Sympoiesis, fractal gem, KNOWLEDGE AGAINST VIOLENCE series (2024)
Fractal music is my proposition of a processing model based on the laboratory/task editingworldgrid, attempting to fluidify the connections between the notions of Intelligence, Love and Revolution. It is an ever-moving framework of philosophical, poetical and scientific approaches of sound. It starts from a wonder of what the three notions hold in common.
This research follows the mind map of numerous experiences lived through the years in the fields of music, poetry, choreography and contemporary art, connecting points between research and conversations with other artists, musicians, dancers, choreographers, searchers, linguists, anthropologists and scientists. Some collaborators will be listed at the end of this article.
Nobody did create fractal music. One can always listen to any environment as fractal music, as it was always there. Fractal music exists as a sound environment, in a simultaneity of soundpoints, intuitively displayed in nowness, processed into music or words by the brain, the heart, and the environment.
Fractal music can be defined as a moment of spacetime distortion, an environmental glitch, where image=sound, subject=environment, inside=outside. The staticity which is felt in this type of environment is comparable to what is also called ''IT'' in Jazz. It is relatable in some ways to Galileo’s observation on relativity : Movement is like nothing.
The glitch can be described as follows. We know that when two elements are gravitating side by side, their trajectories can easily be calculated. When three elements are gravitating altogether, it gets immensely more complex to read their behaviors. It generates a blur, getting us towards the infamous three body problem. As an experiment, I will keep track of the properties of environments as a part of the equation.
Environment dynamics can distract us to actually take the time to listen to environments as wholly. It takes plenty of time and space to focus openly on the surroundings. On a virtual level, so many details present in our world are still so unfathomable to AI. Most surrounding elements will seem irregular, noisy, difficult to grasp. Many would see errors, noise to be suppressed. But it could also be the necessary wardrobe for core notions to understand our universe.
These notions are written so deeply, that the only available process is to slow down, at least sometimes. The details lack in the vastness of our systemic readings. Maybe all we need is an invitation to focus. Focus on our environment, as the author of its own narrative. Because as Hubert Reeves wrote as an incipit to the 2022 edition of the french Grand guide de l'Astronomie: ''The biggest recent discovery on our Universe is that we now know that it has a story.'' At our human scales, let's try and focus tightly by adding local constraint.
When it becomes familiar, The whole process consists in learning how to read the patterns and cycles within these environment imprints. In our era, controlling space with communications technologies implies navigating through various dimensions of time, that tend to be misleading with the effort, as an oscillation between subject/environment/ in a context of
it also includes socio environmental markers such as birthdays, local traditions, marketplaces, local cultural events, etc.
The overwhelming sensation provoked by the mix of timeframes tends to blur the readabilities, from grounded temporalities to lead internet time. A special balance is required, to reconcile temporalities into a day’s cycle. To handle this balance, essential to the culture of music, we will interpret the arrowed equal sign developed by Benoît Mandelbrot:
The formula is conceived to generate agency between two complex ensembles. The equal sign is considered like the third element to the triadic problem.
The overall framework of this research is notably inspired by Benoît Mandelbrot’s Fractal Ensemble, The linguistic notion of prosody, Donna Haraway's notions of nowness and sympoïesis, Josèfa Ntjam and Mawena Yewessi’s work on futuribles (possible futures), Warren Brodey’s research on soft environments, The CCRUs notions of hyperstition, Boaventura de Sousa Santos idea of an abyssal language, and Aho Ssan’s sonic views on Baudrillard’s Simulacrum.
Now, how to write about music, if it is a simple trajectory from the heart? Music can only be a feeling. While translation tools can be developed for the sake of language and common grounds, this research can only be a lecture among others. Cognitively, it can only be received in individual manners, generated by the consciousness of accumulation, agglutination, combination of every sound that we get to hear and process throughout our lives.
While some IRL experiences generate direct realities, algorithmic timeframes and data uploaded on the internet find themselves at the risk of being dried up from their essence, at the risk of creating empty hyperstitions. Who would sterilize a dream ? Dreams are often more fluid and adaptative than realities.
Throughout this analysis and approach, I intend to compose soft sound environments, experimenting new dialogues, understanding, meaning, methodologies to understand environments or subjects through sound, in its abstract state, as a post-language solution.
So a certain discipline of the body and the mind will be respected during the process (meditative practices, inner technologies, proximity with nature). The artistic research focuses on the exploration of a list of notions, to try and bring out some acuity about the sounds and music we listen to, as connected to the environments we live in.
Sound perception could be comforted in a vernacular experience, meaning the starting point of every proposition would be a unique narrative emanation of its own local spacetime and magnetic constraints, to craft dedicated sonic environments and emphasize the simultaneity of soundpoints/viewpoints, as an attempt to reduce the determinism factors in sonic communication. The listeners shall be free to choose, inside these environments, what frequencies they feel closer to.
Theoretically, The model has to face several major problems. One of the main problem being:
After collaborating and jamming with so many talented and diverse musicians, my attempt is to collaborate, and start communicating with ecologic environments rather than individuals. As computational music is now mainstream, new technologies are numerous, to match sound with visuals and movements.
The applied research attempts to develop music notably inspired by local ecosystems, using data art technologies to try and understand in a sonic manner. Every sonic piece would be a soft environment in nowness. As an intent to create, common sonic grounds, with a blend of computational and organical inner-technologies, in a trajectory of maintaining ecological equilibrium. What if a soundpiece is a place ? What would be its topology ?
Reacting to this definition of topology, Warren Brodey cultivates the notion as follows:
On a perceptive level, any natural environment may contain un-necessary elements for the viewer/listener/feeler. If we go on a walk into nature, it is not possible to see only trees, or only rock formations. We may favor some elements, but the whole experience consists in immersing ourselves into an environment, and focus on whatever. The freedom of the process to perceive the world is deemed as essential. Sound accompanies the thought in some kind of blurry conversational feeling, like the environment has its word to say and the heart says say again?. I believe music knows how to accompany us way more than it just seems like.
Borobudur was Built Algorithmically, Hokky Situngkir,
Dept. Computational Sociology, Bandung Fe Institute,
Center for Complexity, Surya University
Fractal music does not pretend to hold any scientific value, as it is merely the proposition of a learning methodology, considering the world through sound, generating language solutions on a spectrum of feelings with fractal sonic accuracy.
It is a translation model of what can be felt, in a multi-dimensional environment of sonic commons and undercommons, from an inside lecture to an environmental, shared listening perspective, translated by sentipensar, (Saturnino De la Torre De la Torre, María Cándida Moraes) so to say, a synæsthetic process of feelings to data.
Fractal music is an ever-expanding object, a sensitive model to redefine language and communication in their abstract form. Here is the Google definition for language :
If we strip language from its stereotypical assignments (words carrying sense), there will always be prosodic elements to understand it: frequency pitch, loudness, textures, colors, speed, tonic accents, rhythms, silences. Therefore, Fractal music is directly connected to language. Since the Babel Tower has long been destroyed, what we have in common is a trajectory harder than ever. Nevertheless, it is still possible to grasp some of its remains, while acknowledging cultural specificities and unweaving stereotypes. As a Marseille resident, the starting point of my analysis takes place in the Mediterranean Sea.
The Mediterranean constitutes a rich example of a variety of languages that are still interconnected. Part of its mainframe, the Sabir, a vernacular language invented by the sailors to communicate and exchange. The language is a raw blend of Italian, Arab, Spanish, French and Occitan. The word itself is an alteration of the Castilian, Occitan, Portuguese and Catalan word saber, from its latin roots sapere, knowledge.
The main KNOWLEDGE obstacle of learning through music, depending to location constraints, can be described as such:
The possibility of learning without gaining or using economic value is possible, so it cannot constitute a human’s limitation.
Therefore, the possibility of learning without gaining value only constitutes a social environment limitation, as the irregular sustainability prevents the free circulation of the knowledge.
Cathara : Knowledge Against Violence, 6'20, music video
CATHARA : KNOWLEDGE AGAINST VIOLENCE is my proposition for the upcoming exhibition, I composed and produced the short film Knowledge against violence as part of a corpus dedicated to a poetic reflection, combined with narrative technologies and fractal sound/imagery composed throughout my Intelligence Love Revolution residency with Foreign Objekt.
The short music film will be released with eight visual extracts of fractal imagery, sounds and notions :
I hope experimenting with them will provide more insights about the process. Do not hesitate to reach me out if it inspires you, as the proposition in itself is an open dialogue.
I would never know if there actually is a fractal music from the Mediterranean, if I do not search for it. It has rippled in different parts of the world in many waves, sometimes violently, but yet it holds so much peace. If it exists, then I must hear it. Listen to the deep environment. The Sea contains many messages. All of them are emotions. Some of them are conveyed through my DNA. I hear fragments everyday in the present. So I just do not know if I have to search for it inside or outside. In the past, or in the future. The research will continue with an upcoming residency in Praiano, Amalfi Coast, Italy, starting January 2025.
Hugo Mir-Valette
This research is led thanks to the precious support, collaboration or friendship of Foreign Objekt (Sepideh Majidi), Josèfa Ntjam, Sean Heart, Niccolo Moronato, Désiré Niamké, Liam Warren, Leslie Ranzoni, Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa, among other friends, thanks to Angela Saracino, and my dear family so open to philosophic exchanges. Many thanks to Warren Brodey and Karene Lyngholm for the playful and insightful conversation. Here are some of the local structures that supported the project : DRAC PACA, Artagon, Rift, SOMA, Aquatic Invasion Productions, Association PLUS, Belsunce Projects, Bogiaisso Festival, Lyl Radio Marseille, Dos Mares, Parc Régional des Baronnies Provençales
REFERENCES
Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South, 2016
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, 2016
Stephon Alexander, William J. Cunningham, Jaron Lanier, Lee Smolin, Stefan Stanojevic, Michael W. Toomey, and Dave Wecker, The Autodidactic Universe, 2021
Warren Brodey, Anthology, GUTTORMSGAARDS ARKIV, 2024
Hokky Situngkir, Borobudur was Built Algorithmically,
Dept. Computational Sociology, Bandung Fe Institute,
Center for Complexity, Surya University
CCRU 1997-2003
Arthur C Clarke, Fractals: The Colors of Infinity, 1995
The Undercommons, Fugitive Planning and Black Study, Stephano Harney & Fred Moten
More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction, Kodwo Eshun
Aho Ssan, Simulacrum, Subtext Records, 2020
PROJECT STUDIES
Swell of spæc(i)es, Aquatic Invasion, Josèfa Ntjam, Sean Hart, Mawena Yehouessi,Nicolas Pirus
B r e a t h i n g, Choreographic performance, Liam Warren, RIFT
Le son du vivant, Leslie Ranzoni
Sonài, Niccolo Moronato, Bogiaisso Festival
Marseille Shadow Works, Belsunce projects, Art Explora
Mirrar, Mohamad Arar
Apolatl, Fabienne Guilbert Burgoa
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