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Two panels of concentric squares, one ordered, one scrambled, after Frank Stella's Double Scramble, are performed around the clock by the airspace above Dallas. A rooftop antenna receives the transponder broadcasts of aircraft passing overhead; each new contact sounds the next note of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1 and moves the panels' colors. Heavy aircraft advance the melody and dissolve the field into a new palette, generated by an irrational rotation of the color wheel and therefore never repeating; lighter aircraft lay down the accompaniment and drift the hues within their family. When the sky empties, the bands breathe in a slow inward ripple over a low pedal drone, waiting. Satie fixed the pitches and Stella fixed the geometry, but the rhythm belongs to the traffic: the piece assembles itself differently every hour, dense at midday, sparse and suspended before dawn. Neither recording nor loop, it is a continuous performance in which the viewer watches cause become color. The note heard is the transition seen, each one the trace of a particular aircraft, named briefly at the frame's edge, crossing a particular sky.
30 second silent excerpt
