The research transforms the brain waves generated during the REM phase into sculptural solids and automatic audio compositions. Using a technology capable of translating the brain’s electric activity into forms and sounds, Sparkling Matter expands the confines of the oneiric world, giving it body and noise, as well as making the experience a participative one.
Sparkling Matter is an exploration of the possible ephemeral and material forms that dreams can produce. It all begun from the desire to listen to the sounds generated by the different sleeping phases, to be able to turn them into a participatory experience.
After the invention of the encephalogram by Hans Berger in 1924, the idea that the brain's will could trigger the act of a machine gave birth to a research, better known as Brain Computer Interface. Over time, its applications in the acoustic field have been focused mostly on the attempt to organize music writing in a conscious manner, solely through the use of thought, by transmitting data from the encephalogram to the machine.
In order to observe deep sleep and the mystery surrounding it, in Sparkling Matter the musical composition has completely been delegated to the act of thinking in its more unknown form, when the mind is free to dream. This open-ended exploration of the unknown gave voice to the diverse states of consciousness. Fourteen electrodes have been used to monitor the electrochemical activity of the brain.
Each one of them is able to send an independent signal to a conversion software. These programs transform, in real time, the encephalogram data into signals recognizable by an audio software, which translates them into sound.
The first presentation of Sparkling Matter happened at Marsèlleria in Milan (spring 2016), where, during a sleep concert, we listened for a whole night to the sounds generated by a performer, asleep and dreaming. A second performance, Notturno Smarrito, was realized at the Galleria Nazionale in Rome (winter 2017). On this occasion, a circular audio system reproduced the perimeter of the electrodes connected to the performer. It was able to recreate a spatial vision of the synapsis and of the cerebral connections happening during the different phases of sleep. This way, the generated sounds created a three-dimensional environment, where the public could wander through. A third sleep concert took place at Marsèlleria in New York, in the winter of 2017. In time, new concerts and night performances have generated other occasions to experiment, new sound material and data to translate, as well as new chances to deepen the research.
Parallel to the sound research, a spatial and material translation has been indeed experimented. The data related to the REM phase have been multiplied by a software for automatic landscape generation (Scenery Generator). The generated shapes have been then recreated in porcelain, through a 3D printing process. Either with sound or matter, what we perceive is a temporal narration of an activity, both intimate and secret, capable of creating a portrait, or a simulacrum, of our thought. In spring 2017, other sessions took place at Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, during the exhibition Intuition. In the room that used to be Mariano Fortuny’s atelier, the sleep concert and porcelain printing went on for several days. On this occasion, for the first time, it was possible to observe the whole process in real time, from the hypnagogic phase to the printing of dreams.
Matteo Nasini
Davide Daninos, The writing of thought
Excerpt from “The Necessary”, in INTUITION, MER. Paper Kunsthalle, Ghent, 2017, pp. 62-81.
Intuition is a process that is at once passive, since it is based on the capacity to reap and record one’s own ideas, and active, since it gives meaning to that which we have heard or received. What we experience through rational thinking is nothing more than a synthesis of the parallel processes that take place in our brains unbeknown to us.
The coherence we perceive is the result of a filtering process that our minds perform to construct a stable image of the world before us and the illusion of a continuous consciousness within us. André Breton used to call ‘interior ear’ the instrument necessary both to listen and to distinguish the various parallel processes that define our mental life as a constant ‘dynamic present’, as [Edoardo] Boncinelli puts it. This ‘ear’ focuses our hearing on the background noise of consciousness, orients it towards those movements that accompany or precede rational thought and that, if properly analysed, can describe the secret life of our mind.
“On 27 September 1933 (around eleven at night, as I was trying to fall asleep earlier than usual)”, Breton writes, “I once more recorded such a series of words, not provoked by anything conscious in me. Although spoken as if by an actor off stage, they were quite distinct and, to what is aptly called the interior ear, constituted a remarkably autonomous group. I have been forced at various times to turn my attention to these particular verbal formations, which, in any given case, can appear very rich or very poor in sense but – at least by the suddenness of their passage and by the total, conspicuous lack of hesitation which reveals the manner in which they are brought to us – bring to mind such an exceptional certainty that one does not hesitate to examine them in greater depth.”
Breton himself defined this form of psychic automatism as thought-writing, and automatic writing was the Surrealist method for registering it. A symbol of the paradigm shift promoted by this French intellectual, this practice deprives interior discourse of rational objective by eliminating any interruption in or segmentation of the stream of consciousness. In doing so, it transforms the artist into a ‘modest recording instrument’.
For me, the image that best captures that definition are the phonograph wax cylinders that Thomas Edison invented towards the end of the nineteenth century. These simple cylinders were capable of recording sound simply through a membrane connected to a needle. Trembling, it was able to engrave sounds vibrations in the soft and sensible surface of the wax and, subsequently, to replayed them. This attention to the mechanical receptivity of the Surrealist artist helped to limit, insofar as that is possible, the vanity of the author; to eliminate any virtuosities that can reduce even the most mature research to the easiness of effects. Once it had been brought into such clear relief, this tendency ran through the various artistic revolutions that succeeded it; indeed, it is still operative today, most notably in practices where a collaboration with instruments and materials is central to the production of the work. In the ‘decalcomania without preconceived object’ of Óscar Dominguez, for example, the composition was born solely from the encounter between paper, ink, and the will of the artist. But the same tendency can be found in Max Ernst’s frottages and in the canvases where Isa Genzken uses oil paint is to bring out the drawings hidden in the floor of the artist’s studio (Basic Research, 1989). But let us return to the image of the artist both as source and as recording instrument. We find a direct example of that tendency in the series of self-portraits Robert Morris made in the early 1960s. Self-Portrait (EEG), from 1963, is a recording of the artist’s brain activity, monitored through electroencephalography, a simple scientific instrument capable of automatically transposing the invisible movements of our mind into graphic form. This intuition allowed the artist to recognize and translate his own mental activity into visual poems, whose form is akin to a musical score.
Thus we see, recorded on a piece of paper, all the oscillations and intermittences that characterize our consciousness. It is a new form of automatic drawing, in which the mind express itself ‘on its own’. Starting from the same presuppositions, Matteo Nasini pursued and updated the technique using new typologies of exploration (Sparkling Matter, 2017). This Italian artist has focused his research on the oneiric dimension of consciousness and created new methods to give form to the invisible contents of mind as it dreams up scenarios that are free from any rational order. To give voice and body to these dimensions of our internal life, Nasini monitored the electric activity of the cerebral cortex of several subjects with an instrument similar to Robert Morris’, during one, or more, sleep cycles. Subsequently, the artist took the linear traces produced by the electroencephalograph and rotated them on their axis. The result is a translation of two-dimensional information into geometric solids, that were subsequently printed in ceramic.
Francesco Angelucci for Arte e Critica
MATTEO NASINI. SEEING THE ABYSS IN COMMON PLACES
Studied from a purely musical perspective, Matteo Nasini’s sound survey insists on tracking alternatives to traditional musical composition. The artist does it with the most immediate choice: cutting off the composer. Nasini’s music production process actually excludes rationality in the choice or omission of sound and timbres. His Wind Harps are an explicit example of that proceeding: the ropes, mounted over an harmonic sound board and left outdoors are stimulated by the wind action, thus, they begin to vibrate and finally play. The thickness of the strings imposes a various wind resistance, hence, the more intense the wind blows, the more the strings of the harp can resonate and reach the threshold of audibility with their different consistencies and times. The artistic effect - a musical composition without a real composer - is therefore made up of a set of sounds chosen by the wind itself. Sparkling Matter is a similar investigation: The project has been presented and exhibited both at the Marsèlleria and the Climate Gallery in Milan over the course of one year; it also won the Talent Prize 2016 and it was hosted at the National Gallery of Rome, the project also inaugurated the new space of New York’s Marsèlleria and it was presented at the Palazzo Fortuny during the Venice Biennale. While the Wind Harps excluded the composer, in Sparkling Matter the replacement is even more ambiguous though still radical as it is an investigation through stages of human consciousness. Through the action of an electroencephalogram (EEG), Nasini maps the activity of a sleeping person; nineteen magnets correspond to as many areas of the brain analyzing the electrochemical activity. Cerebral connections and synapses are associated to a software translating such impulses into sound. The combination of the brain’s nineteen areas, stratifying or cancelling each other, creates a composition in which man – though generating subject - remains a compulsory spectator only. It is, in fact, the irrational part of the unconscious sleeper the real creator of the whole sound architecture, which is why the central issue of Sparkling Matter is about taking away human beings from its rational and enlightened context. Nasini has genuinely transformed this intuition into a live performance in which the transformation, from sleeping impulses into sound, is handled by the artist himself while the public is invited to fall asleep to the sound of the sleeping unconscious and sharing the sleep phases with him. The impulses were then translated into ceramic sculptures thanks to a 3D printing process. Shiny white and cone-jagged shapes appear as the materialization of sleep, to all intents and purposes they emerge as the iteration of irrational functions. Compared to other sound artists of his generation, Nasini’s narrative dimension is more explicit, conceived as succession and stratification of sounds in a determined time. The alternation between the different stages of sleep has the effect of an unstable composition built on silences and synthetic dissonances that reflect the brain’s behaviour. However, it would be naïve to believe that the composing human element may be eliminated from the musical architecture. On one hand Nasini excludes the rational process of composing and on the other he procrastinates or rather anticipates a direct human intervention. The Wind Harps are supposed to play by themselves though they actually sound exactly like the artist has tuned them while the natural role of the wind can interfere on the existing material. In Sparkling Matter is instead the human intervention to allow the impulses to sound, through the software creation, exactly like the artist wants. In this investigation, the artist come close to avant-garde composers, notably Arnold Schönberg, Pierre Boulez and John Cage. The idea of proposing an alternative solution to the traditional tonal composition system, whether through the creation of another system - the rigid dodecaphony - or indulging in sound casualty, finds an astonishing synthesis in the work of Nasini in which both causality and control express themselves in a peculiar balance. The artist manages to propose a real and solid alternative to the traditional composition system through the liquidation of rationality in the process of choosing the musical material. While the role of the composer has always been to make rational choices regarding a given model, Nasini leaves this choice to irrational discerning factors as wind or human subjects. The writer Karl Kraus wrote: “music that lays the banks of thought” while the composer Anton Webern censured this aphorism for precluding music from being thought and rational impression - which is not too bad sometimes. Sparkling Matter, through its mapping of the state of unconsciousness, has actually succeeded in achieving what should be the goal of any artistic expression: learning to explore abysses in common places.
Sperkling Matter, 2018 Vinyl 180gr, 36 pages booklet, edition of 500 copies. Ed. YARDPRESS
The collected sounds of this edition have been extracted from several sleeping phases, recorded during the sleep concerts happened between 2016 and 2017.