for Marina Hasselberg

Maps and Shadows

Is it possible to transform different representations of music to space, and vice versa? Is there a point where they collapse into each other? Sound like space is a place in which we are embedded, in which the sensory experience of reality and artistic form can finally converge.

Space as a dimension of time implies movement, maps and presence. Sonorous spaces – like traversable spaces – map our perception of time; and to light sound should be compared when sound is not just what we hear but also the medium of our perception. If we understand the close relation here between listening and seeing, sound and light; then visualizing sound is like understanding that is not about what we “see” as what we see “in”.

Beyond the maps, the shadows imply a presence in time and in space; and like walking in the city of Zora – one of Italo Calvino’s Le Cittá Invisibili (Invisible Cities) – we might recognize a place that no one, having seen it, can ever forget: “… the city which can not be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honey-comb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember …” (GM)

“Music cannot exist without sound, but sound can exist without music. 

Thus it seems that sound is more important.”

Giacinto Scelsi