Public Privacy #4 E-Guitar “Leap in the dark”

for e-guitar solo and fixed media

The series Public Privacy for solo instrument, video and tape deals with the dialectic between the PRIVATE and the PUBLIC  – which is nowhere better portrayed than in Social Media. I call the artistic work with the fundamental functionality and with the different forms of social media presentation in a musical context Social Composing as a derivation of Social Media Art.

The first three pieces of Public Privacy deal with the phenomenon of covering which contain the transformation of the private youtube-living room into a public stage and happening. In Public Privacy #4, subtitled Leap in the dark, it is the compositional process itself that is staged. The material comes from video recordings that I made during rehearsals with guitarist Nico Couck in Ghent. The journey from Cologne to Ghent, the meeting with the guitarist, the fact that sometimes, within a very short time, one finds oneself in a foreign place with unfamiliar people because one follows an impulse, and how creativity suddenly transforms from a private act into a public one — in Leap in the Dark, these seemingly incidental feelings and processes merge into a “fan film,” alluding to the viral trend on YouTube of trashy reenactments of well-known horror film scenes.