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Unknown Territory


“If there were no continual effort to start from the beginning there would be no art. I cannot help it but start from scratch. I am tempted only when I experience something unknown, something new and meaningful for me. It seems, however, that this unknown territory is sooner reached by way of reduction than by growing complexity. Reduction certainly doesn’t mean simplification, but it is the way – at least in an ideal scenario – to the most intense concentration on the essence of things. In the compositional process I always have to find this nucleus first from which the work will eventually emerge."

Arvo Pärt
Interview with Arvo and Nora Pärt
The Musical Times, Autumn 1999
Brian Allen Simon, creator of the avant-ambient musical project Anenon, moves his musical practice forward into a feverish, unfettered space that he’s hinted at mostly in his excellent live shows. Highly recommended—pair with a humid evening and an Alsace Pinot Noir. 

A More Tenuous Means of Understanding


“The Industrial Revolution brought one dynamic change to all things made by machine, craftsman, and artist; no longer were they produced on commission, but rather on speculation. Here is the product, created or manufactured; will someone want it? All of the give-and-take between maker and user, then, is broken down, giving way to a more tenuous means of understanding"

Donis A. Dondis
A Primer of Visual Literacy
A delicate sound collage from 1999 by composer Pauline Oliveros and sound artist Andrew Deutsch. Oliveros was committed to a kind of meditative practice of attention she called Deep Listening and Deutsch is a professor of sound design at Alfred University. 

We Are Out of Place


Until 1999, my sculpture was participatory in the sense that I built reading rooms, reading gardens, bridges, workers' lounges, etc. Previously, I knew architecture not as a "thing between four walls in a spatial sense, but as a place for resting, sleeping, working." But since then I have enclosed the sculptures so that people cannot enter; they have to walk around the sculpture and view it. Adorno's ironic statement—"it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home"—now guides my work. Outside of these enclosed spaces, we are out of place, as though banished, estranged, expelled, or as Lukács says, experiencing a "transcendental homelessness."

Siah Armajani
from Notes on Exile