absence
1. A work that exists but has never happened
The distinction between composition and presentation matters. Lacanian Sieve is an acousmatic piece, composed exclusively in SuperCollider with nuPG by Bernd Schurer. There is no performance to anticipate, no performer whose interpretation might transform the work in real time. The work exists as a completed composition, yet its encounter with an audience remains unrealised.
Xenakis’s sieve theory structures the rhythms; Turing machines govern processes of locking and unlocking; FFT re-synthesis produces frozen timbres. These are not merely techniques for producing an atmosphere of absence. They constitute a system that encounters its own limits.
2. Desire, and the sieve
The title Lacanian Sieve is intriguing because a sieve ordinarily separates things. It permits some elements to pass through while retaining others. It establishes a relation between what passes, what remains, and what is lost. But desire complicates this operation.
In Lacanian terms, desire is not simply the wish to obtain an object that would finally satisfy us. It emerges through lack, through the impossibility of making the subject and the object of desire coincide completely. The “objet petit a” is not simply the object we want; it concerns what sets desire in motion.
A system can generate events, transform material, establish relations, and continue indefinitely without ever arriving at a final state that would settle everything. The process is productive, but its productivity does not guarantee resolution. Listening itself becomes entangled with desire: the desire for recurrence, for recognition, for a resolution that may never arrive.
3. Netochka Nezvanova, thirty years later
Netochka Nezvanova was never merely a pseudonym in the ordinary sense. The name carries the history of a particular relationship between identity, software, authorship, and the early networked art scene. It evokes a position from which the author could appear without becoming fully identifiable or available. But perhaps this is precisely the point.
The author returns, while the person behind the name remains at a certain distance. The music enters the world, while its composer is absent from the presentation. Tim Zulauf, the author of the accompanying text to the piece, will be there, carrying a different kind of authorship into the encounter.
There is no single, authoritative voice that necessarily unifies all these elements. The relationship may be more productive if it remains unresolved.
But we can allow the different histories to coexist.