Bühlmann, V. (2023, September 7). Can There Be Music at the Edge of the World? Art, Mathematics, and an Aesthetics of Forgetting [Keynote Presentation]. 2023 Sonic Architectures, Bern, Switzerland.
In this talk I want to ‘listen’ to the motifs of Canon and Pop in as many as possible of their radiant spectra, and tell tales that speak in many voices of Space as being abducted from Time.
I will attend to the ancient understanding of ‘canonics’ as providing translation-bridges from the (mathematical) domain of harmonics to that of geometry, where the Pythagorean Comma is to be ‘tempered’ architectonically. In architectonics, such canonic ‘translations’ are linked to the pre-Kantian notion of the ‘schema’ (as a bounded area that can be animated/excited by something exterior to it, for example the sun, if outlined by a gnomon’s shadow).
But how to ‘talk’ schematically, how to talk ‘as-if-out-of-time’?
I aim/hope to develop a poly-voiced talk as the fable of Pierrot-Pantomime (mime of all, gk. pan), who sits, as I imagine, at the edge of the world where he seeks to articulate nothing (that is, silence). His sadness comes (partly) from having lived in an earlier time as a geophysicist who fell in love with the sound of his seismograph. Trying to forget his memories, Pierrot-Pantomime encounters other fabulated Persona such as the Vampyroteutis Infernalis of Vilem Flusser’s fable, the scientific man who, like the blind man, is imagined to learn seeing ‘as-if-with a stick’ in René Descartes fable The World (his Dioptrics), the sage in Michel Serres’s fable Biogea, among others.
-
Research Areas:
Development and Advancement of the Architectural Arts: 100%
