A DOG IS A MACHINE FOR LOVING, PART 2

Special Guest: Stephane Ginsburgh

Stephane Ginsburgh, ein in Brüssel lebender Musiker österreichischer Abstammung, ist für sein gewagtes, wie virtuoses Klavierspiel renommiert. Er spielt vornehmlich zeitgenössische Musik, ist aber auch im klassischen und romantischen Repertoire zuhause. Am Programm seines Auftritts bei PETER CAT’S stehen Werke der britischen Tonkünstlerin Joanna Bailie, der amerikanischen Komponisten Frederic Rzewski und Matthew Shlomowitz sowie Alec Halls „A Dog Is A Machine For Loving“, ein Porträt von vier Hunden im Leben des kanadischen Komponisten. www.ginsburgh.net

A Dog Is a Machine For Loving
In 2015 I wrote Zoopoetics, a work for chamber ensemble and tape. The term was first employed by Jacques Derrida in his 1997 text, „The Animal that Therefore I am“, referring casually to “[Franz] Kafka’s vast zoopoetics”. A subsequent definition of the term by Aaron Moe, in his 2014 book on the subject, calls zoopoetics “the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species‘ bodily poiesis.” This work, for solo piano and tape, is an expansion of these new aesthetic forms from my recent explorations, as well as an artistic response to Donna Haraway’s writing on dogs.

The Companion Species Manifesto “is about the implosion of nature and culture in the joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in ‘significant otherness.’ In all their historical complexity, Donna Haraway tells us, dogs matter. They are not just surrogates for theory, she says; they are not here just to think with. Neither are they just an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material-semiotic presences in the body of techno-science. They are here to live with. Partners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote.”
(Alec Hall)