Limits

Armed with our capacity for feeling, expression and abstraction, we now start hitting limitations. I turned to the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein for the visual analogy of this process. He battled to explain our place in the world with the limitations of our language as a tool for doing so. And his writing often appears to me as much art as philosophy due to its incomprehensible style. So, his writing was a great source for representing the challenges we face in communicating our feelings and ideas. I worked on a similarly dense and rigid piece of music and set the challenge of syncing its structure to that of the Wittgenstein texts, to the code artist Ksawery Komputery.

Ksawery built a dynamic HTML system which synced text changes to the stems of the audio, reacting in the writings of Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ and ‘Philisophical Investigations’, to the many layers of synthetic detailing of the music. The idea being to create an audio-visual barrage of attempts to make sense of our place in the world and our relationships to our systems for doing so.

The chapter starts with the quote which I am seeking to refute via my process of making this album “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”.

The Dolby Atmos mix with Kaspar Broyd and Niels Orens follows a similarly rigid and chaotic form to the music and video, with a barrage of spatial complexity and tightly synced rapid variations.