Time Signatures
W. Mark Sutherland

The Visual Arts Centre of Clairington, Canada, 2017

The sign(ature) translated into the sing of the sign and sign of the sing by the passage of time.

The Time Signatures exhibition is a collection of nine sound poems produced in a variety of time-based media. The exhibition features battery powered digital metronomes, altered vinyl recordings, wall-mounted CD players and video projections. The primary installation/performance piece in this exhibition is Time Signatures for György Ligeti based on the late composer Ligeti’s 1962 performance score Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. Meta4 is the secondary installation/performance piece in the Time Signatures exhibition. Meta4 consists of four separate wall-mounted CD players connected to four guitar amplifiers by four contact microphones. Each CD player plays a CD, each CD featuring a different improvised meta-language vocalization.

Time Signatures also includes the metal masters used to manufacture my 1998 LP Scratch dedicated to John Cage’s 4'33", Eugen Gomringer's “Silencio,” and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's gramophone etchings. Pardon My French and Cutups are altered vinyl records featured in this exhibition along with Radical Artifice— a synthetic sonotext based on the sequential reading of punctuation marks in pages one to three of Radical Artifice by Marjorie Perloff (The Chicago University Press, 1991).

Chorale and Static Poem are the video components of the Time Signatures exhibition. Chorale is an animated concrete videopoem based on the words sing/sign while Static Poem is an electronic translation of Dadaist Man Ray’s poem-painting Lautgedicht.

Time Signatures for György Ligeti

This installation/performance piece was premiered as part of the Poeitische Position II group exhibition at the Kasseler Kunstverein in Kassel, Germany in 2006. It was re-mounted at the Electric Eclectics Festival in Meaford, Canada in 2015 and it was the centerpiece of my Time Signatures exhibition at the Visual Arts Centre in Bowmanville, Canada in 2017.

Time Signatures for György Ligeti is based on the late composer Ligeti’s 1962 performance score Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes, originally proposed for one conductor, ten participants, and 100 manually, operated metronomes. This new piece is an audio-visual installation/performance using 100 battery-powered metronomes configured on the gallery floor. The duration of the piece is determined by the lives of the batteries used: when all the100 metronomes are depleted of their charges, the installation falls silent and the performance is complete. The average battery lifespan in the metronomes is approximately 80 hours.

A poem of twenty-one words, exactly 100 letters in length, and including all twenty-six letters of the alphabet, forms the visual and rhythmic basis of the piece. The configuration of the100 metronomes on the gallery floor mimics the physical shape of the poem. Each letter in the poem is represented by its own metronome. Those that stand in for the letter A are the only ones to use the pitch capacity possessed by modern electronic metronomes — the concert pitch A (440 Hz). The A metronomes are therefore, the only metronomes in the piece that are not assigned a pulse rate. The rates assigned to the metronomes for all the letters beyond A differ in each case, with B assigned pulse 44, C pulse 48, D pulse 50, and on to the letter Z at pulse 208.

Time Signatures VAC Catalogue: Full Catalogue (PDF)
Time Signatures exhibition: https://vimeo.com/184958445