Indeterminacy, Score, Performance

About Halo installation by Kimchi & Chips

([Link]

Lev Manovich

Only mediocre works of art have verbal “meanings.” The best ones do not. They need
to be experienced. They can’t be reduced to a set of keywords, topics, themes, or is-
sues.

Although this experience can be almost instantaneous in theory, I can’t think of a single
work conceived for such split-second viewing. Instead, practically in all cases, an art-
work asks us to dedicate some time to being with it. In many works, including most
music pieces, the time needed is programmed by the work itself. John Cage’s 4′33″
lasts exactly 4 minutes and 33 seconds in every performance. The length of conven-
tional music compositions in Western culture is not fixed as precisely. Each perfor-
mance is a realization of a score by individual performers or a conductor and an or-
chestra, and its length may vary slightly from one performance to the next. For exam-
ple, performances of First Symphony by the famous twentieth-century Russian com-
poser Alfred Schnittke can vary between 91 and 94 minutes. The same is true of all
genres of live performance that follow a script, including dance and theatre.

But how much time is needed to properly “see” a painting, photograph, sculpture, or
installation? A few minutes? A few years? One definition of a visual masterpiece is that
you never get bored looking at it. There is always something that still remains for you to
discover. So one answer can be eternity. However, as far as I know, no-one has ever
verified this by conducting an experiment.
The mechanical, electrical, and electronic media of the industrial era standardized cre-
ation, distribution, and presentation of cultural works. The motor of a film camera, film
projector, gramophone, record player, magnetic audio tape player, and other media
machines runs at a constant speed. This standardization enabled new media such as
cinema where images are sampled at regular temporal intervals and played back at the
same speed. So unless we are dealing with certain experimental films (e.g., Outtakes
from a Life of a Happy Man by Jonas Mekas), every showing of a film on a single film
reel lasts exactly the same time and not a second longer or shorter.

Industrial machines such as the motor did not only enable new “media arts” in a direct
material way. They often became the subjects of the arts. Between the First and Sec-
ond World Wars, many modernist artists and filmmakers celebrated the new beauty of
moving machines in their works that featured machine tools, airplane propellors, and
the rotating wheels of trains and trams.

Halo belongs to a different era. Today our feelings about modernity and industrialization
are often ambivalent or negative. Ruthless exploitation of natural resources, environ-
mental degradation, and climate change are among the undeniable consequences of
industrialization. Instead of admiring the machines we made, we now want to pay clos-
er attention to nature, which is more rich, complex, interconnected, and variable, but
also apparently more fragile. However, nature in itself is not the subject of Halo.

Halo does not contain a detailed depiction of nature, framing it for our contemplation or
admiration like classical Western landscape painting. Nor does it follow the tradition of
East Asian ink and wash painting, which aims to convey the “spirit” of the subject
without depicting all its details. So if Halo does not represent nature or our impressions
of it, what does it do?

Ninety-nine mirrors controlled by a computer follow the sun throughout the day, reflect-
ing and beaming its light into precise positions along a volume of mist droplets. When
conditions are perfect - the sun is bright so you can see your own shadow and there is
no wind - these 99 light beams together create a circle. But this does not happen very
often. Even the slightest wind disturbs this “light drawing,” so instead of a full circle, we
only see its bottom part. It is mesmerizing and very satisfying to sit and watch this
process for a long time. On the one hand, it is impossible to predict the process of cir-
cle formation - how much of it we may see in the next moment. On the other hand, the
microscopic particles of water are very easily disturbed by the slightest wind, so the
parts of a circle that we do see in a given moment are not solid. The shapes are unsta-
ble, flickering, wavering.

Is Halo a game? I think that an an element of a game is indeed present. When we en-
gage in play, this process is enjoyable in itself. A play does not require achieving a
goal, but a game does. So we can say that in Halo’s game, the goal is to wait until we
see a full circle. But it is a strange game because it does not require any physical ac-
tions from us. In fact, we can’t even affect how it proceeds. The only one thing that we
can do - and this is what Halo does ask of us - is watch and wait. But this still does not
make it into a real game. After the goal is achieved and we finally see a perfect 360-
degree circle, we want to stay and watch more. So perhaps Halo is both a game and
play at the same time.

Formally, Halo belongs to the genre called “computer controlled installation.” There is
nothing wrong with this category, except that today it encompasses so many different
works which operate in so many different ways that it does not tell us anything about
the uniqueness of this particular work. So rather than looking for precise terminology
within the field of media arts, let’s see if we can use concepts from another much older
aesthetic field - music.

In Western music, the development of musical notation gradually led to a separation

between the author and the performers. Originally, the composer would direct the per-
formance of his own music. It was only later on that others also started to perform the
printed scores. These performers could interpret various aspects of the composition in
different ways. The same score was realized differently in each performance. What kind
of interpretations (or variations) were allowed and desired depended on the country
and historical period.
In the middle of the 20th century, John Cage started promoting a new approach to
composing music that he called indeterminacy. In this approach, a musical piece is de-
liberately composed so that it can be performed in substantially different ways, allow-
ing for variability that went far beyond allowed interpretations in classical music per-
formance. Earlier composers said to have used indeterminacy as an approach include
the Americans, Charles Ives (1874 - 1954) and Henry Covell (1897-1965); Cage also
refers to Johann Sebastian Bach's The Art of Fugue from the middle of the 18th centu-
ry as an important example of indeterminacy.

In parallel to Cage’s indeterminacy, the related term aleatory was proposed in Europe
by Werner Meyer-Eppler. According to his definition, “a process is said to be
aleatoric ... if its course is determined in general but depends on chance in detail”
(Werner Meyer-Eppler, 1955. “Statistic and Psychologic Problems of Sound,” Die Reihe
1, p. 55). While some use the terms indeterminacy and aleatory interchangeably, for
others aleatory has a more narrow meaning - it is a chance choice between a limited
number of possibilities. The word alea in Latin means “dice.” In the late 18th and early
19th centuries, musical dice games were popular in Europe. A piece had several mea-
sures and each measure had several versions; which version was played was deter-
mined by throwing dice.

Composers and music theorists defined different types of indeterminate music. In one
type, chance operations are used while the piece is being composed, but perfor-
mances of the score do not vary. (Cage’s Music of Changes from 1951 was composed
in this way by using I Ching.) In another type, chance operations are used during the
performance. As an example, consider Terry Riley's In C (1964), an early minimalist
composition written for an indefinite number of performers. The work contains 53
numbered musical phrases. Each performer can repeat each phrase any number of
times before moving on to the next. However, Riley also suggested some constraints -
his directions indicate that the performers in the ensemble should try to stay within two
to three phrases of each other. The performance has no fixed length and can last any-
where from twenty minutes to a few hours.
Can these concepts from music history and theory help us to better understand the
uniqueness of Halo’s system? Does it have a score and a performance? What is being
left to chance? What type of aleatory do we have here?

On a general level, the “score” of this piece can be described as follows: if direct sun-
light is available, use it to form a circle on the volume of mist. This score also contains
the precise details to control the position of 99 mirrors, which move during the day to
accommodate the changing position of the sun. In contrast to works such as In C, in
Halo the “performers” (i.e. the mirrors) do not decide how to interpret the score. How-
ever, their always perfect performances are “subverted” by the slightest wind, which
interferes and prevents the perfect circle from being completed.

But this is not all. Halo also relies on a second source of unpredictability - the presence
of sunlight. The sun around which the Earth rotates does not vary its strength, but
whether we see direct sunlight or not depends on cloud conditions. As I found out
when writing this text, cloud types include hundreds of species and are even arranged
in a hierarchical system that dates from the early 19th century ([Link]
wiki/List_of_cloud_types). The behavior of the cloud layers affects Halo’s performance.
Sometimes the shape of a circle can appear slowly; at other times, when direct sunlight
suddenly illuminates the scene, the circle appears as if by magic, suspended above the
ground in mist particles.

We can now return to the beginning and ask: does a great work of art need to delight
us forever, allowing us to always discover something new? I don’t know. What I can tell
you is that Halo certainly can be watched for long periods of time on different days and
its magic persists. And even if you only experience Halo once, you will never forget it.