Imaginary gestures of specta(c)torship: Darie Nemes Bota’s ‘Urban Seashell’
Abstract:
This article considers the process of specta(c)torship afforded for by Darie
Nemes Bota’s imaginary music score Urban Seashell, recently published
in the collection Redescoperind Muzica Imaginara (2020, ed. Irinel
Anghel). Urban Seashell asks the spectator to perform a series of simple
movements on a sidewalk near a busy road, movements that modulate the
sound experience of the traffic noise. At the same time, the spectator is
asked to imagine a sound and develop it in their imagination according to
the indications of the score. I take the (im)materiality of the resulting
musical experience, the conjunction of ‘real’ and imagined sounds, as the
starting point for theoretical considerations into the consequences of this
performative experience of specta(c)torship.
After briefly considering the meaning of imaginary music for Octavian
Nemescu, the avant-garde composer who proposed this practice in the mid
’70s, the article explores the paradoxical conjunction of active/passive
listening, movement, and imagination that Urban Seashell, as a work of
imaginary music,opens up for the spectator. Building on insights from
Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, I explore a possible understanding of
imagination—as it emerges from the experience that Urban Seashell
proposes—that allows us to glimpse the (de)construction of embodied
subjectivity and of its associated milieu (in the understanding that Gilbert
Simondon gives to this term) as the fundamental stakes of the process of
specta(c)torship that Urban Seashell offers.
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