participative installationfor composers and/or artists
On an Instrumentation of Capital is a participatory piece, concerned with collective work and more specifically with different aspects of artistic work, relating to its concrete financial worth and validation as well as its dispositives in general. It consists of three parts.
1.A countdown of half an hour is being projected. A pianist is playing an upward chromatic scale over the whole range of the piano over and over again. While he’s playing, the participants are asked to prepare the piano with any object. Either with one of their own or one from a pile of objects on a table, positioned on the other side of the room. Before they do, their objects are weighed with a scale by a paymaster and they get paid accordingly. The heavier the object, the more money they get. However, the weight is coupled to the lowest possible monetary unit of the respective regions currency, resulting in incredibly low wages, even in the case of heavier objects. The participants are allowed to repeat this process as often as they like. As more and more preparations are within the piano, the initially sterile, abstract and model-like characteristics of the musical material, the chromatic scale are gradually transformed into a kind of Klangfarbenmelodie. A sort of collective composition, appropriating and framing as work a compositional technique, usually associated with the piano works of John Cage from the 1940s. As soon as the countdown stops or all the objects from the pile are within the piano, no more preparations are allowed while the pianist continues playing for around 2-3 minutes, though faster than before.
2.A discussion with the participants concerning topics of artistic work, how to define its worth (both generally and financially) and its various dispositives in relation to their experiences in the first part.3.In an auction, we sell back the objects from inside the piano to the participants. Each objects price starts at 1 ✕ the lowest possible monetary unit. Buying is voluntarily, any object that is not being bought goes back to the pile of objects at the next iteration of this installation. Did the value of these objects change over the course of the last hour? as they were part of an artistic performance?
Concept, performance: Julian Siffert, Uikyung LeeParticipants: composition students of Kyung-Hee University, Seoul
2017
