Deconstructed Music

“Deconstructed Music # 1”, winner of the International LAB Award, was a project that aimed to create a new musical work through the modification, combination and rearrangement of an existing piece. The project is based on collective, simultaneous participation in a real-time web environment.
The Creative group RAN was formed in order to develop the project. RAN was formed by:  Javier Ideami, Carlos Navarro &  Ramón Prada.

The twentieth century has seen much reflection on the democratisation of music. The technological revolution that computing and digitalisation brought came to facilitate this process while the appearance of the Internet and the concept of cyberspace opened up a whole new world of possibilities in this area.

“Deconstructed Music #1” suggests a step forward, eliminating the concept of authorship to achieve the supreme form of democratisation; creating a form of artistic anarchy informed by simultaneous, interactive, reinvented creation, in search of a continuous, infinitely unfinished piece. We use music as an object of reflection, as our personal conviction is that it is the most universal and primitive manifestation of the human being.

With the intention of creating a form of universal “musical thread” in ‘perpetum mobile’, Deconstructed Music allows a pre-existing musical work to be deconstructed and shuffled in infinite variations, through the interaction, voluntary or accidental, in real time of any participating world wide web visitor.

All the compositions that emerge, being due to action, chance or probability, are accessible in real time to not only those manipulating, composing or deforming the piece, but also to the casual spectator who reflects over the entropy within the chaos.

Deconstructed music became a  physical installation in Laboral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial; Its operation consisted of two parts; a terminal with web access to the project pages to allow public participation in the (de)construction of the piece, and a black box, six metres cubed, equipped with sound and back projected image which emitted a symphony of primary colours generated by the ‘ad hoc’ musical blocks, amplified by almost absolute darkness within the room.

Deconstructed Music unlocked a door of possibilities, both aesthetic and industrial, on which we invited the whole artistic and cyberspace community, along with the general public, to reflect upon.