Aauuttooppooiieessiis

Aauuttooppooiieessiis is a piece by Austrian experimenter Arno Steinacher, released on the netlabel LuvSound.

In his works, Steinacher seeks to translate scientific models and ideas into music. In this case, the idea underlying the piece is autopoiesis, a term coined in 1972 by Humberto Maturana from the Greek words auto, meaning oneself, and poiesis, meaning creation. In practice, an autopoietic system is one that continually redefines itself and sustains and reproduces itself internally. An autopoietic system can therefore be represented as a network of processes of creation, transformation, and destruction of components that, interacting with each other, continually sustain and regenerate the same system [wikipedia].

The result is a rather fascinating piece of music, minimal in its essence, yet constantly evolving, conveying the idea of automatic and spontaneous evolution.

Author's notes:

The basic idea of this work was to explore the term autopoiesis, which means selfcreation. In the context of theoretical life science, autopoiesis is often said to be the most fundamental principle of living systems.

To a certain extent autopoietic processes consist of repeated cycles of self-recurrance: glycolysis for instance, photosynthesis or autocatalytic RNA reactions. These processes are organized modular, forming a regulation network. As self-recurrance never happens exactly, there is space for errors and individuality, which in many systems causes something new on another level. This is one of life’s attributes: to create new dimensions spontaneously, another may be unrepeatablility.

“Aauuttooppooiieessiiss” reflects on and plays with these ideas. It consists of several loops with two main origins: instruments and machines, which stand for organic versus anorganic matter. The instrumental parts were all produced with electric guitar, the machine parts were for some part recorded in a factory near Vienna in 1999. Some loops run in parallel in many copies, but each copy differs in tempo and starting point. No situation in this work is repeated, every rhythm that emerges is ephemeric and takes place just one time, although it may be very similar to its neighboured ones, before and after. This ephemeric patterns that just arise at some times in this piece were my focus during the composition process.

One of the surprising results for me was that self-recurrence of machine sounds caused a more organic situation than the guitar-loops, which merely seemed to transform their sonic quality.

Arno Steinache – Aauuttooppooiieessiiss – mp3
page at the Internet archive from which you can also download the song in other formats (FLAC, OGG).

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