Concerning the Virtue of the Second Matter

From wherever one stands, attempts to make sense of the world are conditioned by the dogmas and folklore of the time. Ideas designated as fallacious are set aside; in their dismissal they become legible as symptoms of a broader impulse within the production of knowledge itself - what might be an obsessive or self-destructive drive that shapes its subjects as much as it explains its objects.

Adopting the language, symbols, and chemical practices of seventeenth-century alchemists, Concerning the Virtue of the Second Matter comprises a tree of metal and electronics, embedded with speakers, amplifiers, microphones, minerals, metals, and a small laboratory apparatus. Enacting a kind of alchemical ritual, the performer engages the sculpture through feedback systems and live chemical reactions that restage historical experiments. Over the course of the performance, the tree gradually mutates, assimilating sounds from its environment as its chemical elements are depleted.

The work incorporates translated writings by the alchemist Michael Sendivogius, describing living and self-propagating minerals and metals, along with their symbolic functions within an astrological hierarchy.

Concerning the Vrtue of the Second Matter was commissioned by minu_festival_for_expanded_music, for percussionist Jennifer Torrence.