How Tania Decided to Make a Magical, Cosmic Record Player: A Conversation Between Tania Candiani and Alejandra Labastida

Alejandra Labastida (AL): Let’s talk about alchemy. This video was based on a previous project (Engraving Sound) in which you transformed a series of engravings into a musical instrument. These were illustrations by Robert Fludd. At the time they were originally made, the cognitive status of ideograms in alchemy was higher than that of discourse, which was considered suspect in a field of investigation that valued intuition and the senses as the proper path to understanding.[1] You took these engravings, which condense Fludd’s theories on the harmonious relationship between the macrocosm and the microcosm and carried out a fundamentally alchemical operation: the transformation of elements; in this case, images became sound.

Tania Candiani (TC): Engraving Sound is a sound machine that integrates several different systems. The piece functions like a record player, reading the grooves on the copper surface, which were created through the corrosive effects of acid on metal: the traditional engraving process. This piece was based around the ideas of the engraving and its interpretation or translation into a type of vinyl record, and the possibility of listening to these grooves as if they were being reproduced by a record player.

In terms of the choice of the engraving, as the context of the piece’s creation was the IV San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, I was therefore interested in reflecting on the technique itself, the material (the metal plate) and its transformation (the chemical process).

Nevertheless, I needed to make a connection to sound using the image itself. This “record player” had to pronounce, sing, translate into sound the nearly alchemical effect of the technique, but not anecdotally. I had to find a synthesis, an image that was, in itself, a visual form of thought.

I had come across Fludd’s engravings in books on the archaeology of the media, in which they were categorized as hermeneutical devices—not necessarily artifacts, but conceptual instruments. And so I used the iconography with which he represented the harmony between the macrocosm and the microcosm in Utriusque Cosmi. The book’s engravings illustrate a philosophy of the world as an imago dei: man and nature are the microcosm and the stars the macrocosm, with harmonic correspondence between planets, angels, parts of the human body and music. Fludd created a psychic map of the infinite… And his engravings are circular, like a record.

He also wrote De Musica Mundana, in which he describes a “celestial monochord.” Music represented the union between the idealized world of mathematics and the physical world of experience, the perceptible hinge between arithmetic and geometry. The idea of a perfect universe, governed by numbers, finds its final justification in musical notions. Pythagorean myth spoke of “the music of the spheres,” an ever-present melody created by the movement of the stars that is imperceptible to our senses. This image continues reflecting the contemporary music of the planets, but based around a supersymmetry that leaves room for chaos.

My work has involved instruments from the natural magic tradition, technological imaginaries that have the effect of enchanting us or substituting one sense for another: synesthesia. Talking heads and trumpets, magic mirrors, automata and Aeolian harps, all invented by Athanasius Kircher at a time in which the distinction between science, magic and belief had not yet been established and it was thought that the movement of the stars was governed by divine laws. Kircher has been a constant reference in my work, ever since 2012’s Five Variations of Phonic Circumstances and a Pause, when, in long conversations with Karla Jasso—the curator of that exhibition at Laboratorio Arte Alameda—I came to understand him as one of the cornerstones of the archaeology of the media.

I have explored these translations or technological citations in other pieces, such as String Loom (2012), in which I used punchcards to weave the phrase “Hecho a mano” [Made by Hand] on a mechanical loom, and then I translated the orifices/instructions of these same punchcards into sound.

AL: In the past, you’ve discussed a certain technological nostalgia, but now it seems that you’re interested in a specific form of the production of knowledge in which magic and art had not been exiled yet from the search of truth by the monopoly of science.

TC: A couple of years ago, I spoke of the “nostalgia for the obsolete.” Nowadays, I prefer to think of the rejection of obsolescence, the pertinence of considering technologies of the past through present knowledge, of continuing to be amazed by those technologies. By recovering forgotten inventions, I aim to reconstruct, reinvent and reproduce a series of technologies that ended up trapped between fortuitous (epistemological) events and were, therefore, passed aside; these technologies and uses from other times speak to an image we had of a future that never was.

Instruments from the natural magic tradition continued to be invented up through the 19th Century, although they stopped being called magical. Natural magic never really disappeared, but was instead subsumed into new categories, such as entertainment and natural science. We tend not to think of magic as a practical art—certainly not in a utilitarian sense—but many of its objectives, such as creating realistic images without substance, communicating instantaneously across the world, imitating and preserving the human voice, revealing hidden sources of power and traveling under the sea and through the air are mundane technologies today.

Instruments and devices have a life of their own. They often determine theory by establishing what is possible, and this largely defines what can be thought. The study of these apparently tangential inventions and instruments can reveal connections that would otherwise be invisible.

The peculiar thing about these instruments is their ability to close the gap between the extremely scientific and the nonscientific. The margins indicate shadows – the limits of scientific legitimacy, in this case. But the margins are also places of contact and connection between different themes and entities.

AL: By turning it into an instrument, you have taken Fludd’s work on the search for the truth of the firmament to its logical conclusion. As you have already mentioned, he built on a tradition regarding the harmony of the spheres that goes back to Pythagoras.[2] Do you see yourself as part of this genealogy?

TC: The universe is a musical score… The idea of the universe as a musical composition has a history that goes from Pythagoras to Kepler, Kircher, Fludd and John Cage. Fludd’s engraving Celestial Monochord (depicting a hand reaching down from heaven to tune the celestial spheres) reflects the continuation of the Pythagorean theory on the harmony of the spheres. In this theory, there appear allusions to different musical notes, two octaves with their respective proportions on the monochord, as well as the basic elements of the time (Earth, Water, Air and Fire) and the planets that were then considered to be the lords of the sky.

At the end of the 20th Century, R. Murray Schafer proposed an empirical approach to this idea, coining the term soundscape, which he conceived as an ecosystem made up of all the world’s acoustic events, among which we live. Another term coined by Schafer is acoustic ecology (the study of sounds in relation to life and society), which addresses the importance of sound in our lives and our environment, as well as the need to create a politics of sound. But to be able to hear, we have to stop to listen.

I made The Sonorous Object at the same time as a long-term research project that culminated in For the Animals, which was presented at the Arizona State University Museum, curated by Julio Morales, at the end of August. For the Animals is a project that we had been working on for the previous five years, which aims to create an ultrasonic dialogue with nature and a system that allows species to listen to each other. It is based around a geological formation that dates back millions of years (Hole in the Rock, in Papago Park, Arizona), from which we extracted data to turn into sound. With this information, we created a series of compositions utilizing calls for six animal species that inhabit the Arizona Desert, whose migration routes have been interrupted by the physical border between political territories. There is also a video in which the narrator calls on us to listen, thinking of the way in which the world sounded before there were living things, to listen to the planet itself. For the Animals experiments with the physical, environmental and natural limits between nature and society through the shared experience that animals and humans have of sound.

AL: Unlike the monochord, which was, for Fludd, “the internal principal that, from the center of everything, produces the harmony between all life in the cosmos,” [3] the sonorous object that you created has three needles. Can you talk a little more about these kinds of decisions?

TC: The physical form of the instrument in Engraving Sound had to take into consideration the playback system so that the public could use the source sounds as moldable acoustic material. Within the machine, there is an analog synthesizer (a tool designed to generate sounds and control their timbre, utilizing simple elements interconnected in special schemes) with a control panel that the public can manipulate. The static electricity of the body itself also functions as a filter that modifies the sounds.

A vinyl record is a mechanical transcription of sound waves; in this case, we used an engraved copper plate. Sounds are waves of pressure that travel through the air. On the copper plate, these waves are depressions or grooves produced by acid in the engraving process, a metaphor for the waves traveling through the air.

We literally have a sculpture made by something acidic, a sculpture of the cosmos, and the landscape depicted is unique to each plate. Each needle follows the groove, the left side transmitting to the left audio channel and vice-versa. There are three needles, and so we have three left channels and three right channels. The needle transmits the vibration through the generation of microvolts that travel down the cables to the preamplifier and then to the amplifier. It’s like creating a petroglyph, that ancient form of writing, only instead of sculpting letters, we’re creating physical forms out of sound. And that’s what’s so precious about sound, that magic.

AL: Let’s talk about religion. Mladen Dolar’s article “Deconstructing Voice” includes a reference to the famous argument on music made by Hildegard of Bingen. The 12th Century mystic argued that the condition of possibility for the divine word to reach its true dimensions was through the singing voice, as speech on its own belonged to the devil. Following this logic, Dolar tells us that the devil is the devil because he can’t sing.[4] Is this similar to what you argued in the video: that access to the planet’s “intelligent soul” has to occur through an object that translates materiality into sound?

TC: Whatever is seen or heard requires interpretation. The way of analyzing sound “scientifically,” rather than through musical terms, is to represent it visually through an instrument that leaves behind a graphic trace.

The association between instruments and language took a new turn with the introduction of recording tools, which wrote their results in their own “languages.” These new languages are, in a way, “experimental graphics.” In this case, the “graphic trace” is the video (which, as it is digital, does not have a physical materiality, but does have a form of digital writing).

Are philosophical instruments more like words, like things or are they somewhere in between? Engraving Sound and The Sonorous Object establish that symbolic character of instruments, proposing alternatives to language and signs. The signal registered brings us back to the question of the natural magician. What does the instrument tell us? Does its voice reveal some secret of nature? In natural magic, words and things are closely linked: words are more than arbitrary symbols for things, they also contain an occult meaning, and one can learn about the thing through the word.

The script to this visual essay operates through allegory and analogy, with hidden connections. Both the words and the instrument point to the hidden essences of things. It was always conceived this way: a grammatical instrument that convokes. I’m excited by my understanding of our contemporary condition as an evolution of this same idea, in which something written (and there is a code) gives form to things.

[1] Alexander Roob, El museo hermético. Alquimia y mística, Editorial Taschen, 2006, p. 11.
[2] Ibid., p. 84.
[3] Ibid., p. 87.
[4] Mladen Dolar, “Deconstructing Voice,” Musicological Annual, vol. 41, no. 2, 2005, p. 15