Media Art Bath, in the United Kingdom, invited the Australian artist, Tom Nicholson and New York based composer, Andrew Byrne to collaborate on the development of a new work—an instructional score for instrumental ensemble and voice. The resulting work, Lines Towards Another Century, combines live performance with a sound and video installation.
Andrew Byrne and Tom Nicholson’s Lines Towards Another Century begins with a list. Yet it also begins with action. A list is finite, the conclusion of a process of ordering and of definition. Conversely, to begin with action would be to suggest beginning at the opposite end of things—at a point full of potentiality, dynamism and movement. This seeming contradiction between a closing down and an opening up of possibility is at the heart of Lines Towards Another Century. It is this tension between the finitude of the list and the potentiality of action that not only informs the form of the artwork itself but also tells us something important about its central subject matter—borders.
A border is a break, a demarcation, a point or a line. A border is often characterised by the twin polarities of movement and stasis, and almost overwhelmingly associated in the popular imagination with the emotions of anxiety and of threat. On the one hand, it is a concrete marker, inarguable and defined (a demarcation, point or line) and on the other, it is characterised by an emotive and physiological state—movement and threat. These are difficult things to reconcile—the intractability of the boundary and the sense of movement (or desire for movement) that it evokes. This polarity is exercised in Lines Towards Another Century through the concrete nature of the... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline