LP – Prensa Manual

Diego Behncke sets up a complex grid of sets, choices, and musical actions with the use of the texts of Foirades/Fizzles, a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, that gave life to what is considered one of the most important artists’ books of the second half of the 20th century. Behncke also added other discursive elements, taken from Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu, a radio creation of Antonin Artaud from 1947, and fragments from works of J.L. Borges, Del rigor en la ciencia and La biblioteca de Babel. The method the Chilean experimenter based now in Berlin includes the decomposition and the reconstruction of these textual sources with the use of a recursive logics, which means the execution of algorithms determining a simplification and a subdivision of the whole set of data. Then, these data are later again subject to other similar treatments, according to the same algorithm. The result is very suggestive and takes the form of an electronics electroacoustics, full of very disturbed, robotic, and proliferating sequences, crossed by digital hyperboles, glitches, vortices and dissonances of all kinds. As well as a recursive use of convolution synthesis and computer-controlled modular synthesizers for FM synthesis, Behncke used many programs to obtain a distinctive sound performance: for example, Orchidea for the orchestration of the parts, ACToolkit for different tools of digital synthesis, CatOracle/CataRT for the corpus-based concatenated synthesis, a Yamaha Vocaloid and WaveNet for the vocal synthesis. The synthesized voices work as a mechanism of recall and the sum of the effects makes uncertain to establish in the artistic creation how much is “machinery” and how much is the result of precise human interventions. This dichotomy is actually irrelevant, if we go beyond a clear authorial alterity and we look at things from a full post-human perspective. This is not the future, we lost recognition of that, but the “here” and “now”, which is absolutely signed by the new and newest ways of productions. Artificial intelligence technologies are explicitly alluded to, although the creative process is acted upon a source text translating into outputs through a series of trasductions, following mysterious paths, full of structures of not always linear relationships, on purpose clouded and residual, the result of an ambiguous subset of conceptual and technical devices.

 

Diego Behncke – Machine Anamnesis