Onomatopoeia

Description:

Western Front presented Stan Douglas’s installation Onomatopoeia in the gallery. 

In Onomatopoeia, an upright player piano is spotlighted in the gallery. Despite the absence of a performer, the piano plays a version of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111 that has been 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 Onomatopoeia, the punch card of the automatic loom is the direct predecessor of the player piano roll: both systems spatialize events in time and enable their exact repetition through mechanical, or phantom, means.