gesture depending only on the direction of the hand that makes it.

The arrow in magenta does not point toward anything that can be named. It arrives from outside the frame having already passed through whatever was in its way and it carries in its triple-barbed head the accumulated velocity of everything that was refused and redirected and finally released in a direction that had the decency to receive it.

At the bottom of the page, five circular medallions are arranged like stations of a procession whose devotional object is language itself, text wound into circles that must be read in rotation, that give up their meaning only to the reader willing to turn, to follow the curve, to accept that some sentences were never meant to be read in a straight line. The catamarans bobbed like failed stitches. The seconds between lightning and its echo. Perhaps time itself, an explanation nobody asked for, tailored to fit another.

These are not program notes. They are evidence.

Evidence of what? Of a mind that has looked at the tradition of notation and found it, not wrong, but insufficient. Insufficient in the way that a single name is insufficient for a person who has lived a complicated life, in the way that a single language is insufficient for a thought that was born in the body rather than the mind, in the way that a line is insufficient for a life that moved in circles and reversals and sudden adjacent departures from everything it had promised to become.

The score does not ask to be performed. It asks to be survived.

And in the surviving of it, in the looking and the turning and the following of the radiating lines back to the telephone that has been ringing at the center since before you arrived, something happens that is neither music nor its absence but the third thing that exists between them, the thing that has no name yet because no one has stayed in the gap long enough to name it.

Stay.

 

 

Paper, Model, Score: Thomas Demand’s Afterimage in My Compositional Surfaces

Thomas Demand’s pictures have followed me into the studio for years, not as images to imitate, but as a procedure to inhabit. He reconstructs a scene as a full-scale paper model, photographs the model, then removes the evidence. What remains is an image twice mediated: a photograph of a construction that stands in for an earlier photograph.

That lesson is foundational to my scores. I also insert a built intermediary between source and outcome. Where Demand builds rooms, I build pages: hyper-notational surfaces that must be navigated rather than merely executed. The performance you hear is not a translation of instructions; it is an excavation of a constructed field.

Thomas Demand's "Control Room"

From Photograph of a Model to Model for a Score

Demand’s practice taught me to distrust directness. In my work, I stage a sequence: concept → model (visual, typographic, photographic) → notational object → performance. Portrait sessions with models, tilt-shift photography, and photo-real fragments feed the page; the page is then collaged with blocks, legends, and vectors. Like Demand’s sets, these pages are not neutral carriers; they are architectures that record the choices of their making and demand new choices from readers.

The effect in both cases is similar: a viewer or performer must confront the intermediary. The work refuses to disappear into fluency.

Objecthood as Method (Not Decoration)

Demand’s dye-rich prints condense time and manual procedure into surface. I aim for an analogous condensation: metallic powders, conductive inks, thermochromic and photochromic layers, dense graphite, aluminum supports. These are not embellishments. They are operational materials that change the kinetics of reading such as how light grazes a line, how a block occludes, or how a legend becomes legible only at a particular angle or distance. The page controls tempo before a single sound is made.

In rehearsal this has consequences. Performers negotiate wayfinding (landmarks, corridors, cul-de-sacs) rather than counting alone. The score becomes site: not a tape to be unspooled but a place where decisions are staged and restaged.

Spatial Resistance

When notation turns spatial, it becomes political. The linear staff over-optimizes for excerptability, logistics, and product. A spatial score resists all three. It cannot be skimmed, clipped into “best bars,” or sight-read on short call. It costs rehearsal, and that cost is the point: time redirected from efficiency to attention, from throughput to co-presence.

This is where Demand’s ethic touches mine most directly. His pictures slow spectatorship by making the image slightly “wrong."  Convincing yet off, familiar yet modeled. My scores slow performance by making the page thick.  They become fields of potential that frustrate frictionless delivery. In both cases, the work’s difficulty is not punitive; it is repairing. It restores our capacity to read with care.

Instruction, Trace, Object

I’ve long been drawn to the hinge where instruction becomes object. In my practice, the score is simultaneously:

• Instruction (it can be played),

• Trace (it records a process of construction, including failures),

• Object (it holds on the wall, on a table, as a sculpture of information).

Demand’s model/photograph dynamic clarified this for me. We both use an interposed artifact to change the terms of reception. For him, the paper room reforms the photograph. For me, the constructed page reforms the performance. In both, the intermediary is generative, not ancillary.

Reading as Archaeology

Performing these works is an archaeological practice. Players read for seams: where instructions thicken, where textures contradict, where legends fork. Annotations accumulate; each realization leaves residue for the next. The work grows by stratigraphy, not by a single definitive text. Demand’s destroyed sets are gone, but their logic remains legible in the image; my earlier drafts are gone, but their logic is fossilized in the final page. We meet our audiences (and performers) at the surface where that history has been compacted.

Curatorial Notes (from the Studio Outward)

If these pages enter the gallery, I prefer they be treated as sites, not illustrations for a performance that “really matters.” Show the scores at scale, with vantage points that enable mapping.  Present rehearsals, marginalia, and multiple realizations as parallel artifacts, not documentation. The point is to stage the same demand these works make in the rehearsal room: engage the intermediary.

Influence, Precisely Named

Demand didn’t give me a look to borrow; he gave me a logic to adapt:

1. Build the intermediary (model/page) that stands between source and outcome.

2. Harden process into surface (photograph/score) so that labor becomes legible.

3. Compel a new literacy in the viewer/performer.  Reading for joins, routes, and residues rather than for instant legibility.

That sequence continues to shape my compositions. It is why some pages appear obstinate; why blocks sit where common sense says “clear the path”; why certain legends seem too local or contingent. They are local and contingent by design. The page is a model of a situation, not a shortcut through it.

Coda: Afterimage

I often think of Demand’s pictures as afterimages of making. My scores aspire to the same: to be notational afterimages that hold, in their complication, the memory of the processes that produced them and the performances they will provoke. If the work asks more of the reader, it is because I want the page to look back and say: the intermediary is where meaning starts.

Praxitecture - Wrapped

 

"Photonic Notation"

 

Photonic Notation

In Tolaprinit, I am exploring what I call Photonic Notation, a scoring system in which photographic space, image fragments, and optical memory operate as active notational material.

Rather than treating photography as illustration or documentation, Photonic Notation allows the image to function as a compositional field. The photograph becomes a site of instruction. Light becomes a carrier of musical behavior. Figures, shadows, borders, objects, architectural space, and visual artifacts are not decorative additions to the score. They are part of the score’s grammar.

In the first example, conventional musical symbols collide with image-objects, red trajectory lines, floating medical abbreviations, diagrams, and photographic fragments. The notation does not simply move left to right. It radiates, doubles back, interrupts itself, and asks the performer to read across planes of optical pressure. The eye becomes a performer before the instrument does.

In the second example, the gallery-like photographic space becomes a kind of silent theater. A suspended figure, a physical bundle on the floor, film-strip borders, metallic typography, and a pair of dice are all embedded into the score’s logic. The page behaves less like a flat surface and more like an installation that has been compressed into notation.

Photonic Notation is concerned with the moment when a score stops being only a map of sound and begins to behave like a light-sensitive object. It asks: What does an image sound like before it is interpreted? What happens when photographic evidence becomes musical instruction? Can a score be read as exposure, residue, apparition, architecture, and event?

For me, Tolaprinit is not a score with images added to it. It is a score in which the image has become one of the instruments.

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