Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves       in Italiano da Google Translate

"...Euterpe was the muse presiding over music"

 



Link to the full video on the little screen, with sound.
flickr set.
music (with Carlotta Buiatti).
Link to an interview about the project on Cosmos Radio, NYC with Bill Buschel.
Celia Ipiotis of Eye on Dance and the Arts was very helpful to us in the New York phase of this project.

November 17-28, 2018 / Trieste / New York
Festival di Arte e Robotica @ Hydrodynamic Station of the Trieste Old Port
curated by Maria Campitelli

Catalyst Euterpe was conceived as a series of events and objects based on the Seikilos Epitaph. In our research to prepare the debut of the work we learned about the Antikythera Mechanism and incorporated it.

At the core of this project are objects that embody the seemingly contradictory qualities of the eternal and ephemeral. One, an ancient funeral Stele inscribed with a poem and music about the eternal and ephemeral (with a complex history, described below), and the other, the earliest example of an orrery - and considered by some as the world's oldest computer. Both objects, believed to have originated from approximately the same time and place, exhibit a complex orbital path through time and culture. Within Catalyst Euterpe their internal and external qualities orbit each other at "angles" created by media, form (time) and perception.

This kinetic interrelationship has a heterodoxical effect on the qualities of both original objects. This effect is a poetry embodied in the objects and forms that comprise the work - the sculpture, code, video, music, and performance. The eternal and ephemeral are real, and persistent, but their reality is kinetic and transitory and influenced by known and mysterious forces. Culture is formed from similar dynamics across a wide range of qualities. The perception and experience of this bounded fluidity, this ebb and flow, embodied in various states and degrees and perceptions is central to the aesthetics of Catalyst Euterpe.

For this first installation we had two elements: a collaborative, networked performance with artist/vocalist Carlotta Buiatti and artist Fabiola Faidiga, entitled Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves, that occurred on November 18, 2018 in the Hydrodynamic Station of the Trieste Old Port, and a sculptural installation composed of 3d resin prints, video, and sound, that was exhibited in the Fesival di Art e Robotica curated by Maria Campitelli at the Hydrodynamic Station of the Trieste Old Port in November 2018.

A future performance of Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves is scheduled for March, 2019 in Malchina, Italy as part of L'ENERGIA DEI LUOGHI, curated by Fabiola Faidiga and Casa C A V A.

The sculptural installation included two 3d prints in resin, based on the Seikilos Epitaph and Antikythera mechanism, video, and music.

Below is information about each of the elements of the installation. You may scroll down to read each section, or use the following links to jump to specific information.

About the original objects:
The Seikilos Stele and its inscriptions
The Antikythera Mechanism

About the relaltionship between the Antikythera Mechanism and Seikilos Epitaph within Catalyst Euterpe

The objects within the installation
The music
The videos



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About the original objects:

The Seikilos Epitaph and its inscriptions

The Seikilos epitaph contains the earliest example of written music, and a dedication.

The dedication reads:

Seikilos to Euterpe

Εἰκὼν ἡ λίθος εἰμί. τίθησί με Σεικίλος ἔνθα μνήμης ἀθανάτου σῆμα πολυχρόνιον.
eikṑn hē líthos eimí. títhēsí me Seikílos éntha mnḗmēs athanátou sêma polukhrónion.

"I am a tombstone, an image. Seikilos placed me here as a long-lasting sign of deathless remembrance."

The lyrics of the song:

Ὅσον ζῇς φαίνου                    hóson zêis, phaínou            While you live, shine
μηδὲν ὅλως σὺ λυποῦ             mēdèn hólōs sù lupoû         have no grief at all
πρὸς ὀλίγον ἐστὶ τὸ ζῆν        pròs olígon estì tò zên         life exists only for a short while
τὸ τέλος ὁ χρόνος ἀπαιτεῖ.   tò télos ho khrónos apaiteî.   and Time demands his due.


The Antikythera Mechanism

As we prepared for these events we learned about the Antikythera Mechanism - perhaps the earliest known analog computer, that dates from approximately the same time as the Stele. Discovered in an ancient shipwreck in the early 20th Century, the Antikythera Mechanism was a mystery until independent researchers were able to decipher its intentions and reconstruct it. The Antikythera mechanism was used to calculate, through a geared mechanism made of brass and wood, synodic movements in 19 year cycles. It appears that the Greeks studied the celestial observations encoded on cuneiform tablets by the Babylonians, and through these studies observed patterns and cycles. They invented a mechanism that can kinetically calculate and visualize these cycles forward and backward in time.

The small scale of the mechanism suggests that it may have been for personal use. The combination of the predictive, kinetic, and personal qualities of the object suggests a sense of individual inquiry, agency and an awareness of one's place in the world that became a cornerstone of the Western mind. The song and epitaph of the Stele similarly portray an individual's thoughts and expression about time, remebrance, love, death, joy and sorrow, as well as an idea that the object would outlive its creator, and remain meaningful to future persons.


The relaltionship between the Antikythera Mechanism and Seikilos Epitaph within Catalyst Euterpe

To us, the coincidence of these two objects and the ideas behind them seem revolutionary for their time and foundational for ours.

The Stele embodies the paradox of the ephemeral and eternal. Its history, including its presence within Catalyst Euterpe, and Catalyst Euterpe/Through the Waves embodies how this paradox permeates life and culture, and how it inhabits different forms as it persists through culture. Our project traces this paradox across time and media - beginning with the original, hand carved, marble stele, through various incarnations into a presence both within networked, digital culture, and as sculptural objects and performance.

The cosmos of the Antikythera mechansim is one of periodic, cyclic, kinetic interrelationships - not unusual in the Bronze age (3000 BC – 1200 BC) that preceded the era of our mechanism and stele. The mechanism provides a way to observe these interrelationships freely from different points in time. This individual, free relationship with elements of one's environment based on a dynamism of empirical data was revolutionary at the end of the BC era, and continues today, reborn in countless inventions and objects. The Antikythera Mechanism was lost at the bottom of the sea for almost 2000 years, only to be found, scientifically analyzed and re-constituted using a form of individual, intellectual freedom and inquiry of which it was, perhaps, the original exemplar.

Classical Antiquity (or The Greco-Roman world [800 BC - 600 AD]) , the period of the Antikythera Mechanism and Seikilos Stele, developed the idea of events progressing through linear time.  Classical Antiquity's sense of time and action differed from the Bronze age, in which time and events were understood primarily as cyclic.

At the dawn of the era, during the 8th and 7th centuries BC, Babylonian astronomers developed a new empirical approach to astronomy. They began studying and recording their belief system and philosophies dealing with an ideal nature of the universe and began employing an internal logic within their predictive planetary systems. This was an important contribution to astronomy and the philosophy of science, and some modern scholars have thus referred to this novel approach as the first scientific revolution. This approach to astronomy was adopted and further developed in Hellenistic astronomy.

The Antikythera mechanism, made of bronze gears within a wooden frame, was a mechanical computer that made cyclical movements through Babylonian data observed at the dawn of Classical Antiquity/end of the Bronze Age. The Seikilos Stele, inscribed with poetry and music also echoes a sense of cycles and rewewal. Both are rooted in a collective past that is periodically reborn in the present, with its context of individual progression through time as one searches for truth (itself a paradox of empirical facts and heuristic, poetic wisdom). The flow and tension between the eternal (cyclical) and ephemeral (things to be superceded/obsolesced, to be put in the past by a new discovery) are embodied in both objects.

It is worth noting that during the era, and in the approximate location of both artifacts numerous debtor revolts were occuring.

A side-effect of Classical Antiquity's and Contemporary cultures' sense of  progress and linear time is a deracinating effect, separating us from a cyclical mode of understanding rooted in our collective connection with environment. In the Bronze age, human actions were understood within a framework of original, perhaps "natural" order moving toward chaos and returning to order. Culture was the collection of beliefs, actions and objects that interact with the environment in such a way as to return/renew the relationship between people and environment to one of original order. Culture, it could be argued, is the same process today - i.e., embodiments of that which is to be maintained/renewed, albeit within a different set of beliefs. Our project is about the presence of this eternal, wave-like rhythm pulsating through contemporary material culture, meaning, individualty and the search for truth within the present.


The objects within the installation

The Seikilos Stele
We fabricated a reproduction of the original Stele, using measurements of the object which is currently in the Department of Antiquites of the National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet), in Copenhagen. Our digital reproduction was then digitally "cut" into two pieces. One, the lower half, containing the original music, was 3d printed in resin. We also included a small screen embedded in the print that shows the entire text of the complete object in fragments, and with occasional variations.


The Antikythera Mechanism
We fabricated a reproduction of the Antikythera mechanism as an artefact - as it was found at the bottom of the sea. We then 3d printed the digital model in clear resin. We included a small screen that is showing a video that is a mix of Fabiola Faidiga's Through the Waves, footage of water where New York's East River meets New York Harbor, and the digital model of the top half of the Seikilos Stele.
Both the Stele(s) and the Antikythera Mechanism were created in the same way:
The objects were 3d printed in clear resin from digital models of the original Stele and Antikythera mechanism.

The music
in Performance:
For the performance the electronic music is based on the notated music on the stele. We wrote some software that analyzes a recording Carlotta Buiatti made of the epitaph music. The software tries to determine the most prominent phrases/notes, and plays them in sine waves, in very close to real time. When the software is left running after the song file has finished playing it responds to its own output, and creates variations as it listens to itself perform what amounts to a memory of the original music. Over time, the software transforms the melody into something unique. We sent these recordings of the software to Carlotta and she used them to create her own variations on the music. We combined these different sounds into the soundtrack we made for the performance,

The audio for the performance is here.

in the Installation:
For the installation the music is a mix of the composition we created for Carlotta Buiatti and Fabiola Faidiga, and algorithmic/robotic variations on the sound elements used for that composition. The music should alternate approximately every 10 minutes between the fixed composition, and the dynamically created variations.

The videos:
Artist Fabiola Faidiga has created a video for the performance and installation entitled Through the Waves. The video will be shown during the performance together with a video we made. Both videos were shot around the ports of our respective cities - Trieste and New York. We shot our video on the East River ferry going between Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn, as the water from the East River meets the water of the Harbor of New York at the base of Manhattan. Featured in our video is a digital model of the top half of the stele - a virtual companion to the lower half of the stele that was printed and exhibited in Trieste.

The full video, with sound, is here.