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.
I shall give up lines and give up counting syllables too. And I will seek refuge from the mob of infinite measured forms in the sensitive planes of expanse.
30 years domizil: evenings with friends in Berlin and Zurich
12 December 2026, 7 pm – silent green 4/5 December 2026, 8 pm, Kunstraum Walcheturm
In 1996, a cassette was released as part of a sound installation by the fictitious label “domicile edition”. Thirty years later, the artist label run by Marcus Maeder and Bernd Schurer looks back on a catalogue of more than fifty releases. domizil emerged from Zurich’s techno and experimental music scene of the 1990s, when the first affordable laptops made it possible to produce electronic music at home, in one’s own “domicile”. To this day, the label stands for a curious, non-academic computer music at the intersection of electronic music, field recording and the visual arts, and increasingly of environmental reflection, generative art, data sonification, ambient poetics, acoustic ecology and artistic research.
domizil celebrates its anniversary in Berlin at silent green, the former Wedding crematorium where domizil already celebrated its 20th anniversary. farmersmanual, Rashad Becker, Asmus Tietchens, Noémi Büchi, Normification (Florian Hecker/Marcin Pietruszewski). Benjamin Flesser and Jedan Nula (Bernd Schurer/Marcus Maeder, presenting their anniversary release – will perform on 12 December. The evening brings together long-standing companions and new voices from Zurich and Berlin, from the pioneers of glitch and computer music to a younger generation of Swiss composers. It‘s a celebration with friends and, at the same time, a look ahead: in the future, domizil will be equally active in both cities Zurich and Berlin.
Concerts at Kunstraum Walcheturm will be announced shortly.
Tickets for the Berlin evening are available through Eventbrite.
In artistic terms, process refers to the methods, materials, and steps an artist uses to create a work of art. It encompasses everything from the initial conception and research to the physical execution and evaluation, emphasizing the journey of creation rather than just the final product.
Glitch music and art are creative expressions that embrace technological malfunctions—such as corrupted files, skipping CDs, or system errors—as their primary medium. Instead of fixing errors, creators treat them as aesthetic material.
B1212 is an interactive, browser-based net art piece created in 2000 by the enigmatic artist and software designer Netochka Nezvanova , utilizing custom, machine-code-like programming to manipulate text, sound, and browser behavior in real-time. The project is highly abstract and subverts the traditional architecture of the web, generating chaotic, performative audio-visual experiences directly within the user’s browser environment. ____
Janus is the ancient Roman god of beginnings, endings, transitions, doorways, and time, famously depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions—one to the past, one to the future. He oversees gates, passages, and the start of new cycles, making him crucial for new year celebrations (January is named after him) and rites of passage like weddings and births, symbolizing movement between states. Romans invoked him first in rituals, viewing him as a guardian of all transitions, from daily life to war and peace.
A Janus Bunch oscillator state comprises two distinct phases. The model can describe synchronisation between internal phases and external oscillators by coupling both internally and externally. This enables the phases to exhibit fascinating and intricate movements. Some of these compositions use networks of so-called Janus Oscillators as a reservoir of dynamic patterns. These patterns are audified by using auditory-display techniques coupled to dynamical FM/RM Synthesis algorithms organized in a 2-dimensional plane (each oscillator has several arbitrary XY coordinates).
Some experimental philosophical thoughts on “The Narrow.” started out as a conversation with ChatGPT about the Tritone Paradox in my computer music composition, Lacanian Sieve.
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1. Narrowness as a Constraint on the Symbolic
When a piece commits to one interval as its total structural horizon, the listener is placed in a space where symbolic differentiation is strictly limited. The Symbolic (in Lacanian terms) becomes a single axis—a filtration of all musical possibility through one cut, one relation, one “law.”
Psychologically, this produces:
A sense of cognitive claustrophobia: the mind searches for alternative relations, but the system refuses them.
A heightened awareness of micro-differences: the listener is forced into an obsessive, nearly analytic parsing of tiny variations.
A feeling of being “locked in”: as if the system only permits motion along a very tight corridor.
This can be described as epistemic narrowness: the world is small, but infinitely deep.
2. Tightness as Affective Constriction
The tritone carries centuries of ambiguity and tension, but without relying on tonal baggage you can emphasize its structural role: it is an interval that never fully relaxes. When it becomes the only possible gesture, a paradox emerges: the tension is constant, yet endlessly mutating.
This shapes the emotional field in the following ways:
Persistent non-resolution → a condition of suspended desire.
Pressure without release → an affective “tightness,” often experienced somatically (sternum, throat, solar plexus).
A narrowing of emotional bandwidth which paradoxically amplifies sensitivity—when all gestures compress around a single relation, small differences become emotionally charged.
You could describe this as affective torsion: the piece bends the listener inward rather than outward.
3. Narrowness as a Model of Psychic Repetition
A system rooted in a single interval, especially a dissonant and “unplaceable” one like the tritone, can be heard as a form of compulsion to repeat. Not repetition of identity, but repetition of difference within sameness—a hallmark of the unconscious.
This resonates with:
Obsessive thinking → circling around a single structuring absence.
Traumatic repetition → the return of something that cannot be metabolized.
The Real pressing through a closed Symbolic loop.
You can say: The music stages the psyche encountering an impossible limit, again and again, as if attempting to master it—but never doing so.
4. Narrowness as Spatial Metaphor: The Corridor, the Throat, the Aperture
Computer music often generates topologies rather than narratives. If the tritone is the only generative relation, the topology becomes narrow:
Like a long corridor that changes thickness, humidity, temperature, but never opens into a room.
A throat that constricts or dilates but never speaks.
A fissure or crack: the listener inhabits the inside of a fault line, not the outside.
Emotionally, this evokes:
Unheimlich tightness (the familiar inflected with the strange).
Anxiety without panic: the walls are close, but stable.
A beauty produced by proximity: microstructures become intimate, almost erotic.
You might call this spatialized affect: the emotional state is coextensive with the geometry of the interval.
5. Narrowness as Sonic Ethics: The Refusal of Abundance
By restricting the entire musical universe to tritone variations, the piece refuses abundance in favor of rigor, discipline, and radical minimality.
Psychologically, this can be interpreted as:
An ethics of renunciation: nothing is allowed except what the system permits.
A confrontation with lack rather than its concealment.
A purification of attention: the listener becomes aware not of what is present, but of what is missing.
This narrowness becomes ascetic, almost monastic—but with an underlying violence.
6. The Emotional Implication of Infinite Variation within Tight Bounds
Here the key is the infinite in tension with the narrow.
Because the tritone is the only interval, but it appears in limitless permutation:
The listener confronts infinity-in-a-sliver.
There is a vertigo of smallness: infinite depth but no lateral expansion.
This often produces a strange calm—resignation mixed with fascination.
Psychically, this mirrors:
The way obsession makes one detail inexhaustible.
The way desire attaches to a single object-cause (objet a) whose variations are limitless.
The way trauma lodges a world inside a single point.
We owe the quasi-totality of our discoveries to our violences, to the exacerbation of our disequilibrium. Even God, insofar as he intrigues us, is not to be found in our most intimate depths, but rather at the exterior limit of our fever, at the precise point where, our rage coIliding with his, a shock results, an encounter that is equally ruinous for him and for us. Stricken with the malediction attached to acts, the violent man does nor force his nature, does not go beyond himself, except to furiously re-enter, as aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having raised them. There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. S ome form of self-destruction, responding to his vocation and accomplishing it, is at work in the core of history; only he saves himself who sacrifices gift s and talents in order that, disengaged from his quality as a man, he is able to strut into being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career there is no price at which I am able to protect my identity, however minute are the residues that remain, it is necessary that I liquidate them; just as, on the contrary, if I adventure into a role in history, the task that I take upon myself has to exasperate my faculties to the point where I splinter with them. One always perishes by the self that one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.
I don’t understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn’t it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more?
Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?
There are people to whom gain is unimportant, who are hopelessly unhappy and lonely.
We are so closed to one another! And yet, were we to be totally open to each other, reading into the depths of our souls, how much of our destiny would we see?
We are so lonely in life that we must ask ourselves if the loneliness of dying is not a symbol of our human existence. Can there be any consolation at the last moment? This willingness to live and die in society is a mark of great deficiency. It is a thousand times preferable to die somewhere alone and abandoned so that you can die without melodramatic posturing, unseen by anyone.
I despise people who on their deathbed master themselves and adopt a pose in order to impress. Tears do not burn except in solitude.
Those who ask to be surrounded by friends when they die do so out of fear and inability to live their final moments alone.
They want to forget death at the moment of death. They lack infinite heroism. Why don’t they lock their door and suffer those maddening sensations with a lucidity and a fear beyond all limits?
We are so isolated from everything.
But isn’t everything equally inaccessible to us? The deepest and most organic death is death in solitude, when even light becomes a principle of death.
In such moments you will be severed from life, from love, smiles, friends and even from death. And you will ask yourself if there is anything besides the nothingness of the world and your own nothingness.
Netockas´ Thoughts while reading <the theory of the solitary sailor>, Gilles. Grelet, June 2024
For eight computer- controlled solenoids, medical tuning forks and eight digitally controlled sine-wave- oscillators. Made with SuperCollider. Also, worship The Glitch.
