Tan Mu: Signal and the accompanying performance Everything on the Line at BEK Forum, curated by Nick Koenigsknecht, unfold through a process I would call arbitration, a term I developed in my Master of Architecture thesis Architectonic Silence: Arbitrating Noise. In electro-acoustic music systems, there’s an input, an internal process, and an output, often accompanied by unique visual notations that may seem arbitrary, yet are essential to meaning-making. It’s arbitrary, for instance, to interpret a line in a painting as a rise or fall in volume, a crescendo or decrescendo, and yet, once you decide that, a system of notation begins to take shape. Like Xenakis’ stochastic scores or Cage’s chance operations, Tan Mu’s paintings transform data cables into gestural constellations that oscillate between calculation and intuition. What matters is not a direct alignment between system and representation, but the act of arbitration, deciding, judging, mediating between input and output, that emerges through the process itself: the human effort to make sense of a signal as it passes through multiple notations, forms, materials, processes, and consciousnesses.

The performance by Sophie Steiner and Chatori Shimizu extends this same logic into sound and embodied experience. It’s arbitrary to connect an audience and performers with a string of yarn, and yet that gesture completely shifts the space, it affects how the performer plays, how the audience listens, and by extension how everyone participates in the act of meaning-making. The boundary between performer and audience dissolves; each becomes part of the other’s gestures affecting the sound as an ensemble. So what are the forms of untraditional notation that can render vibrant music out of such a network? What feedback systems might arise, ones that, perhaps, reach back and affect Tan Mu herself, the painter at the origin of it all? In this sense, Signal and Everything on the Line remind us that the arbitrary gesture is never meaningless, it generates new systems of relation, where noise becomes form and connection becomes composition. –Saul Appelbaum