Arno Steinacher began composing at the age of 12. At first, he played guitar and homemade instruments in improvisational projects, and produced so far unpublished tape music. Now for the most part he works in the field of electronic music, focusing on implementing scientific theories and models into his music on both a structural and a metaphorical level.

Aauuttooppooiieessiis is a study of repetition and mutation that doesn't present its findings as scientific evidence, but explores the aesthetic and aesthetico-structural possibilities of autopoietic phenomenon in sound. The result is a compelling and mesmerizing landscape of guitar and metals.

[www.arnosteinacher.com | www.myspace.com/rymdmyr]

 

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Aauuttooppooiieessiis 28:50
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artist statement  

 

The basic idea of this work was to explore the term autopoiesis, which means selfcreation. In the context of theoretical life science, autopoiesis is often said to be the most fundamental principle of living systems.

To a certain extent autopoietic processes consist of repeated cycles of self-recurrance: glycolysis for instance, photosynthesis or autocatalytic RNA reactions. These processes are organized modular, forming a regulation network. As self-recurrance never happens exactly, there is space for errors and individuality, which in many systems causes something new on another level. This is one of life's attributes: to create new dimensions spontaneously, another may be unrepeatablility.

"Aauuttooppooiieessiiss" reflects on and plays with these ideas. It consists of several loops with two main origins: instruments and machines, which stand for organic versus anorganic matter. The instrumental parts were all produced with electric guitar, the machine parts were for some part recorded in a factory near Vienna in 1999. Some loops run in parallel in many copies, but each copy differs in tempo and starting point. No situation in this work is repeated, every rhythm that emerges is ephemeric and takes place just one time, although it may be very similar to its neighboured ones, before and after. This ephemeric patterns that just arise at some times in this piece were my focus during the composition process.

One of the surprising results for me was that self-recurrence of machine sounds caused a more organic situation than the guitar-loops, which merely seemed to transform their sonic quality.