Simulated Monolithes
Music by Steve Reich, from the album Monolithes, solo renditions by Jean-Louis Marchand
Each film presents its recording complete and uncut
Visual artist Peter Repetti stages the three pieces of Jean-Louis Marchand's Monolithes — his solo renditions of Steve Reich — as three worlds of light. Each film records a single, uninterrupted performance of a simulation: a world that grew in step with its recording, having listened through the whole of it first, so that light arrives with — and sometimes just before — the sound. Nothing was filmed and nothing was drawn; everything visible was grown from the music. Reich built these works from processes — two identical lines slipping out of phase, a rhythm assembled one note at a time, a canon of eleven clarinets — and the images are built the same way: not illustrations of the music but parallel processes, run at the music's speed.
The work extends a century-old lineage of visual music: Oskar Fischinger's abstractions drawn frame by frame to shellac records in the 1930s, Mary Ellen Bute's electronically generated films, John Whitney's computed harmonies of motion. It equally descends from the stage that minimalist music built for itself — Robert Wilson's architecture of light around Philip Glass, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker dancing Piano Phase in Fase, and Beryl Korot's video counterpoint made with Reich himself. The dancers of the first movement bow to a more recent ancestor: OpenEndedGroup's digital portraits of Merce Cunningham, whose captured motion became networks of nodes and re-stringing lines. Here no body was recorded; the figures are chance procedures — Cunningham's own compositional tool — given joints and let loose among the pillars, legible only by inference. From the Light and Space artists the work takes the conviction that a darkened room and a controlled glow are enough material for an entire experience.
Among its contemporaries — Ryoji Ikeda's data-saturated black rooms, Refik Anadol's machine-dreamed volumes, the raymarched worlds of the shader-art community — Simulated Monolithes is distinguished by its obedience. It invents no data and consults no network; its structure is dictated by scores now half a century old, and by one musician's decision to play every voice himself. The single sanctioned disobedience belongs to the dancers, who ignore the music's phrasing entirely — as Cunningham always insisted dance and music should meet only in the same room. Where generative art tends toward the endless, this work is exactly as long as the music, and ends when it ends.
The whole work is one program: a single WebGL fragment shader, about fifteen hundred lines of code, that computes every pixel of every frame from mathematics alone — no models, no textures, no footage. Space is described as signed distance fields and rendered by raymarching; light, reflection, and atmosphere are gathered along each ray. Before anything plays, the recording is decoded in full and analyzed: every strike is found, ranked by loudness and brightness, the pulse measured, the loudness arc of the whole piece mapped. The visuals consume that event stream against the audio clock — deterministic to the sample, which is what allowed these films to be rendered offline, one exact frame at a time at a constant 60 frames per second (2560 × 1440). The sound in each film is the original recording itself.
Twin Pillars — the two towers are twelve-key keyboards; each detected note strikes the key of its pitch on its voice's tower. A slow drift process separates the voices exactly as the pianists do, driving the moiré gratings of the sky, the interference curtain between the towers, and two wandering ring systems on the floor whose phases slip against each other. Each completed cycle of the phase leaves an echo pillar behind. The dancers are chance procedures in the Cunningham sense — joints easing to random targets on time-warped clocks that burst and rest — drawn only as constellations of light joined by a re-stringing cat's cradle, after OpenEndedGroup's portraits of Cunningham. The palette turns from candlelight-and-moonlight to forest-green-and-saffron out of the great unison flash a third of the way through.
The Grove — five trees are grown strike by strike as distance fields: trunk, then whorls of branches, unlocked by the music's own accumulation. Blue rain falls volumetrically and pools around the seeds. Midway, the camera passes under the soil into a second world — mirrored root-trees and a mycelial web of noise-threads through which every strike propagates as a light wave between the root systems — before surfacing into a sudden daybreak. At the felling, each tree morphs geometrically into cut timber; the ring faces are concentric bands whose colors record the film's own history, rain-ivory at the pith to red-earth at the rim, and every strike still ripples outward through them.
The City — the towers are a procedural grid, each cell swelling and twisting on its own phase; windows light by interlocking canon, and each note pulses a district near the flight path. When the camera passes inside a tower, one of six hidden rooms renders instead. In the slow middle movement the riverfront goes dark while windows deep in the grid — dark the rest of the piece — wake in the distance; afterward the light comes home. From the final quarter, crimson gathers window by window into the red ending. The river is never water: it is sheets of drifting stars that learn to mirror the sky as the piece opens up.
Peter Repetti is a visual artist who works primarily in the medium of increasingly precise sentences. He does not paint, does not sculpt, and has never personally illuminated a single pixel; he describes, rejects, and describes again — a practice he considers no different from that of any director, and considerably cheaper. His notable artistic decisions include sending a burgundy back twice for being pink, and the requirement, delivered without qualification, that every dancer stop moving the instant the music does. Simulated Monolithes is his first work. It has never been exhibited at MASS MoCA, but it has been imagined there in great detail. He lives and works on the same Wi-Fi network as the piece.
Steve Reich published by Boosey & Hawkes · recordings by Jean-Louis Marchand