Digital recording, video and audio

An improvised performance using no other sound sources than five to six modules of the Dataton 3000 series instruments dating from the early 1970's. It is loosly related to an earlier piece, Opposite of Black Noise.

The Dataton System 3000 (Sandlund, Björn, 2019) is a modular synthesizer and audio mixer designed by Björn Sandlund in Sweden during the 1970’s in an attempt to make a versatile instrument for electronic music. Despite its utopian vision the Dataton System 3000 was never widely used as an instrument, nor explored for its pedagogical enterprise. It was used for some compositions, notably by Lea Nilsson who worked closely with Sandlund (Sandlund, Björn, 2019). It thus exemplifies the kind of harsh expulsion that the market carries out on unwanted objects that do not comply to an ever narrower effort of standardization.

My primary interest is not the objects in themselves, my interest in these instruments goes beyond that. One could however say that there is nothing outside a piece of equipment like a Dataton module, to rudily paraphrase Derrida's statement that il n’y a pas de hors-texte (Derrida, Jacques, 2016(1974)). There is only the object and what it tells us in the context that it is used in. Everything is there, contained within the instrument and its narrative. Though I believe that there is some merit to this thought there is a greater risk of creating hierarchies in the relations between the various actors if the instruments are at the centre in this way. Neither is it my sole interest to to design an artistically driven project where the end goal is a work, which undoubtedly also constructs a hierarchy around the artifact. Rather, it is the interactions that are made possible by engaging in an artistically driven play with the objects that I am after. A free play that does not have a purpose and no particular meaning, though it may well develop in other directions in the future. In this free play I can engage with certain questions in a way that would otherwise not have been possible, and improvisation is part of the method that allows me to do this.

References

Derrida, Jacques (2016(1974)). Of grammatology, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University.

Sandlund, Björn (2019). The Early Synth Days, Linköping: Panoramicum Förlag.