Jace Clayton activates the power of sound in ways simultaneously subtle and sublime, mobilizing its capacity to create meaning. The interdisciplinary artist, also an accomplished DJ (known as DJ/Rupture) and writer, is currently the subject of a solo show, titled “They Are Part,” at MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) in Boston that presents what he describes as “those waves of magic that happen when the human spirit joins with technology.”
Occupying MAAM’s expansive central space is the sculptural sound installation 40 Part Part (2022), which was originally commissioned by the Front Triennial in Ohio and the New York Philharmonic. Comprised of 40 identical speakers on wood stands that form a circle, 40 Part Part invites visitors into the circle’s interior where a wooden plinth with three different acoustic connections—an aux cord, lightning connector, and Bluetooth—stands. Anyone can hook up their devices (as many as three at a time) and play any sound file they have—voice notes, recordings, videos, music. The work is generous, accommodating, patient. It waits in silence for us to connect.
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During my visit to the exhibition, I plugged in my phone and played Diana Ross’s “Love Hangover.” Another visitor played birdsong simultaneously via Bluetooth. The input audio merged and swirled around us, becoming architectural as it emanated from 40 speakers. 40 Part Part does not simply play back the track; Clayton has written an algorithm that transforms the sound into an uncanny remix. Through his custom software, the audio is warped and repeated. Notes can be duplicated, isolated, their durations abbreviated or extended. The algorithm also picks up on sub-modulations, frequencies underneath the ones we usually hear, excavating the spaces between these sounds. Activating the installation is a joyfully disorienting experience, encouraging us to renegotiate our relationship with our sensorial environment.
For over an hour, I watched visitors interacting with the artwork, with emotions ranging from wonder to discomfort. Most people were gleefully surprised to perceive familiar sounds in new and unexpected ways, but some seemed almost embarrassed when their audio choices would virtually glitch out over the speakers. There is vulnerability in the act of selecting sounds for all to hear. From phone messages and home recordings to popular songs I knew and obscure instrumentals I didn’t, 40 Part Part serves as an adaptable auditory self-portrait perpetually in the making. It is open for us to project pieces of ourselves—crystallizing something fundamental about our existence in this moment, and how we define it.
We often collaborate with technologies we don’t control. They tell us which movies to watch, which routes to take, which shoes to buy. Algorithms are omnipresent in our lives, and “[t]hey’re already making life-changing choices on our behalf at every turn,” as mathematician Hannah Fry writes in her award-winning book Hello World: How to be Human in the Age of the Machine (2019). Silent and invisible, they go largely unquestioned and unnoticed, but in 40 Part Part, the algorithm refuses obscurity. It’s confrontational, rebellious even. By making itself known through the ruptures it generates, Clayton’s algorithm re-sensitizes us to sound, as well as the memories and associations we tacitly ascribe to it.
Maybe, for some, this is where the discomfort emerges: when something you thought you knew becomes unfamiliar to you, its complexities and nuances reveal themselves. Memories may seem fixed, but they prove themselves to be malleable and unreliable. When technology defies our expectations of how it should work, we are reminded that the systems we rely on can unravel at any time.
But this is also where we can build new worlds. Dynamic, multisensorial world-making is heightened in Ceremony of the Steps (2023), a series of live performances commissioned by the museum in which Clayton explores how to come together and amplify our voices in celebration and protest. For each unique performance, Clayton collaborates with local choirs, selecting two songs from their repertoire, and composing a third in conversation with them.
For the inaugural iteration, presented in March with the Northeastern University Madrigal Singers, the audience gathered inside 40 Part Part’s circle, while the choir stood at one side and Clayton stood before the plinth with his equipment. Surrounded by 12 microphones, the choir began to sing, their voices like a tidal force that suddenly submerged the space. Then, toward the end of the third song, there was a shift. A nearly imperceptible whisper started to emanate from the speakers, at first nothing more than gentle friction against the vocal diminuendo. The concert transitioned from human to machine. As the choir dispersed around the circle’s perimeter, Clayton was live-sculpting sound in real time, molding its fluid waveforms and syncopated tonalities into a continuum of deep listening. In this space of experimentation, he unlocked dimensions that had always been there, but were somehow not available to us before. We were listening to what we had previously heard, but also what the software interpreted. Guided by Clayton’s dexterous hands, the performance gestured toward other, nonhuman forms of knowing—different kinds of improvisation and exchange.
Ceremony of the Steps seemed to invoke a meditation of acclaimed composer and artist Pauline Oliveros: “As you listen, the particles of sound—phonons—decide to be heard. Listening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic. As you listen, the environment is enlivened.” Allowing the trajectories and tendencies of this sensitive technology to creatively unfold, Clayton conjures the power of sound as a portal to new subjectivities, where past, present, and future converge.
Source: artnews.com