My Hypermaterial Pharmaceutical Imagery as Score,

My Hypermaterial Pharmaceutical Imagery 

When I began turning pharmaceutical forms into musical scores, I realized I was entering a conversation that Damien Hirst had been conducting for decades. Hirst understood the pill as the modern icon of belief. He treated it almost as a devotional object. Not because of its chemistry, but because of its cultural force. To him, the pill represented faith, control, hope, ritual, and a strange kind of secular salvation. That belief system sits underneath my work as well.

I do not use the pill as decoration or quotation. I use it as the notational substrate itself. The hypermaterial surface, the extreme clarity of its lighting, the sculpted distortions, and the engineered textures all operate as musical instructions. The pill becomes the score in the same way Hirst believed it had become a new form of contemporary certainty. It is a thing people already trust. A thing people project agency onto. A thing that offers order in a chaotic world. I harness that energy for sound.

Why Pharmaceutical Form Became My Notational Foundation

The pill is already encoded with the logic of dosage, regulation, and controlled effect. When I began shaping these forms into impossible geometries or superellipsoidal distortions, I recognized that I was not only designing images. I was designing instructions. Pills are built to act on bodies. When I turn them into scores, they act on performers. The structure of the form dictates the structure of the gesture.

Hirst often said the pill was a perfect sculpture. Small, self-contained, polished, and filled with promise. I treat the pill the same way, but I amplify it into a notational tool. A twisted matte capsule implies rotation in sound. A beveled metallic seam becomes a boundary that the performer must cross. A gel surface suggests softness or internal vibration. These details are not symbolic. They generate musical behavior through presence.

Hyperreality as a Temporal Device

The hyperreal photographic environment is intentional. I present the pill in a space without horizon, without texture, without distraction. The pill floats in a clarity that borders on ritual. Hirst leaned on the language of clinics and pharmacies because he saw them as temples of modern belief. I use that same visual intensity because it controls time.

The performer cannot skim these images. They must sit with them. The details pull the eye into microscopic zones of gradient, shadow, and gloss. This suspended attention becomes a temporal condition. Traditional notation measures time. My hypermaterial images dilate it. Time emerges from the scrutiny of the object.

Dosage as a Musical Directive

Printed dosage values in my work function as notational anchors. When Hirst spoke of the pill, he often framed it as a promise that something will change. Dosage is the metric of that promise. It calibrates the intensity of belief.

So when I mark “8.08 tTg” or “1525 mg-ko” across a surface, I am not mimicking pharmacology. I am situating the performer inside a world where potency must be assessed. Dosage shapes their interpretive stance. It directs energy, saturation, speed, or density without spelling out a single rhythmic value. The performer does not decode. The performer absorbs.

Materiality as Instruction, Not Ornament

The hypermaterial surface is where the real work begins. A pill with conflicting textures creates a crisis of interpretation. Matte dissolves into gloss. A smooth convex field collapses into a metallic channel. A saturated red intrudes on a pale, clinical white. These tensions force the performer into a new mode of reading. The score refuses clarity in order to provoke interpretation.

This echoes Hirst’s view that the pill is both salvation and seduction. It draws you in with the promise of control, yet it exposes your dependency. My scores do the same. They appear calm, clean, and beautifully engineered. Then they destabilize the performer and demand invention.

Clinical Aesthetics and Their Theatrical Charge

The clinical world pretends to neutrality. Hirst pushed against that illusion by revealing how medical objects function almost like icons. I adopt that tension directly. The pill in my work behaves like a ceremonial object disguised as a product. It carries authority, yet it trembles with expressive excess.

This theatricality is central. The performer approaches the score expecting technical information. Instead, they confront a hypermaterial object that overwhelms them. In that moment, they move from reading to witnessing. The score becomes a site of confrontation rather than instruction.

Toward My Own Pharmacological Aesthetic

Everything I create pushes toward a pharmacological model of notation. I am no longer composing in the traditional sense. I am designing vessels of potency. The pill becomes the architecture through which musical force is delivered. It shapes perception, directs attention, and triggers sonic imagination.

Hirst believed the pill represented the contemporary desire to be fixed, cured, improved, or saved. I believe the pill represents a contemporary desire to trust the object. My scores exploit that trust and redirect it toward musical interpretation.

Where the Pill Leads Me

For me, the pill as score is not symbolic. It is operative. It is a machine for producing new forms of sonic thinking. A hypermaterial capsule can carry more notational intelligence than any symbol. It tells the performer how to feel before they know how to play.

This is the essence of my work. Sound emerges from the object. The performer confronts a hyperreal pharmaceutical monolith and draws sonic consequence from its material command. Hirst saw the pill as a surrogate for belief. I see it as a surrogate for musical thought. In both cases, the object is charged with more meaning than its surface suggests. It becomes a site where desire, control, ritual, and imagination converge.