FontanaMixer, simulate algorithms with John Cage.

FontanaMixer

The encoding of conceptual works in programming code is a particular form of 'digitization' which implies passages media (ie from one medium to another material immaterial) are not negligible, even if at the same time sublimates the ideas in perennial yield of algorithms. FontanaMixer is a generative software based on 'Fontana Mix', conceptual work of John Cage in 1958, planned in Mac by the Austrian Karlheinz Essl in almost half a century later. The score, composed of 'statements' made by points, lines and graphics, through transparent sheets stacked randomly counted six different parameters under which determine every single sound event, with the choice of these parameters left free interpreter. This anarchic freedom of interpretation, which Cage connected to liberation from personal taste reconnecting to natural events, without apparent order, is reflected in the coding done with four independent channels and parameters that are modified independently under the eyes of the user. The theatricality of the work disappears, and with it also the stage presence of the equipment (four tape recorders) used at the time, but this work, commissioned by the festival Wien Modern, creates a sort of 'cover' software of a historic performance by preserving , unlike the cover purely 'musical', the guiding principles, namely the innovative thinking that motivated them and animated in their time. The uncertainty, the opportunity and the silence gather calculated by a microprocessor primed by the necessary instructions, and a protagonist of the same original poetic automation.