Tristan Perich: Noise Patterns

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This theme is also the subject of his recent circuit album, Noise Patterns, presented with the drawings.

Perich’s machine drawings (2005-present) explore randomness and order as two opposite ends of a spectrum. The machine drawings are presented as either ink on paper or as wall drawings executed by a machine that the artist designed and built. A single pen strung between two small motors is controlled by the instructions of Perich’s program, describing a boundary and the pen’s motion within it. While precisely executed code drives the movement of the motors, the final drawings are realized by the mark of pen on surface, and are thus subject to physical circumstances such as the ripple of the string connecting pen to motor, the gradual depletion of ink, and the texture of the paper. These poetic incidents reveal that algorithms are merely instructions until they are executed by a physical machine. In dialogue with Perich’s recent work in music, the new drawings focus on the visual consequence of randomness.

Noise Patterns, the artist’s third circuit album, will be displayed as a listening station alongside a limited edition print of its source code. Released in 2016, Noise Patterns expands upon Perich’s acclaimed 1-Bit Symphony (2009), the subject of his first solo exhibition at bitforms gallery. While 1-Bit Symphony is comprised entirely of tonal sounds, Noise Patterns introduces randomness (noise) as a counterpoint. On a technical level, the sonic raw material in Noise Patterns is digital 1-bit noise: a probabilistic density of random oscillations that Perich sequences into rhythmic patterns and layers into textures, pulses, rumbles and beats. The physical format reveals how Perich engages music at all levels, from sound all the way down to the binary instructions of the hardware.