playing a composer's piano.
the schoolboy's lunch wrapped in bach manuscripts.
invention of the hammerklavier.

the instrument of medium/ thawing of frozen timber

1970 recording of Jorg Demus performing Beethoven's last Piano Sonata (no. 32 in C minor, op 111) on Beethoven's 1825 Viennese Graf. [Bonn Germany]


Train, one of the 1997 recordings from the U.S. Navy Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) network and autonomous underwater hydrophones. Possible origins of this sound are an iceberg's keel dragging along the sea floor to other vibrations generated from moving fluids, like air blowing through a clarinet, of the ocean water and the right conditions around some seamount.

Art’s Public Skin and the Hand of Man

The metaphor of touch may aid the eye’s encounter with sculpture (Form) however touch allowed by the hand, beyond the paralleling attempts of metaphor, allows the body a transformative moment with Form as an experience of one’s self. Touch requires our presence; it is the sense of our very skin, our esemplastic perception of body and self.

Neurological investigations of our sensory system strongly suggest reality as percept-dependant, a subjective combination of memory, attention, and patterned expectation dictating the perception of the percept’s known world. This pattern of the known, persisted by sight-dominated encounters, conducts expectation of the percept’s experience without an experience of it. Thus an encounter with little available association or memory, touch enables the percept’s perception of self through the experience of a powerful Unknown, patterning what is known from the Unknown as self.

This synaptic experience and its essential connection with touch are foundations of the PROTOIST SERIES: The Forms before the Known. These human-scaled works are created with steel, iron, concrete to be touched, walked upon as consumptive sensory experiences. Through touch, man’s hand affects the surface areas with temperature change, chemical effects and accumulated pressures as the Form and percept together evolve into their never–ending Other. PROTOIST Forms poise a permissive moment with the experiencer to touch this public skin engendering a new intimate Known and collective Self from the Abstract.