excite the mental eye from dark oblivion's night

Mnemosyne

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Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne is a ceremonial (e)-vocational work. Dedicated to the goddess of memory, Mnemosyne the creation is poetically rooted in the work of Aby Warburg and in the concepts of the ideas of biologist Rupert Sheldrake. The work is an intimate extreme and yet delicate effort to melt acoustic and virtual instruments, to bound alternative sound projections and space perspectives designing trajectories along a time defined by the act of listening while emotionally reacting to hidden triggering mechanisms. Sliding into an alternative state of perception becomes the profound real evocation of a chthonian goddess who firmly handles the everlasting essence of the universe: its memory.The proposal for the performance of the world premier of Mnemosyne aims at creating a ritual emotional experience.

The processes of remembering mnemonic and ritualistic celebrative events are notably difficult to

describe and have resisted philosophical and psychological as well as vernacular explanation. This performance traces its first steps to an ethological approach to questions of musical experience—i.e., treating music as a behaviour that evolved in ancestral humans because it contributed to their survival and reproductive success. In particular, I refer to interesting and suggestive similarities between the evolutionary (biological) process of ritualization in animal communication and the ritual (cultural) uses of musical behaviour in human rites or ceremonies. In both ritual and ritualization, stylized (i.e., formalized, rhythmically repeated, exaggerated, and elaborated) sounds, images and movements are important means of shaping the responses of participants which have some active role often influencing with their participation and energy the final result. The ethological view of emotion as a motivator of behaviour similarly brings a fresh approach to compositional handling of new sources of musical emotion, permitting the creation of a preliminary ‘ethological taxonomy’ related to diverse emotional responses to music.

One of the key aspect of the ritual is the position in which the performers of the rite and the audience are

standing; from the primeval caves and arenas, to the Greeks theatres and the Stonehenge circles, from the baptisteries, basilicas and cathedrals to the open air Elizabethan theatre and the travelling mystery and religious plays, from the Opera theatres to Renzo Piano’s arch for Luigi Nono’s Prometeo the location of the ritual and the disposition of the audience has always been carefully calibrated and considered by everyone who was interested in influencing not only the passive aspect of the fruition but the true embodiment and psychophysical reception of the vehicle artistic communication.

The work begins in pitch dark, the absence of knowledge! The venue, the screen, the lights, the ceremony all lay loose in an infinite universe without memory: we are the lost child. Slowly form nothing the caminantes enter the venue: the rite begins! Musicians and participants are gathered together … in silence … following an Orphic Hymn thousand of years old they are ready to

excite the mental eye from dark oblivion's night

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Mnemosyne : Aby Warburg’s Wanderstrassen

The compulsion to engage with the world of pre-established expressive forms—regardless of whether their origin is in the past or the present—signifies the decisive critical moment for any artist intending to assert their own character. It was recognition of the fact that until now this process had been overlooked, despite its unusually wide-ranging importance for the stylistic formation of the Renaissance in Europe, that led to Mnemosyne, the images of which are intended, to present nothing but a traceable inventory of pre-coined expressions, which demanded that the individual artist either ignore or absorb this mass of inherited impressions surging forward in this dual manner. Aby Warburg

Begun in 1924 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929, the Mnemosyne Atlas is Aby Warburg’s attempt to map the ‘afterlife of antiquity’, or how images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in Western antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Focusing especially on the Renaissance, the historical period where he found the struggle between the forces of reason and unreason to be most palpable, Warburg hoped that the Mnemosyne Atlas would allow its spectators to experience for themselves the ‘polarities’ that riddle culture and thought.

Warburg’s combinatory experiments in the Atlas follow his own metonymic, intuitive logic, even as it is

propelled by decades of rigorous scholarship. Warburg believed that these symbolic images, when juxtaposed and then placed in sequence, could foster immediate, synoptic insights into the afterlife of pathos-charged images depicting what he dubbed bewegtes Leben (life in motion or animated life). As such, the Mnemosyne Atlas strives to make the ineffable process of historical change and recurrence immanent and comprehensible. More specifically, the Atlas would chart both the afterlife of the classical language of gestures in Renaissance art and beyond as well as the migration of Greek cosmological symbolism up through to the moment when Giordano Bruno and Kepler tried to reconcile the legacies of classical and astrological thought with the discoveries of early modern astronomy. The Atlas functions cartographically, too, as it explores how the movement of themes and styles between East and West constitutes meanings, North and South. Transforming the cartographic and scientific notions of what an “atlas” should be, Warburg created a dynamic ‘thought-space’ [Denkraum] where cosmographic and art-historical images reveal how subjective and objective forces shaped and shape Western culture.

In its “last version,” the Mnemosyne Atlas consisted of sixty-three panels (Tafeln). Using wooden boards, measuring approximately 150 x 200 cm and covered with black cloth, Warburg arranged and rearranged, in a lengthy combinatory process of addition and subtraction, black and white photographs of art-historical and cosmographical images. Here and there he also included photographs of maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images drawn from newspapers and magazines. The individual panels, in turn, were then numbered

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and ordered to create still larger thematic sequences. While in his later years Warburg increasingly deployed such panels in his lectures and presentations (most famously in his Hertziana lecture in Rome in 1929), he also hoped to publish the Mnemosyne Atlas. Indeed, he planned to supplement a volume of plates with two volumes of text, containing historical and interpretive material.

However, as he left the Atlas at the time of his death, the balance of word and image is decidedly tilted

toward the latter. It is left to us latecomers, then, to carefully supplement the gaps, to connect the Wanderstrassen that Warburg adumbrated. This can be done in myriad ways: by adducing his published and unpublished writings; by further mining and explicating Warburg’s own sources; by weighing subsequent scholarship on the artists, the eras, the questions, that fascinated Warburg; by conceiving new ways to map the territories that he first adumbrated; and by deepening and extending his insights and methods, either by applying them to new materials and/or in order to reflect on the nature of historical knowledge and scholarship more generally.

The actual panels of the ‘last version’ are no longer extant; only black and white photographs (18 x 24 cm) of them remain, held in the archives of the Warburg Institute. However, seventy-one years after Warburg’s death, Martin Warnke with the assistance of Claudia Brink, produced a magnificent edition of the atlas based on the ‘last version.’1 In addition to providing Warburg’s draft Introduction to the Mnemosyne Atlas – a key if characteristically knotty fragmentary text – they also reproduce Fritz Saxl’s illuminating letter to a prospective publisher regarding the Atlas, while Warnke’s own Introduction provides important details about the Mnemosyne Atlas, its genesis, scope, and potential meanings. We know, then, that Warburg’s plan had been to complete at least 79 and perhaps as many as 200 panels.

Typically, though, Warburg’s vision was not fully realized. As we have it, the Atlas is frozen in a

provisional state: panels appear without titles; individual images – there are 971 in all – were for the most part displayed without titles or other identifying information; and while some photographs are matted, most are not. Fortunately, though, in a notebook titled Überschriften: Synopsis of Plates [WIA, III.104.1], Warburg’s colleague Gertrud Bing, following her mentor’s lead, offers brief headings for each panel, furnishing thereby a kind of conceptual shorthand signposting main subjects and themes. The photographs of the panels serve as a set of post-modern grisailles, a belated memory palace, which invites us to contemplate Warburg’s syncretic vision of the afterlife of pagan symbolism and cosmography in medieval, Renaissance, and post-Renaissance art and though.

1 [See Der Bilderatlas: Mnemosyne in Warburg’s Gesammelte Schriften, II.1 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2000 [reprinted in 2003, 2008]). The other volumes in the Gesammelte Schriften, from the two volumes of Warburg’s published writings [I.1-2], the Tagebuch der Kulturwissenschaftlich Bibliothek Warburg [VII] to the just published, Austellungen [II.3], offer other avenues for interpreting and supplementing the Mnemosyne Atlas.]

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Memory as a poetical destination Music is a temporal art and as such our experience of it is in part function of the way sound interacts with memory. This work seeks to explore the role of memory in music and the way in which musical structure can act as a framework for articulating experiences related to the perception of sounds in space along time. On the other hand memory defines who we are and our consciousness is a direct consequence of our mnemonic processes. To organically assemble music matter and its morphological relationship with all the temporal and spatial parameters, which inform it I investigated how memory affects the way, listeners identify and respond to spatial structure in music. I work especially with works which lasts for long durations, through creating a new 25-minute composition for ensemble, sound projection, virtual orchestra conTimbre and visuals with a strong celebrative component where interfaced careful to constantly to interact with the consciousness of the audience. The piece, poetical thought as homage to Mnemosyne daughter of Ouranos, mother of the nine muses and goddess of memory and of time, considers how repetition of pre-selected frequencies in music interacts with memory considering how perturbation of the spatial projection of sounds makes memory liable to disruption and degradation, or confirmation. Over the past years I have undertaken independent contextual research to inform my existing work with memory in music through an intense compositional and research practice part of PhD at King’s College London. In the last four years I researched the connection between perception and recollection of spatial events along time and learned to follow precise studio’s techniques and procedures investigating how to use individual and original analogic and digital hardware to shape mnemonic recognition as a poetical and structural functional framework. I developed some original algorithms to project different bands of the very same spectra along different routes, continuously redefining, but constantly re-affirming them. I also produced interesting approaches to the projection of sub harmonics, keeping present their direct influence on our emotional apparatus. Finally I envisioned a constant variation on internal components as the shifting of frequency bands, the convolution of sounds and the interaction between close frequencies (beatings) to obtain a constant aliveness in sounds that are pin pointed in space and time and act as pivot cardinal coordinates for ‘frozen melodies’ and ‘shadow harmonies’. The aim of this work has been also to develop a perceptually integrated spatialization system flexible, and able to create landscapes in constant growth, as if under meteologic or biologic transformation. In this way a unique palette of ‘dreamy and unreal sound sceneries’ has obtained through a careful rating of the virtual microphones directivity pattern, their recording sensitivity, their position and orientation both in the recording and performing room.

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The technical approach to the contribution of the digital sound processing of concrete sounds ( wood breaking as stones cracking, paper crashing and aluminium scratching) was strongly designed as in a laboratory allowing microscopic sounds to become macroscopic in definition, dramatically changing the perspective, creating a perpetual live reaction-interaction between the produced sounds and the audience sense of perceptive perspective. Various parameters are adjusted in real time during the performance: filtering of the responses from directivity patterns and sound projection, microphones’ orientation and dynamic, as well as the transformation of the perceived physical and virtual locations of the live ensemble.

Made of matter, space and time Music is a temporal art and as such our experience of it is, in part, a function of the way sound interacts with our memory and individual perception of space and time. One useful distinction made by scholars is between episodic and semantic memory, each of which is considered to represent a different type of consciously accessible long-term memory. In particular episodic memory involves remembering specific events and includes recollection of time, place and emotions experienced at the time of the event. In my work I tend to consider the so called parameters of sound and the dimensions as a whole organic set of diverse components related to the sound manifestation. I support the definition of a sound that is always considered as a living and breathing organism more than a passive intentional object. The research could finally lead to a creation that will creatively include most of the retrieved data to innovatively shape and transform the original poetical matter into an effective interactive artistic experience. Reflections, trajectories, transformations, gravity and behaviour, are another possible integrative way to understand the scientific and poetical principles behind music, at least my music.

Under the perspective of the Live Electronics Mnmeosyne work is a journey in perceptive

technique. I created an initial draft of a ‘walkable score’, that literally allows me to travel into the sound and shape a unique and individual experience for every listener. The audience is thought to experience a sense of musical epiphany evocation and hallucination, implemented by observing a video with processed image Mnmeosyne by Aby Warbourg. Every listener becomes an interpreter of his/her own perceptive experience and choses where and how to focus the attention ideally having a slightly different experience during possible further listening. We all tend to disregard the ambient sound which surround us in everyday life, often forgetting to monitor it in the background for signs of danger as our ancestors used to do . Electronics sounds, whose source we can neither see nor identify, tend to elicit greater alertness in the listener and therefore we often shut them down unconsciously. The elements of surround sound are always, in life as in this work, three and four dimensional spaces (even if memory becomes undoubtedly a fifth dimension); we must remember invisible sounds with un predictable motion in space have always traditionally been used by the perception to warn us from danger… death.

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We have very little experience with their aesthetic heightening, nor do we know what connotations the manipulation of these primary perceptual elements will awaken in listeners. Grafting complex intellectual interpretive mechanisms onto reactions of the subconscious nervous system as old as mankind itself definitely enriches music, will we be able to use it poetically? By dissolving the traditional frontal orientation of musical discourse, surround sound, and in particular projected sounds, stimulate the development of new modes of listening, but still need improvement and diffusion to wider audiences. I do the dissolution has yet to be turning inward, changing the language of music itself, the ways in which written music speaks to us. More than fifty years after the best works of Luigi Nono and centuries after Giovanni Gabrieli or Hector Berlioz it is really inexplicable why sound projection is still so rare in the concerts hall where the frontal stage rules by necessity and not choice. Great and true artists have never subdue to what ‘was already there’ but have always pushed the limits further further from sculpture to architecture, from art to music: why are we so limited to have become the more conservative art-form? Our duty is also to question and break this sick dis-equilibrium where who has the biggest immobility of vision is called a ‘genius’ and raised over fragile pedestals.

Spatial sound perception is an important process in how we experience sounds in our environment. The synthesis of spatial sound properties by means of computer and loudspeaker technology is an on going research topic. In spatial music, perceptual effects of spatial sound segregation, fusion and divided attention are and should constantly be explored. The aim of this work is also to develop a perceptually convincing sound projection system that is flexible and easy to use in different scenarios. Using an interdisciplinary approach I also highly benefit from research made with convolution including, pairing and adjusting a possible virtual microphone recreation refining an original sound projection system. The human auditory system primarily utilizes inter-aural level and time differences to determine whether the sound is coming from, the left or right, high or low, front or back. I have created multiple virtual sound recording scenes, and the acoustic sound sources (the ensemble) are be therefore defined through their location, radiation pattern, orientation, and sound pressure level.

With this approach I have created spatial perspectives such as depth illusions, Doppler shifts and simulated various classical microphone techniques. Assigning artificial directivity patterns to microphones or changing the laws of physics in the model helped me create surreal scenes. While the unprocessed audio content (the performers sound) and pre-arranged control data have been organized on Max patches and streamed to a dedicated audio rendering computer, various parameters are still adjusted in real time with two midi faders controllers. I initially worked on different inputs and following perspectives unifying poetical drive with technical needs. We are all aware spatial cognition is a neuroscience and requires the intervention of perfected techniques and these techniques could be optimized considering even more the perceptive capacities of the listener. Of particular interests in this work has been the production of fluttering, ephemeral surfaces that can actively engage the listener in the passing of fleeting events. Successions of notes that operate at a speed and density beyond that which can be immediately apprehended if repeated over and over, allow the listener to gradually build up an understanding of the composite elements of the textural surface. The former often interact with

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other acoustic indices (localization, distance, reverberation, etc.) and used by the central nervous system to create a spatial representation of the perceived environment. Another aim in the creative process has been to explore the ways in which memory disorientation is affected through repetition in ‘impossible spaces’ and different proximities. In my work traditional linear melody, almost archetypical in its conception, is invoked by very intimate forces, being decomposed into minuscule particles and subsequently transformed into new figures or melodic cells, spread along a vast space constantly transforming in time. Memory has a major role in this process, connecting and transforming these frozen melodies and their sound projection in musical and physical space.

The manipulation of musical material will explore the role of emotional states in controlling the strength of memory; passing through a maieutic process, creating a constantly changing emphasis that is analysed by forces that distort it in its very anatomy. The work, under the umbrella of my underpinning research, springs in different ways: explores subtleties of repetition and textural variation leading to the consolidation of musical objects; builds a piece from transforming musical chunks; and examines how live interaction might act in an iterative way as a generative process. The creation is a piece that heavily focuses on time: time that passes, time that is unavoidable, time that circles back on itself, time that is transformed by our consciousness. The piece focuses on the invisible boundary between those sounds we, incorrectly, label ‘noise’ or ’enharmonic’ and those we grant the status of "musical sound".

Several categories of musical objects come and go, transformed, than become entangled: the inhaling and exhaling various noisy, breathy, grainy sounds - whose internal structures will be re-tuned and constitute a “mirroring simulacra”.

The "noises" (breath, grainy sounds, metallic resonances) of the piece will somehow be domesticated, tuned to instrumental harmonies through the use of a specific technique for altering the internal components of the sounds. This is how the sound of a gong or a multiphonics becomes a harmony, or the resonances of the cowbells is constantly varied and altered by their musical context.

Frederick Leighton : Mnemosyne

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The “mirroring simulacra” are assembled with sounds digitally analysed via a method that traces spectral centroid, evolution and amplitude of sounds partials; the computer will than store the resultant information on buffers and use it either to re-synthesize the original sound, or as a model for constructing new sounds. Thus the electronic sounds heard in the piece will range from clearly and audibly related ones to distorted ones whose origin is far from obvious. Crossing or superimposing spectral characteristics of one sound with another will produce fresh new timbre. This range of techniques supplies the pitch-material on the instruments; I am insistent on linking timbre and harmony to the extent that one can scarcely tell them apart constantly evolving in a dialogue between synthetic sounds, wind instruments and resonances linked to the harmonic spectra of the percussions. All acoustic and synthesized sounds, triggered from the diverse programs- are mixed and spatialized in real-time by an original sound projection patch for Ispat/Max that allows every sound to be compressed and stretched along different trajectories in different volumes. Performers are supposed to, create a continuous aura of harmonic reflections. The noise element, rather than being the extreme towards which the music is pushed, is here embedded in the texture of the music from the start – I intend not merely to compose the music but the ambience within which it will be perceived. Winds and strings constantly interacts on the sound of the digital soundtrack and explore or explode it . Each section starts from an acoustic model proposed by the multiphonics - and is consequently imitated by all the players and the digital projections, in so doing, it is progressively transformed into a new texture, which eventually provides the context for a constant new acoustic model. Rich complexes sum and different tones, produced by the ring-modulated resonances, also furnish harmonic material. These complexes sound spectra are half-harmonic, half-timbre in character, and the piece constantly plays upon the ambiguity between harmony and timbre: a complex perceived as timbre when produced by the ring-modulated soloist is transformed into a predominantly harmonic phenomenon when transferred on to the virtual orchestra . The sound of the ensemble is also further transformed by different convolutions, producing sweeps of harmonics often mirrored by the digital soundtrack. Tempo is constantly accelerating or decelerating, melting into space and lending the music a strangely dilated temporal character able to be shaped by the spatial displacement of every musical parameter and its reflection. The listener may have trouble distinguishing all the diverse processes, even if music does fall into clearly defined sections while evolving as a continuous curve of sound. An important hallmark of this curve is the constantly sliding tempo of the music, causing the sounds to be pulverised into grain or to be elongated into entire sections. In this sense this work is ‘a study in perspective and chiaroscuro’ an examination of the relations between speeds and sounds in a perpetually unstable resonating environment.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Mnemosyne

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Evoking the Gods

Until the 60s, and beyond, there have been experiments on the purported transmission of information from one person to another without using any of our known sensory channels or physical interaction. Pioneers of this research were Montague Ullman2 and Stanley Krippner3 of the Maimonides Medical Center4. They were able to transmit a dream to a sleeping subject. Burton Glick, a psychiatric of New York, replicated this experiment. Furthermore, Charles Honorton5 and many more embarked to replicated this experiment. I could also quote scholars who were able to hypnotize people, which were miles away, like Esdaile, Dusart, Boirac, Myers and the famous Pierre Janet6.

Multiple studies have proven that evoking of distinct images at a distance, to multiple subjects, is more efficient if we remove the archetypes already present in the imagination of the receiving person.

In the second part of the XXth century two American researchers, Masters and Houston, attempted to influence telepathically some people, which were subjected to lysergic acid. They realized that the procedure was more successful and much greater when the transmitted image had a high amount of emotional and suggestive charge. When stimulated to focusing on Olympian gods, for example, 68 out of 48trials were able to visualize in a hallucination like-form the image that was ‘sent’ to them, while only 14 were negatively reacting.

Charon will tell you that your imagination is the integration of imagination, in the larvae state, of the men who have been preceding us. Therefore, your subconscious is like a massive storage unit, in which a section is reserved to you but open to connections and exchange from outside. Everywhere else, where shadows loom, it's a warehouse filled with symbols, idols, fragments of experience, dreams and believes and convictions. If someone were to penetrate from the exterior with light you would see things that you wouldn’t even have imagined you could have possibly stored inside.

The explanation to this phenomenon is that states of vigil next to sleep exist and have a precise role, if properly managed. Evoking gods triggering telepathic connections are nothing else if not falls from the wall of logic and rationality, ‘faux passes’ which allows the uncovering of the unconsciousness. Ecstasy and trance all are forms of sleep with eyes half shut, followed by emission of cerebral waves, which are defined by scientists as Alfa waves. We are trying ‘to conquer’ a state of mind 2 Montague Ullman (September 9, 1916 – June 7, 2008) was a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and parapsychologist who founded the Dream Laboratory at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York and for over three decades actively promoted public interest in dreams and dream sharing groups. http://www.siivola.org/monte/index.html 3 Stanley Krippner (born October 4, 1932)[1] is an American psychologist, parapsychologist, and an executive faculty member and Professor of Psychology at Saybrook University in Oakland, California.[2][3] Formerly, Krippner was director of the Kent State University Child Study Center (of Kent, Ohio), and director of the Maimonides Medical Center Dream Research Laboratory (of Brooklyn, New York).[2]http://stanleykrippner.weebly.com/ 4 http://www.maimonidesmed.org/Main/Home.aspx 5 Charles Henry Honorton (February 5, 1946 - November 4, 1992) was an American parapsychologist and was one of the leaders of a collegial group of researchers who were determined to apply established scientific research methods to the examination of what they called "anomalous information transfer" (extrasensory perception) and other phenomena associated with the "mind/body problem"—the idea that mind might, at least in some respects, have a physical existence independent of the body.[1] 6 Pierre Marie Félix Janet (French: [ʒanɛ]; 30 May 1859 – 24 February 1947) was a pioneering French psychologist, philosopher and psychotherapist in the field of dissociation and traumatic memory. He is ranked alongside William James and Wilhelm Wundt as one of the founding fathers of psychology.[1]

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typical of mystics and saints, but intimately shared also by tens of thousands of people, especially when those people have gathered with the precise goal of rejecting reason. I suppose this surprises you, but concrete proofs that the (spirit) every man is in contact with the one of other humans and is able to influence their sub consciousness do exist. An English biologist, for example, Rupert Sheldrake7, has shown beyond reasonable doubt that any mouse, present anywhere around the globe, placed in the exact point in the same water basin will swim without hesitation in the direction of the lath. What about spiders, snakes and bulls and …

… what about gods for example ?

Marco Liberi : Mnemosyne and Zeus

7 http://www.sheldrake.org/about-rupert-sheldrake/biography