MaskMirror

Sound performance

2008 - ongoing

Catalogue number : 73

Since 2008 Alessandro Bosetti has been developing an instrument and software patch. Live in concert he reorganizes speech for musical purposes with narratives that are about nothing and everything at the same time. With echoes to the baroque clumsiness of the first mechanical calculators by the likes of Gottfried Leibniz and Blaise Pascal, Mask Mirror is guided not by mathematical principles but rather mines the unfolding of language and its meaning in random sequences, built on blocks of different sizes (from phonemes and incidental mouth noises to lexical units and prosodic fragments). Bosetti samples his voice with prerecorded voices in an electronic ventriloquism.

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” … Common sense aside, it was difficult not to treat Mask Mirror, with its randomized garble of words, as a willfully cryptic Oracle of Delphi reincarnated as an Apple laptop. While Bosetti had described the project as “about the aboutness of being about”–the sort of vague proffering that makes little sense until witnessed firsthand–what Noise got out all of this is that it’s devilishly hard not to seek meaning even where it’s clear none is forthcoming. Not until the program, in a moment of absurd hilarity, spit forth the word “hamburgers” did it all click: Mask Mirror is a tool for shearing all meaning from language. It’s a liberation, of sorts, like the sound version of Rorschach tests: The mind is encouraged to wander freely and delight in words purely for their sound. In the information overload of contemporary times, Mask Mirror’s playful rupturing of sense–its nonsense, in other words–is a welcome respite.” (Raven Backer, Cityapaper Baltimore).

© Alessandro Bosetti / 2024