Musical Notation as Machine-Skin: Human Modeling and Photographic Intervention

A RADIANT CARNIVAL OF ASSEMBLED NARRATIVES for Piano:

15 Pages. 22” X 17”; 55.9 X 43.2 cm.

Inks, Adhesive Tapes, Sulfolane, N-Methyl-2-Pyrrolidone (NMP), Hexamethylphosphoramide (HMPA), Nitrobenzen, Tetraglyme on Canson Infinity Velin Museum Rag

Edition of 8 with 2 APs

The use of human modeling within scores—carefully photographed, posed, and embedded—intervenes upon the expected abstract neutrality of music notation. The body becomes an axis of referential instability. This is not simply figurative illustration, but an infiltration of corporeal presence into an otherwise regulated system. Much like Roussel’s machines that performed non-functional rituals, or Duchamp’s non-erotic eroticisms, these figures are not emblems of sensuality—they are data points in a mechanical ballet of disjunction.

Photographic realism, when collaged into score-space, recalls Picabia’s mechanical diagrams: found, borrowed, repurposed, stripped of original use-value and repositioned within an invented context. The score ceases to be a system for encoding temporal sound and becomes instead a tableau of embedded forces—optical, haptic, symbolic. The system collapses figure and function, performing a self-referential machinic theater.