Onomatopoeia

Description:

In Stan Douglas's installation Onomatopoeia, an upright player piano was spotlit in the gallery. Despite the absence of a performer, the piano played a version of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 that was restructured to emphasize its ragtime-like rhythms. Perforations in the piano scroll triggered slide projections of an empty nineteenth-century textile factory and the punch cards once used to program weaving patterns. In the work, the punch card of the automatic loom is emphasized as the direct predecessor of the player piano roll: both systems spatialized events in time and enabled their exact repetition through mechanical—or phantom—means.