Electroacoustic Confessional: Confronting one’s artistic past

Abstract We have all made poor decisions, and some such questionable decisions are artistic in nature. When looking back on one’s early work, it is easy to have tinges of embarrassment that are counterbalanced by nostalgia. John Baldessari made this dynamic tangible in 1970 through his Cremation Project , an undertaking in which he burned all of his paintings and baked some of the resulting ashes into cookies. Viewing some of these cookies/ex-paintings several years ago, I felt that Baldessari’s approach to his previous work, simultaneously embracing, annihilating and remaking, was a fitting way to let go of one’s artistic past. My user-driven installation Confessional provides the opportunity for composers to briefly take pleasure in and (symbolically) destroy one of their dubious creations. This process is accomplished with a computer running Max and a user-provided recording that is processed live. The audio processing unfolds in stages that mirror the phases of animal decomposition. Through this series of transformations, the user’s piece transitions from its original state to nearly imperceptible bits of noise. In this article, I examine Confessional , focusing on the work’s conceptual background, related issues such as memory and hierarchy, and the structure of the Max patch that is used for processing.