COMPOSES

Mirror Box (Flesh+Prosthesis #3)

duration:24'
year:2014
instrumentation:amplified sax, percussion, piano and electronics
FIRST PERFORMANCE
date:06/02/2015
place:Eclat Festival, Theaterhaus, Stuttgart, Germany
ensemble:Trio Accanto
commission:SWR & Ernst von Siemens Foundation

Program notes

'Sonically speaking, the posthuman era is not one of disembodiment but the exact reverse: it's a hyperembodiment' (Kodwo Eshun, More brilliant than the sun, 1998.)

As technology proliferates and microminiaturizes it becomes biocompatible in both scale and substance and is incorporated as a component of the body. These prosthetic attachments and implants are not simply replacements for a part of the body that has been traumatized or has been amputated. These are prosthetic objects that augment the body's architecture, engineering extended operational systems of bodies and bits of bodies, spatially separated but electronically connected. (Stelarc on his project Ear On Arm - http://stelarc.org/?catID=20242, accessed 3rd of December 2014)

A mirror box is a box with two mirrors in the center (one facing each way), to help alleviate phantom limb pain, in which patients feel they still have a limb after having it amputated. In a mirror box the patient places the good limb into one side, and the stump into the other. The patient then looks into the mirror on the side with good limb and makes "mirror symmetric" movements, as a symphony conductor might, or as we do when we clap our hands. Because the subject is seeing the reflected image of the good hand moving, it appears as if the phantom limb is also moving. Through the use of this artificial visual feedback it becomes possible for the patient to "move" the phantom limb, and to unclench it from potentially painful positions.(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_box, accessed 3rd of december 2014)

Mirror Box (Flesh+Prosthesis #3) is written and dedicated to Trio Accanto.

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WORKSINSTRUMENTATION Ι CHRONOLOGICAL

SOLO

2-4 MUSICIANS

5/MORE MUSICIANS

ORCHESTRA

INSTRUMENT(S) + LIVE-ELECTRONICS

INSTRUMENT(S) + VIDEO

(NON-LIVE) ELECTRONIC MUSIC