Frames for Nothing: Devices for Revelation in the Phase Space of the Marvelous

This brief proposal summarizes the artistic concept and context, as well as performance procedures and technical apparatus, for an approximately 9-minute solo performance piece whose playfully unwieldy title is given above. This piece builds upon a series of recent sound artworks by the author that intersect with data sonification practices. These works draw upon the inherent criticality of artistic practice to demonstrate how structures phenomenologically encountered within sonification reveal as much about their environmental and systemic context as they do about the data sonified. The present work draws upon a dataset constructed from pseudorandom values. The piece slowly unfolds from a process of gradual rescaling and reframing, applying common sonification techniques to this (random) data. Structure is clearly perceivable in the resulting sound-world, but where does it come from and what is structuring what?