The Imperial Grounds of Transcendence: Colin Tucker

The Imperial Grounds of Transcendence

installation for concert hall, projection, audio, and lights

This installation marks the banal infrastructures of FEED’s performance space through projection, audio, and lights, as a way to mark the often unmarked politics of classical music infrastructures. The installation excavates how the concert hall’s transparent reproduction of musical Works is materially enabled by specific affordances of imperial infrastructures implicated colonization, extraction, and injury. The installation traces, among other infrastructures, how the modern piano’s volume and sustain are contingent upon a (coal-smelted) iron frame and steel strings, how the concert hall's transparent acoustic is contingent upon acoustic treatments with materials such as plantation-grown cotton, and how the concert hall's waged, professionalized performance, particularly on the scale of the symphony orchestra, has depended upon significant “subsidy” from imperial frontiers, initially from enslaving sugar plantations. Through montage strategies, the installation de-compartmentalizes the metropolitan concert hall from Atlantic imperial infrastructures, as a way to catalyze otherwise imaginings of musical infrastructures and frameworks.