They Say It’s New

by Leslee Smucker

They Say It’s New is a research project based on Dionysian imitatio—a technique of rhetoric: emulating, adapting, reworking, and enriching a text by an earlier author. Through concerts, interdisciplinary programs, and a lecture-concert, this research project aims to alight different facets of the miemetic faulty (as Walter Benjamin calls it). The work is highly collaborative; I will be inviting electronic musicians, instrumentalists, composers, filmmaker, and poet, to join me in exploring imitatio.

Research: “They Say It’s New”

re-assemble: an excerpt from a score for electronic and acoustic instrument.

Anim example—an example of my research into Giacinto Scelsi’s poem Animus Inviolabilis.

Aeolian Duo—a still from a score for two instruments

Still from Artificial Light by Hollis Frampton