artist: Patric Catani / Chris Imler / Jorinde Voigt
title: Lemniscate
label: sonig
catalogue number: sonig 78CD

Lemniscate

"Lemniscate" a unique collaboration between the artist Jorinde Voigt, and composers Patric Catani and Chris Imler.

The lemniscate is, fundamentally a mechanism for the infinite. A lemniscus or “ribbon” that chases itself in a figure of eight describes the repeated and unending journey of the unbounded.

Jorinde Voigt draws structures energised by real and imagined possibilities to investigate finite boundaries of systems. She frames and moderates these investigations with spatiotemporal data, information on speed, volume, and an overlaying of sequences. Her notations embrace the concept that elements of equal value co-exist in a logic and proportion of their own.

The lemniscate’s form derives itself from an ellipse, a figure wherein the sum of its distances to two fixed points is a constant. The French philosopher Descartes, turned these spatial observations into the grounding principles of his Cartesian system of thinking which saw the merging of algebra and geometry. For Voigt, whose earlier drawn notations were reminiscent of equations, her current work has developed to propose a highly inventive form of ‘situational geometry’, where patterns of cultural behaviour are put into relative position to geographical properties of space. As Cartesian thinking influenced not only mathematics but also the science of map drawing, Voigt’s drawings or ‘scores,’ have left the paper for the Lemniscate project and begun to take place in space and time. 

In 2008, following Voigt’s concepts, composers Patric Catani and Chris Imler, developed the "lazy 8" of the infinity motif at Watermill-Center, NYC, a laboratory for performance, in the form of an acoustic "cluster". The looped composition formed of 16 chapters, snakes around 7 points realised using a multi-channel arrangement of 6 loudspeakers and thus describes the shape of a lemnsicate through pure sound.
Catani and Imler created moving musical structures with synthesized and live recorded material (field recordings) that build up rhytmic and fragile melodic structures that  move and desolve in a sort of swarm behaviour. (Similar as in Voigts drawings).
It was important for the artists to create music and compositions that split up in their certain elements rather than the dry synthesized granular soundscapes that are used most of the time in this sort of context.

Standing in the centre of this work, the effect is of an architected, geometric form - sensed but not seen, and entirely physical in its scale (the cluster of sound existing between the ground and head height). At the core of the Lemniscate composition is Catani and Imler’s structural break up of a tonal construction as the various layers shift and chase themselves around a physical space.

To enable homelistening the multi-channel installation has been mixed down by the artists as a Stereo Version. 


Tracklisting

1. – 16. Lemniscate 01 - 16

http://www.jorindevoigt.com/
http://www.catani-music.de
http://www.sonig.com