jingle bach (2022)

four-channel audio, one-channel video
Indefinite duration

Program Note

jingle bach is a generative audiovisual installation built upon two ideals—the baroque ideal anchored to faith and the postmodern ideal reinforced by its own commodification. It does not seem too far-fetched to intertwine the two (though it is not my intention, a cynic might argue a Bach chorale has the same ambition and objective as a Coke commercial), resulting in an iconoclastic rendition of Bach performed by rarefied commercials. The reconstruction and fragmentation make it inevitable for both Bach and the commercials to be taken literally here—the former is reduced to a combination of musical notes, the latter a visual representation of the products—even though, as Neil Postman puts it, commercials are “about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.”

The installation consists of a looping digital score of a Bach chorale, “Erkenne mich, mein Hüter” from the St Matthew Passion, and an algorithm that constantly scans YouTube commercials and recreates the chorale using material it samples from the commercials. As more and more samples are collected, the quality of the performance gradually improves, and the chorale becomes increasingly legible, until further enhancements become statistically unlikely.