Robin Becker is an artistic researcher, composer, visual artist, and musician. His practice finds itself navigating the field where visual arts and music overlap and therewith encompasses composition, performance, sound-installation, visual installation, sculpture, drawing, and video amongst other media. Within this practice he takes an experimental approach to artistic activity and research that takes inspiration from both artistic and scientific experimentation, while strongly focusing on indeterminacy, improvisation, collaboration, and social sculpture/composition.
NOTATIONS 21-26.07.23 - NOTATIONS 21-26.07.23 is a spatial iteration and continuation of NOTATIONS, an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative project that deals with practices of listening, collective vocal improvisation, and instant and collective musical notation.
The piece has been made using the same method as the other NOTATIONS in the series, but is not made on paper and instead realized as a site-specific graphic notation-installation. NOTATIONS 21-26.07.23 was created over the course of six sessions with the participation of 30 participants, aged 7 years old to 70 years old.
Since opening in July 2023, the work was activated monthly by a free public program in relation to the NOTATIONS and within the space in which the NOTATIONS are on view. The program included a mantra-singing session led by Pauline Schreurs, a movement workshop by choreographer Maria Sartzetaki, a coloring workshop for children by Marieke Haandrikman, and a concert in which vocalists Hanna Aleksieieva, Ceola Tunstall-Behrens, and Tisa World re-interpreted the NOTATIONS as a 3-hours vocal composition. After the final event, the walls were painted white again and NOTATIONS 21-26.07.23 vanished forever. As the work is site-specific and non-reproducible, it will merely persist in photography, film, the memories of those that participated in making it, and in the memories of those that experienced the work.
sediments - sediments is an occasional collective that took residency at Paviljoen aan het Water, which was our shared studio-, exhibition-, and event space. The collective consists of four cross/inter/trans-disciplinary artists: Robin Becker, Marcel Herkelman, Daphnis Monastirioti, and Tisa World. The residency and collective were initiated by me. For the month of May we gathered as sediments, gradually reaching a point of stability, finding ways of communicating about art and life, and directly influencing each other’s practices. We see this process as a profound act of conviviality, respect and an expression of truthful, gentle humanity in a world (of art) otherwise filled with competition, isolation and individuality. Being next to the water we took inspiration from the cadence of the river, and the harbor of Paviljoen aan het Water provided us a space to bring together the separate units that we are, allowing us to congregate, mutually transform each other, with movement, with flux, gradual ebb and flow. After the month of residency, we were again swept away by the currents of life, all flowing in different directions, but forever united in the memory of a past stabilisation, unity and experience, leaving our harbor with the desire and certainty to continue our collaborative work. Over the course of our residency we organized an exhibition and four events: a wild dance of conglomeration, oscillation through play, forming the unknown immediate, and settling things in motion. These events took the shape of composed situations, social sculptures, social compositions, and are thus considered by us, sediments, to be works of art in their own right.
THE DOMINANCE OF B MINOR, OR WHEN THE MAGIC SQUARE BECOMES TRIANGULAR (WTC I) - Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I" is a collection of preludes and fugues for solo keyboard, composed in the early 18th century. The work consists of 24 pairs of preludes and fugues, with each pair in a different key. The collection was groundbreaking in its use of all the major and minor keys, which had not been explored in depth before. It also established the standard tuning system known as "well-tempering," which allowed for the keyboard to be played in any key without sounding out of tune. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I" is a cornerstone of the keyboard repertoire. Upon arranging the bar numbers of each prelude and fugue properly, the resulting 48 numbers can be arranged so they form three magic squares. The mathematical probability of these numbers occurring as such by chance is about 1 in 48^21. Folding these magic squares into a triangle while taking into account the order of the “Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I” (C, c, C#, c#, D, d, E♭, e♭/d#, E, e, F, f, F#, f#, G, g, A♭, g#, A, a, B♭, b♭, B, b) means that the prelude and fugue in C (major) occur once, the prelude and fugue in c (minor) twice, etc., until the prelude and fugue in b (minor), which occurs 24 times.
SATELLITE (solo, sculptural) - A satellite dish is an antenna that is designed to receive signals from satellites orbiting the Earth. The dish is usually a parabolic reflector made of metal or fiberglass, which reflects the incoming radio waves to a receiver called a low-noise block converter (LNB) at its focal point. The LNB amplifies and down-converts the received signals from the satellite to a lower frequency range, which is then sent to a satellite receiver for processing. The receiver decodes the signals and converts them into a format that can be displayed on a television or other device. The dish must be pointed directly at the satellite in order to receive the strongest signal. To do this, the dish is mounted on a motorized base that can be adjusted to point in the correct direction, and a signal strength meter is used to fine-tune the dish's position.
TYPECASE | a residency programme - TYPE CASE: 52 x 34 cm, smallest cubicle: 5,5 x 4,5 cm, largest cubicle: 12 x 11,5 cm, number of cubicles: 36
TYPE CASE hosts the smallest artist residency in the world. Invited artists are given between 1-5 days to develop and make a work for a free cubicle of their choice. For payment artists are offered a daily dinner and accomodation. The dinner conversations are recorded for purposes of archiving and publication. The first resident was Marcel Herkelman, who installed The Smallest Blue. The second resident is Tisa World.
NOTATIONS - NOTATIONS is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaborative project that deals with practices of listening, collective vocal improvisation, and instant and collective musical notation. With NOTATIONS, a group of participants is instructed to take place around a large sheet of paper (10m x 1.5m), close their eyes, and begin with a guided listening-meditation. The meditation begins with a focus on inner sounds, in order to slowly expand to social sounds, outside sounds, earthly sounds, and finally universal sounds. Then the participants, in a state of conscious deep listening, are instructed to begin vocalizing one tone, slowly expanding to another tone and the areas between, and finally free improvisation. Having arrived at free, collective, vocal improvisation, the participants are instructed to collaboratively create a graphic notation of the instant improvised composition, while continuing the improvisation/composition itself vocally at the same time. The composition is not recorded and is only documented visually in the graphic notation – which may function as a work of visual art on its own terms.
SESSIONS - An improvisation-based noise/punk/industrial/no wave project I initiated that currently has me on vocals and guitar, Alistair Franenberg on bass, and Bobbi X on drums. We exclusively play sessions in which everything is improvised (both music and lyrics) and in which we collaboratively generate new material and elaborate on previous material, necessarily in accordance with the psycho-spatio-temporal contextuality of how, where, and when the sessions take place. SESSIONS was originally conceived as a performance- and recording installation for the occasion of my graduation exhibition (KEEP FORGETTING NEVER FORGOTTEN at Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam, 18/19/20 June 2021) during which the band (albeit with a different drummer) held a residency in the exhibition space and performed multiple sessions a day, while recording these sessions on secondhand cassettes with portable cassette recorders that were spread throughout the space in order to capture the specifics of sonic spatiality. Audience members were invited to trade any item they liked for a unique cassette, creating a somewhat improvisatory and anarchical archive (or anarchive) of objects resulting from the trade. After this we continued in the shape of a band.
SHIT MUSIC - A multidisciplinary project consisting of a graphic notation, a performance score, and a performance. The piece was conceptualized as a human / non-human collaborative effort that engages with the role of birds within musical and compositional context, experimental and non-anthropocentric tactics for generating graphic notations and music, gastrointestinal tracts, and the politics of waste and guano mining. The graphic notation was made in collaboration with my feathered companion, 14-year-old cockatiel Dwarrel. Sheets of empty manuscript paper were placed underneath some of her favorite resting- and defecating-places, and left to dry in order to form a notation. The score may be read in any direction, and interpreted in any way. I transcribed this cloacascript into a manuscript for clarification for interpreters and for easier handling of the score, as dried bird shit is extremely sensitive to touch and movement. SHIT MUSIC was premiered as a one-hour long performance on August 7 & 8 2021 by an ensemble of piano (Reinier van Houdt), cello (Diederik Smulders) and electronics (me).
UNSTABLE CONSTRUCTIONS (glass, wood, metal) - A (sound-)installation that consists out of three unstable constructions (one of glass, one of wood, one of metal) that have collapsed. The sounds of their collapses are played in loops from speakers suspended above the collapsed constructions. Each construction is paired with the sound of its own collapse: glass is suspended over glass, wood over wood, and metal over metal. The rhythmic loops of these collapses create a phasing-rhythm within the space, and movement through space alters the audience’s experience of the sounds and rhythms. UNSTABLE CONTSTRUCTIONS emerges from an engagement with materials, the randomness of the workings of gravity on these materials, and the radically specific (sonic, visual, and spatial) responses of different materials to the collapse of the sculptures they are part of. Thus, the work is somewhat of a collaboration between human (me), material (glass, wood, metal), and gravity. Further, the combination of the collapsed sculptures and the looped sounds of their collapse provide a nod to considerations of the (philosophical) event and conceptualizations and re-thinkings of temporality.
PIANO EVENT – SEA EVENT - A musical piece, video- and performance-installation, and score-generating system. Performers are asked to take a video of any duration (example: 3’30”) of the waves of any sea and transcribe the frequency, amplitude, and impact of the waves within a grid whose parameters correspond to time (frequency), amplitude (piano-register), and dynamics (impact). The piece is performed by playing the video’s waves as strokes on the piano’s strings in accordance with the score. The initial video of the waves is projected over the performer and instrument upon performance. As such, this work is made in togetherness with the specificity of the sea at given location and given time, and (musically) explores human / sea relations.
