Light Sensitive: Photography, Photorealism, and the Score

 

Light Sensitive: Photography, Photorealism, and the Score

Bil Smith · Sound Morphology

A score is usually a promise about the future. It tells a performer what will happen, in what order, at what speed. A photograph is the opposite: a receipt from the past, proof that light once fell on something in a particular way. For several years I have been putting the two side by side, and lately inside each other. My scores now carry photographs the way older scores carried tempo markings: as instructions about how time should feel.

People sometimes ask why a composer needs a camera at all. My answer is that the camera is the most honest notational instrument I own. It cannot lie about light, only about context. And context is exactly what a performer has to build, every time, from nothing.

So the photographs in my scores are not illustrations. They are evidence, weather reports, and occasionally perjury. They sit next to the notation the way a witness sits next to a judge: not deciding the case, but changing how every word in the room is heard.

Plate from a recent score: copper, wire mesh, and cotton under hard light

The lineage

I study photographers the way I study painters: for their operations, not their subjects. Each of these artists taught me something a score can do.

Thomas Demand: the model that disappears. Demand builds full-scale rooms out of paper and cardboard, photographs them with a large-format camera, and then destroys them. What survives is an image of something that was always a replica. I recognize my own scores in that loop. A tactile score is a built object; its photograph becomes the document that travels; the object itself may never be seen by an audience. Demand taught me that the photograph can be the work and the model can be the score, and that the gap between them is where the performer lives.

Olivo Barbieri: the city as a miniature. Barbieri photographs real cities from the air using selective focus, so that a band of sharpness runs through the frame while everything else falls into blur. Real streets suddenly look like architectural models. That trick of scale is a lesson in attention. In my scores, a passage can be "in focus" while everything around it softens: the performer learns to play a narrow band of clarity inside a wide field of suggestion.

Andreas Gursky: the composite that looks like truth. Gursky's vast images are often assembled from many exposures, seamlessly, until a stock exchange or a supermarket shelf becomes a pattern no single eye could see. He taught me that a believable surface can be constructed. My score plates are often composites too: many captures, many lights, one image that behaves like a single moment but contains several.

Thomas Struth: the viewer inside the picture. Struth's museum photographs show people looking at famous paintings, so the act of looking becomes the subject. A score is always watched by someone: the performer reading it, then the audience watching the performer read. Struth reminds me to design for that double gaze.

Cindy Sherman: the self as character. Sherman photographs herself in roles, costumes, and invented film stills, and in doing so shows identity as something staged. I ask performers to do something similar: to read the score as a script for a character who happens to share their hands. Some of my Performance Guidance texts are written for that character, not for the musician.

And others. Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose grids of water towers and blast furnaces turned repetition into structure. Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose long exposures of cinema screens compress an entire film into a rectangle of white light: a whole duration held in one frame, which is exactly what a sustained chord tries to do. Jeff Wall, whose staged scenes look like accidents but were built with a director's patience.

Three cameras, three kinds of truth

I work with three cameras. Each lies differently, and each lie is useful.

The Nikon Coolpix 8800: memory. This is an old camera, a prosumer compact from the mid-2000s with an 8-megapixel CCD sensor and a long stabilized zoom. By today's standards it is limited: noise rises quickly, highlights clip, detail is soft at the edges. I love it for exactly those reasons. Its color has the slightly sweet, slightly synthetic cast of early digital imaging, the color of photographs from a decade we now remember mainly through screens. When I photograph a score object with the Coolpix, the image already looks like a recollection.

In the score, Coolpix images mark the past tense. They appear where the music refers back to something: a quotation, a return, a passage the performer is asked to play "as remembered, not as written." Their softness gives permission. The performer does not have to be precise; they have to be faithful to an impression.

The Hasselblad X2D: testimony. At the other end is the Hasselblad, a 100-megapixel medium format camera, which I use with several lenses, including a macro lens for surfaces. It sees more than I do. Under hard light it records every scratch in copper, every fiber in a cotton ball, every thread of wire mesh. Under soft light it gives wood and wax a depth that feels almost tactile.

X2D plates are the evidentiary layer of the score: the definitive record of an object, a material, a surface. Where these images appear, the performer is asked for exactness. Clarity in the image becomes a demand for clarity in the sound. A fortissimo, in this system, is not only loud. It is fully resolved, every edge visible.

The Lomography Sprocket Rocket: rupture. The third camera is a plastic 35mm panoramic camera that exposes the film right across its sprocket holes, and lets me wind back and expose the same strip again. The results are wide, overlapping, and unpredictable: images bleed into one another, edges vignette, and the perforations of the film itself appear in the picture like a row of rests.

I use the Sprocket Rocket for passages about time itself. The sprocket holes are a ready-made rhythmic grid, a ruler printed by the film stock. Overlapping exposures become simultaneous events. When a Sprocket Rocket strip runs across a score page, the performer reads it left to right as a duration, with each perforation a possible pulse and each double exposure a moment where two times share one space.

Olivo Barbieri

Techniques, and what they ask of the performer

Around the three cameras sits a set of experimental methods. Each one changes how a page reads.

Selective focus. Borrowed from Barbieri's miniaturized cities. A band of sharpness crosses an image of a score object while the rest dissolves. The performer plays the sharp band as foreground and lets everything else become resonance.

Multiple exposure. With the Sprocket Rocket, two or three exposures share one frame. In the score, these mark layered time: a passage the performer may play over itself, or two tempos that must coexist.

Focus stacking and compositing. With the Hasselblad, I combine many exposures at different focus distances into one image sharp from front to back, the way Gursky builds images no single exposure could hold. These plates ask for total control: every voice audible, nothing allowed to blur.

Photographing the model. Following Demand, I build small physical scenes, sometimes from cardboard and paper, photograph them with the X2D, and keep only the image. The performer receives the photograph of an object they will never touch, and must play the distance between image and thing.

Staged self-portraits. Following Sherman, some scores include images in which a performer, or I, appear in character. These are not portraits. They are role cards, telling the player who they are while they play.

Degraded and transformed prints. Images printed and then heated, scratched, soaked, or exposed to sun, using photochromic and thermochromic inks on some plates. The image changes during the life of the score, so no two performances read quite the same page.

Thomas Demand

What this does to the score and the performance

The three cameras give me a scale of fidelity, and that scale becomes musical.

Image source	What it signals	What the performer does
Hasselblad plate	Testimony, exactness	Play with full clarity and control
Coolpix image	Memory, the past tense	Play as recalled, not as written
Sprocket Rocket strip	Time, rupture, simultaneity	Read as duration and layered events

In performance, the photographs can stay on the page or move into the room. Some are projected while the music is played, so the audience sees what the performer is reading. Others are deliberately withheld, so the audience hears the influence of an image it never sees. Either way, the images change the performer's relationship to the notation. A pitch printed beside a scorched copper plate is not the same pitch printed beside a soft, faded Coolpix photograph of the same object. The notes match; the testimony does not.

Closing

When I am asked which camera I prefer, I answer that I need all three, because each tells the truth about something different. The Hasselblad tells the truth about surfaces. The Coolpix tells the truth about memory. The Sprocket Rocket tells the truth about time, which is that it overlaps, slips, and never quite lines up with its own edges.

Demand builds a world and keeps only its image. Barbieri shrinks a city until we can hold it in our attention. Gursky assembles a moment no eye could witness. Struth turns looking into a subject. Sherman becomes someone else in order to show us how selves are made. A score can do all of these things, and the camera is how I learned that it could.

The work is written for a performer, yet it assumes several kinds of eyes: the lens that recorded the object, the reader who interprets the page, the audience that watches the reading. What you hear in performance is an instrument, of course. But you also hear copper under hard light, a memory rendered in early digital color, and a strip of film counting its own perforations like a metronome that refuses to keep still. That is the music I want to share.

Revisiting Gemano Celant's 2015 Article: “Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City for Solo Piano:” Sonic Concretism

 

Revisiting Gemano Celant's 2015 Article: “Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City for Solo Piano:” Sonic Concretism

Link to Full Article (12 Pages):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Pb9229BfhF_thplFmOc4YFyGFQUH1xEL/view?usp=sharing

Early in 2015, an unusual tableau unfolded on the stage of Carnegie Hall. Pianist Nicolas Horvath sat before the piano not just with a traditional score, but with an art object...an expansive, multi-layered manuscript by composer Bil Smith titled Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City. This piano composition, written expressly for Horvath and premiered amid a marathon tribute to Philip Glass, stands at the intersection of music, visual poetry, and philosophy. It is a work as much seen as heard: a dense weave of textual fragments, graphic notations, and musical directives that collectively evoke what one might call a “concrete” music-text hybrid.

The Score as Visual-Textual Artifact

The score of Delinquent Spirit of a Drowned City exists as a striking visual-textual artifact, blurring the line between musical score and artwork. Smith’s composition is not delivered in conventional notation; instead, the score consists of four large boards (approximately 27.5” x 17.5” each) accompanied by three translucent overlays, a booklet of performance notes, a portfolio case, and even an oil-on-canvas integuments. In one section of the score (shown above), words coil and scatter across the page in spiral patterns, overlapping with angular shapes and translucent strips. These textual constellations consisting of snippets of phrases, neologisms, and syllabic clusters are placed with the deliberate care of a concrete poem. Indeed, Smith’s notation eliminates the familiar staves and notes, replacing them with a “complex system of imagery and layers.” The result is a score that one must read spatially and visually, as if decoding an abstract painting or an architectural blueprint of sound.

 

Hash Marks and Hasselblads: An Analytical View of Mesotint for Tuba and Hasselblad H5D-400c

"Mesotint"

For Tuba and Hasselblad H5D-44c

Bil Smith Composer

Published by LNM Editions

In Mesotint, a composition for tuba and Hasselblad H5D-400c, we witness a bold departure from traditional ensemble logic.  It is one that integrates the sonic gravity of the tuba with the optical acuity of a high-end medium format camera. At first glance, pairing an orchestral brass instrument with a $50,000+ imaging device may seem whimsical, if not provocatively impractical. But Mesotint is anything but playful. It is a precision-engineered collision between two modalities of registration, sound and light, resonance and exposure, each governed by different mechanics yet drawn into a shared compositional fabric.

The Title as Technique

The title Mesotint recalls the 17th-century intaglio printmaking process notable for its lush tonal gradients and labor-intensive surface modulation. This allusion is not metaphorical, but procedural. Just as a printmaker works from a roughened plate toward clarity, the tuba in Mesotint begins in a register of static density: long tones, embouchure friction, and microtonal growls thick with harmonic debris. Gradually, definition emerges as fragmented intervals, faint motifs, and sharply juxtaposed articulations come into focus. The composition, like a mesotint print, progresses from blurred shadow to defined light.

Simultaneously, the Hasselblad H5D-400c, a 400-megapixel modular behemoth better known for ultra-high-res archival photography, is enlisted as a participant, not a documentation device. The camera performs temporal captures at intervals dictated by the tuba’s breath. Its shutter cadence becomes part of the rhythmic and structural architecture of the piece.

Unconventional Hash Marks

Graphically, the score of Mesotint is dominated by asymmetric hash marks, but not as metrical dividers, but as timbral interrupts, triggers for either camera exposure or extended tuba techniques. These hash marks are scrawled and tiered, sometimes overlapping, at odds with the traditional horizontal flow of music. Some marks appear to float vertically, implying velocity or register, while others intersect with text fragments such as:

• “fissure exposure”

• “lenslock drone”

• “8.5 stops, no tonality”

Rather than notating fixed rhythms or pitches, these marks and texts function as coordinate points, intermedial cues for both players (the tubist and the photographer/operator). The result is a tabular score that acts more like a shared protocol than a script, with each hash marking a junction of sonic and optical decision-making.

The Camera as Instrument

The most radical element is not the notational style but the inclusion of the Hasselblad H5D-400c as an active compositional agent. The camera, in this context, is not simply documenting the performance, but it is calibrated to respond to, and in some sections, dictate the tuba’s timing. The camera’s multi-shot mode, which stacks exposures by micron-level sensor shifting, becomes analogous to extended drone technique. Each capture creates an image that maps light over time mirroring how a drone maps pitch over breath. The shutter click is integrated into the piece’s percussive vocabulary.

At times, the tubist must synchronize gestures with camera exposure settings: shifting from f/2.8 to f/11 not to affect an image per se, but to imply a sonic contrast as a broader spectral swell, a narrowed pitch band, an articulation darkened like a small aperture on overexposed film.

Furthermore, images captured during live performance are processed in real-time and projected onto translucent mylar sheets behind the performer, creating light-based spectrograms that feed back into the visual score. The composition thus becomes a feedback loop of image > sound > image. The Hasselblad's famously precise color science is reimagined as a kind of compositional key, linking exposure curves to amplitude patterns.

Juxtaposed Notational Shifts

The layout of Mesotint avoids traditional staves entirely. It moves horizontally, yes, but with repeated interruptions. Between every section of hash marks lies a modal juxtaposition.  There is a shift from open-ended improvisational texture to ultra-specific directives. For example, one section reads:

• “Embouchure leakage only. ISO 6400. Shutter hold. Breath mirrored in aperture stop.”

Another reads:

• “Guttural overblow, no pitch. Time exposure in bulb mode (3.3 sec).”

These juxtaposed moments are not arbitrary; they represent a structural schema wherein the tuba’s physicality (embouchure pressure, valve density, spit valve release) matches the camera’s temporal behaviors (long exposure, autofocus delay, dynamic range).

Thus, notation becomes not just a map for the musician, but a negotiation between two sensoriums...the ear and the lens. One hears the pressure of light; one sees the tempo of breath.

Ephemeral Archive

It’s crucial to note that Mesotint is not just a live piece, but an archive in motion. The camera’s images, when stitched, layered, or collapsed, become scores in themselves for future interpretation. The tubist, in future performances, may be asked to “perform the image” created in a previous concert, aligning tone color and rhythm with the histogram curve or pixel density of an archival photograph. In this sense, Mesotint proposes a recursive notational paradigm, where performance generates notation, which regenerates new performance.

Refracted Modalities

Mesotint stands as a provocation against the boundaries of what constitutes instrumentation, notation, and documentation. The use of the Hasselblad H5D-400c, a camera built for hyperrealist commercial fidelity as a score-generating and timing instrument for live brass performance is nothing short of subversive. Its inclusion breaks open not just genre conventions, but modal assumptions: that photography is passive and music is active; that cameras record and instruments perform.

Instead, Mesotint refracts these categories through hash marks and juxtaposition, through layered intervals of breath and light. The tuba and the Hasselblad do not play together.  They compose each other.

"Windless Hall". The Tactile Score. For One or Two Percussionists.

"WINDLESS HALL OF UNKNOWN APPARATUS" 

FOR ONE OR TWO PERCUSSIONISTS. 

Recording on Laboratorie New Music label, Premiere Recording: Darmstadt, 2012

The performer may choose up to fourteen separate percussion instruments to use throughout the performance. Whatever number of instruments the performer chooses, he/she must engage all instruments throughout the performance with frequency of use determined by the performer. It would therefore be feasible that an instrument be stricken but once (and potentially imperceptibly inaudible).

The performer may arrange the boxes in any manner seen fit. They may remain inside the large box or removed from the large box and placed at the discretion of the performer. A box may be turned, flipped or relocated at any time during the performance.

The materials represent consistencies to be aspired to during the piece. In the colophon, each material is defined and while the performer will create their own personal syntacticon based on these performance notes (found in the colophon), the tactile representation of the materials as they appear and reappear should remain consistent. Here the boxes and imagery profusely expand the vocabulary nurtured by symbolic masks, autobiographical events, and references to painting styles and spontaneous thoughts.

An innate inclination toward the geometric as is the overwhelmingly panoramic surface of the small scale painting found as hidden gems in the small reliefs.

Antiseptic Pantheon and the Evidentiary Color Achive

(Fragments recovered from Smith Jubal Notational Corpus #109b, which may also be #109c, or a later copy of a document that predates both)

(Annotated by the composer, re-annotated by the archive, contradicted by both, and almost certainly corrupted)

"Each note is a god in quarantine.

Each page a sterile shrine, sealed in lacquered tempo.

Each performance a breach of protocol I have chosen to permit."

—Inscription on the verso of Codex Para-Sterile, Bil Smith (unpublished; withdrawn; republished; withdrawn again)

❐ "The Antiseptic Pantheon"

I did not invent the Antiseptic Pantheon. I found it, the way a pathologist finds what was already growing in the sample.

People who have studied the Smith Jubal system describe its architecture as a hybrid of medical cartography and war memorial engraving. That description is accurate, and incomplete. It is also a pharmacy. Every score I make carries an indication, a dosage, and a list of contraindications, because sound administered without supervision is a controlled substance, and I prefer to write the label myself.

The Pantheon is not a notational style. It is a liturgy for a religion that has been fully sterilized: a taxonomy of deities scrubbed of belief and preserved only through their refusal to be performed. Each deity (read: pitch class, harmonic cell, psychoacoustic event, symbolic fracture, or, in at least one documented case, a pharmaceutical name that does not exist yet) is housed in a chemically sterile zone. A white void. Thin black concentric halos. A meter that obeys geometry from somewhere other than Euclid.

The staff lines are containment fields. They do not support the notes; they detain them. When I draw a staff, I am not giving the music a place to stand. I am building the cell.

[Archive note: The composer has elsewhere stated that the staff lines are "decorative" and "mean nothing at all." Both statements appear in his hand, on the same page, in different inks. Carbon dating of the inks was inconclusive. One of them may be newer than the page.]

Performers who have attempted these scores have reported the following:

• Temporal distortion during sustained phrases, catalogued as "Velocity Lag." The note arrives late, or the performer does.
• Synesthetic nausea triggered by violet glyph clusters, also called "Minor God Ribbons," also called (by one cellist, who has since stopped answering correspondence) "the purple ones."
• Recursion fatigue: the experience of having played a gesture before it was read, and then reading it, and finding it already slightly worn.
• Dosage drift: following the tempo instruction, "Take two measures every eight hours, with or without food," the performer loses track of whether the piece has begun.
• Attribution vertigo: the conviction, during performance, that the score was written by the performer and merely signed by me.

Marginalia found on certain scores include:

Don't unseal this one yet... still volatile.
Pentatonic sigil might leak if tapped.
Indicated for: listeners who have stopped believing in resolution.
Not for use in children, churches, or the key of D.
This paragraph was not here yesterday.

These are not jokes. They are infection protocols for music that wants to escape, written by a composer who is not entirely sure he wants to stop it.

❒ "The Evidentiary Color Archive"

Where the Pantheon organizes itself through absence, the Archive is built on overflow: a forensic chromatic excess in which every hue is placed on trial and none is ever acquitted.

In the Smith Jubal manuscripts, color is not ornament and it is not pitch. It is evidence. Each swatch is entered into the record as proof, not of a performance, but of intention, of trace, of contamination. The red may be breath. The teal, an inhale that was never completed. A yellow smear may be the exact duration of doubt, measured to the millisecond and then deliberately smudged so that no one, including me, can measure it again.

"We do not write music," I once wrote. "We deposit evidence."

[Archive note: This quotation also appears, verbatim, in a 1960s gallery catalogue for an artist who is not Bil Smith. The composer denies having read it. The catalogue denies having printed it. Both copies are held in the Archive, in the same folder, and the folder is labeled in pencil: "Same hand?"]

Ink becomes deposition. Graphite becomes affidavit. Spray becomes perjury. Gold leaf becomes a bribe. Every page is an exhibit with a chain of custody, and the chain has been broken at least once, probably by me.

The performer standing before a page from the Archive is no longer a reader. The performer is a witness, called to the stand, sworn in, and asked to testify about events they did not see, in a language they were not taught, before a court that has already reached its verdict.

The verdict is sealed. I have it. I have never opened it.

▣ FORMAL TRAITS OF SMITH JUBAL NOTATION (SELECTED, RECONSTRUCTED, DISPUTED)

ELEMENT	FUNCTION	STATUS
Laminated Glyph Mass	Notational clusters sealed in acetate; "Do Not Touch" gestures, preserved like an artist's sealed tin, contents unverified	Unopened. Possibly empty. Possibly not.
Isobaric Trough	A deep cut or indentation in the page signifying unspeakable silence; the paper is wounded so the silence has somewhere to go	Active. Do not press.
Perimeter Chantline	A continuous phrase-loop scrawled around the page edge, sometimes in blood analog, sometimes in a crawling declarative text the performer must read aloud and not believe	Looping. Origin point unknown.
Evidentiary Splotch	Color blot catalogued by pH and intent, not tone	Admitted as evidence. Contested.
Detained Clefs	Conventional clefs boxed in annotation grids, unplayable unless formally "released"	Held without charge.
Dosage Bar	A measure carrying a prescription instead of a tempo; administered, not counted	Off-label use reported.
Calendar Staff	Duration written out by date, one line for each day the piece was not performed	Ongoing. Currently in its fourth year.
Polished Void	A passage executed so flawlessly it becomes indistinguishable from nothing at all	Under review. Possibly the most dangerous element.
The Unnamed Compound	A note-cluster labeled with an invented drug name, "indicated for" a rare condition, with no supplier	Orphan status pending.

⎇ The two systems, the Antiseptic Pantheon and the Evidentiary Color Archive, exist in contrapuntal friction. One silences; the other testifies. One bleaches the divine down to its residue; the other proves the crime by refusing to clean it up. I have spent years trying to decide which of them I believe in. Lately I suspect they are the same system, viewed from opposite sides of a glass partition, and that I am the glass.

It is said that some of the Pantheon scores burn themselves when performed too literally, leaving a charred surface more beautiful than the music it consumed. Others dissolve in water and reveal layers of archived pigment underneath: testimony beneath testimony, a stratigraphy of unplayable truths. One score, when soaked, revealed a second score. The second score, when soaked, revealed the first one again, slightly altered, as if it had been revised while underwater.

[Archive note: The composer was asked which score came first. He replied, "The one you haven't performed yet."]

[✁ REDACTED]

[✁ REDACTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE COMPOSER'S WISHES]

[✁ UNREDACTED BY THE COMPOSER, LATER, WITHOUT EXPLANATION, THEN REDACTED AGAIN]

"There is a score in which nothing is written except color. When you follow its sequence, you do not hear music. You hear the page breathing through your skin. When the breathing stopped, I looked down, and the color was on my hands instead of the page. I have been told this is the correct outcome."

—Field Note, Anonymous Performer (later identified; identification later withdrawn)

"Every score in this archive is a prescription for a condition nobody has diagnosed yet. If you are reading this, you may already be in the trial. Please do not stop taking the music without consulting the composer."

—Final line of Corpus #109b, or the opening line of #109c. The archive is no longer certain which direction it reads.

---

 

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.