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M¡rrør Effεc† 1 – sound installation for a web page (homage to “I’ll be your mirror, Th∑ √ev|e† Un∂er9roµnd & N¡cø )Boundless self-love. That was the curse imposed by Nemesis, goddess of vengeance, on Narcissus, and when he stooped to sip water from the lake he drowned into his own image. This ill-fated mythological persona failed to distinguish itself from its own reflection and died by drowning into itself. Narcissus’s tragedy is just one of many mythological stories, but it permeated human consciousness deeply, as it touches a theme central to our experience – our reflection. However, one can compare this myth to playing with a starfish; no matter where you touch, you get stung. It implies that Narcissus drowned because he could not distinguish himself from his reflection; he was unable to discern where his Self ends and where the reflection begins; he failed to find his own boundaries. However, Narcissus also needed the reflection in order to express his love, a sort of external view~point, as if he himself was not enough. It was love that demanded the sinking, and a drowning that required love.
The mystery surrounding the story of Narcissus produced magnificent works of art as well as fascinating commentaries: Caravaggio and Dali beautifully depicted Narcissus’ portrait; Hermann Hesse discussed his own relationship with the mythological figure through the image of the Abbott in his book “Narcissus and Goldmund”; Marshall McLuhan suggested that Narcissus, as an allegory for humanity as a whole, fell in love with the medium instead of the message, namely with the idea of reflection and not with the reflection itself; the term “narcotic” derives from the name Narcissus; a poetically inspired Freud described a certain human behaviour as “narcissistic”, a term which later acquired the dimensions of a pathology named after the immortal character (Narcissistic personality disorder), and so forth.
Linking my own destiny with the destiny of the ‘reflected ancestor’: the experiment “Laws of Reflection” is born out of this anxiety. It follows the fatal failures of Narcissus while trying to learn the lessons and avoid cases of drowning. These are the principles guiding the journey to expand the boundaries of self, beyond the limits of composition, of music based on deterministic principles, to a work in which I interact with the world of improvisation, a world based on the unknown-in-advance. Finally, you will be asked to compose poems for two of the arias, in real-time.
Welcome to my “Laws of Reflection”.