numbers #1 “post-truth”
for tenor saxophone and recursive mp3-compression
Formation: tenor saxophone + tape (optional video)
Creation: january-april 2017
Premiere: 20th may 2017. EMA Festival (Madrid). ÁNGEL SORIA
Duration: 12 minutes
Numbers is a series of pieces in which I try to explore how information and perception changes through massive replications and repetitions of the apparently identical, deconstructing the supposed abstraction and neutrality of numbers and trying to create an aesthetic experience through its concretion as sound realities.
“Post-truth” is built through the articulation of a simple fact: the mutation of information in its recursive repetition through simplifying media like the control mechanisms ruling the data flow in social networks or the audiovisual compression algorithms.
The piece offers a persistent confrontation between the original saxophone sound and its digital alter ego, which is gradually being transformed through its recursive mp3-compression; a slow process in which, around recursion 800, the starting situation of original-repetition will blur into another situation where it is no longer possible to discern between the conditions of reality, mutation, original and copy, where even the real seems to imitate its own mutation.
Quasi as a diptych, the piece finishes with a second beginning: a regression from the starting situation towards a progressive decomposition into its digital reality of ones and zeros through a progressive sound pixelation (downsampling).
Although in very different media, the piece picks and transforms influences of the poetics found in other works like the play Numbers (Mar Gómez Glez), the videopiece I am sitting in a video room (Patrick Lidell) or the critical analysis of new technologies carried out by the Ippolita collective.