NIKITA GALE

Nikita Gale once proposed that “bodies are never entirely absent from what we refer to as technology.” The technology of the player piano seems particularly haunted by the body and by early cultural attitudes about re-performance, inviting us to imagine a pianist (or pianists?) working the instrument. In TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), Gale underscores this uncanny absence by silencing the instrument’s musical functions, leaving only the sound and image of its mechanisms, and amplifying them through a custom-built sound and lighting system. The work’s title “tempo rubato” – literally translated as “in robbed time” or “stolen time” – is a musical term that describes the expressive freedom taken by a performer when interpreting a score – an acknowledgement of the space between a musical score and its live performance.

Gale is interested in the ways that definitions of labor, performance, authorship, legibility and sensing are beholden to their technological contexts. Here, the artist has foregrounded the various intersections of these concepts by working with a legal team to identify instances in which the relationship between property and legibility – specifically through the senses of hearing and touch – become particularly murky. The artist leaves us with the question: can we locate the performance through the mechanical gesture alone?