circa ten to the ninety (2025) | iteration ii | Retro-performative audial composition (two performers, digital chessboard, Max/MSP, monitor, speakers).

> Premiering: luc trahand’s composition.

> Continuing: saun santipreecha’s composition.

+ 4–6pm, open play.
- 6–8pm, curated performances.
+ 8–10pm, open play.

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On Saturday, May 3, the gallery is presenting the second iteration of circa ten to the ninety (2025) by foad dizadji-bahmani, saun santipreecha, luc trahand. The work is embedded-into Maccabee Shelley’s ongoing solo exhibition with the gallery: the middle of the end .

This collaborative, still-evolving work positions a game of chess as a unique encounter with relations between un/conscious structures snared between bodies, logics, boards, compositions, gambits—and play (or competition). With or against an Other (in the place of an other), each player performs a simultaneous coding and deciphering—and aleation—of their actions through an audial rendering of their moves. With the typical quiets of chess amplified to the point of roiling the surface of their hush, each move is voyeuristically heard (as it’s watched).

“Conceived by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, and developed together with Saun Santipreecha and Luc Trahand, <<circa ten to the ninety>> is an ongoing performance project rooted in a fascination with chess as a form of creativity. […] [T]he work involves a game of chess played on a specially designed board that generates a relationally-modular audial composition. Each piece — king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn — for both sides — white and black — corresponds to a distinct layer drawn from a musical a musical suite congruous to its movement, and is mapped to specific squares on the board” […full statement provided below].

Anyone who would like to participate is invited to sign-up and play a match during the ‘open play’ scheduling (4-6pm; 8-10pm).

*Please follow this link to a Google Sheet provided in order for anyone to register for individual time slots: Sign-Up. Alternatively, if you would like to play, you may also simply show-up at the gallery during the ‘open play’ periods and there will likely be an opportunity to play. Of course, signing-up is encouraged if you would like to guarantee your spot.

Each match is set to a 20-minute interval; however, it is possible for a match to run longer than the afforded time slot. So please be aware that the timing of matches may slide forward, depending on the duration of each individual match.

Please reach-out to the gallery with any questions about signing-up: gallery@reisigandtaylorcontemporary.com.

(The first iteration of <<circa ten to the ninety>> took-place during the last evening of "Gene’s Presents 1TB Verbatim: Los Angeles Timing 2013-2025" at Leroy’s Happy Place (Chinatown, Los Angeles). March 2, 2025.)

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Project Statement

<<Conceived by Foad Dizadji-Bahmani, and developed together with Saun Santipreecha and Luc Trahand, circa ten to the ninety is an ongoing performance project rooted in a fascination with chess as a form of creativity. Drawing from the Surrealists’ exploration of chess both as metaphor for, and expression of, the tensions between order and disorder, chronos and kairos, the conscious and the unconscious, the work involves a game of chess played on a specially designed board that generates a relationally-modular audial composition. Each piece — king, queen, bishop, knight, rook, pawn — for both sides — white and black — corresponds to a distinct layer drawn from a musical suite congruous to its movement, and is mapped to specific squares on the board. With every move, the musical work emerges, shaped by strategy, imagination, and the players’ evolving choices, and thereby gives voice to Duchamp’s quip that, whilst not all artists are chess players, all chess players are artists. Adding to this fluid interplay of sound and structure, the layers assigned to each piece possess a temporal signature, defined by an inverse linear function of the time remaining on each player’s clock. This temporal element infuses the work with a sense of urgency and transformation, as the diminishing time alters the pace and texture of the unfolding composition. Although bound by the rules of chess and starting always in the same high-entropy state, each performance becomes a collaboration by opponents through whose unbounded agency one of circa ten to the ninety audial possibilities is actualized and phenomenological time is expressed. The result is a work where order and chaos, sound and silence, strategy and serendipity converge in an ongoing act of creation.

For th[e] first iteration of the project, Saun Santipreecha composed the musical suite sampling from two sources, electroacoustically-modified: a saxophone and an electric guitar. Variously stretched or condensed in time, and taking as inspiration Blake’s Newton (1795) – the aquamarine fauna and luteofulvous mineralia away from which Newton has turned, and his search, under the pressure of the cold ebullition, through a system of mathematical rules – Santipreecha created a suite that ranges from deep textural resonances to clusters of gamelan-esque ticking. In turn, this also pays homage to the prepared piano compositions of John Cage, whose later work, Reunion (1968) serves as this project’s parental lineage. A multi-tonal haze intensifies and then slowly dissipates towards a certain audial resolution and final stasis.

The complex and meticulous audial architecture of the project is designed and engineered by Luc Trahand. Working in MaxMSP and interfacing with a digital chess board, Trahand constructs a dynamic isomorphism between the state of play and the musical suite, adding spatial processes and temporal signatures.

This project invites future iterations based on different musical suites composed by other artists.>>

<<[Premiering during the installation of iteration ii (May 3, 2025: Reisig and Taylor Contemporary (Los Angeles),] Luc Trahand’s iteration of circa ten to the ninety engages with the chess players’ relationship with the game and its system. Pursuing the human and the artifice—that which is denominated as artificial—as automorphic structures, it conceptually examines the bidirectional correspondence that we partake in. As we become both cybernetics and ghosts, algorithmic individualism proliferates throughout our socius. This composition aims to highlight the relevance of the notion of Foucault’s biopolitics, further decorticated by Mbembe, Han, Haraway, Agamben, and other authors. A mutual imitation of voice and machinery, the sounds’ spectral fingerprints progressively morph into one-another as the players move through the game.>>

{Statement courtesy of the artists.}

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A Manual (for Composers)

Introduction:

circa ten to the ninety operates within the program Max (MSP). The designed system reads the game on an electronic chessboard and arranges the layers of sound provided by the composer to create the audial performance in real-time.

How The Sound Is Structured:

All the pieces on the board are always producing a representative sound. The sound emitted is determined using two criteria:

The chess piece type (King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn).
The positions of the pieces on the board.

The chess piece type determines which of the 6 provided sound layers the system is picking from. The position of a piece determines which sample of the selected layer is going to be played on loop.

Each layer is automatically divided into 64 samples of equal length. Each sample represents a square of the board. They are mapped in a spiral, as such:

For example, a pawn on square d4 will play sample 61/64 of the “Pawn” layer (being at position 61 of the spiral). If the “Pawn” layer is, say, 20m00s, then the sample that will be looped will be between 18m45s and 19m04s, with a loop duration of about 19s. This process is repeated for all active pieces on the board.

Moves:

When a move is made, say Pawn d2 to d4, the sound emitted changes with its position change. When the piece is placed, this pawn’s sound spikes in volume momentarily, separating itself from all the other sounds, and then decays back into the masses of sound layers.

Tension Build:

Throughout the game, the outputted sound’s frequency gets progressively shifted upwards, ramping up slowly from a factor of 1 to 1.3 over the course of a full 20mn game (10mn on each player’s clock). This creates a sense of a tension build, maintaining the intensity of the game.

This feature is optional and can be foregone if the composer wishes for the frequency to remain unaltered.

Turn Distinction:

The white and black pieces are panned to the side of the board that they are on. This means that (in the initial board state) 16 white pieces are hard-panned and opposed to 16 black pieces. The sounds that are representing the side whose turn it is not are mixed into reverb, thus putting an emphasis on the side that is to play a move.

What The Composer Provides

The composer needs to provide 6 stereo files of duration 10–30 min. Note that longer duration reduces repetitiveness. Each of these files will be used to represent a type of chess piece (King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, Pawn), so they should be labeled accordingly, with Last Name, First Name, and Piece Type.

Nota Bene:

Keep in mind the layering—the 6 layers should be distinct and able to sit in their own frequency/rhythm space and not overpower. There are 32 pieces on the board at the start of the game, each producing a sound from one of the layers. Note the 16 pawns. It is best to make sure that the “Pawn” layer is sparse enough to be layered 16 times.

Piece Count Reminder:

King, Queen: 1x2

Rook, Bishop, Knight: 2x2

Pawns: 8x2

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Saun Santipreecha (b. 1989, Thailand) is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and writer who works across and between disciplines and art forms, often at the intersection between image, language, sound and body. His artistic route in visual arts and music began simultaneously, studying privately with two Thai Silpathorn Award recipients for Thai contemporary artists, visual artist Chalermchai Kositpipat and classical pianist/composer Nat Yontararak amongst other tutors and mentors. In 2008 he moved to Los Angeles where he pursued a career in music composition for film, collaborating with artists from multiple disciplines including fashion and video games while also working independently on projects culminating in the experimental album Dandelye (2022). His compositional work in film, television, and fashion—many of which he has worked on under the pseudonym S. Peace Nistades—has been screened in over thirty film festivals worldwide including the Cannes Film Festival as well as at New York, Paris and LA Fashion Weeks. He has also worked in numerous capacities in the music department for a number of composers including John Debney, Danny Elfman, The Newton Brothers and Abel Korzeniowski.

Saun’s first institutional exhibition, [O-I-RI-R], is an installation in the East German Guardhouse at the Wende Museum (open April 27 - September 15, 2024). He had his debut solo exhibition, Dandelye—or, Beneath this River’s Tempo’d Time We Walk, in July, 2023 at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary. His first international solo exhibition, Per/formative Cities | A Nest of Triptychal Performances (curated by Camilla Boemio), took place February–March at AOC F58 Galleria Bruno Lisi, Rome. His second solo exhibition in Los Angeles at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary opens May 25. The exhibition is titled ...These Things That Divide The World In Two... and coincides with his participation at the 9th Annual Conference of the Samuel Beckett Society—Beckett and Justice—at California State University, Los Angeles. (He was invited to speak on the panel Beckett, Justice, and Thai Artist Saun Santipreecha in conversation with Beckett scholars Katherine Weiss and Feargal Whelan (2024).) In November 2024, he joined other artists in conversation with Artistic Director Tarell Alvin McCraney on the occasion of Keeping Beckett Live: Waiting for Godot Panel at the Geffen Playhouse.

His work has been in various group exhibitions in Incheon National University, South Korea, New York, and Los Angeles, and he continues to work with artists and specialists across disciplines.

He is currently based in Los Angeles, CA.

French-American interdisciplinary artist Luc Trahand’s work spans multiple mediums and forms from music and sound to language, film, and sculpture.

His most recent work, HUM•DRUM is an installation at Reisig & Taylor Contemporary Gallery in LA [installed as part of spleen iiiii (July 27 - September 7, 2024)] that focused on the deconstruction of meaning in semiotics. It brings together sculpture, sound, pyrography, bookmaking, and boothmaking in a contrivance of the spect-actor's perspectives.

He served as co-producer and Max architectural engineer for Saun Santipreecha on his international solo exhibition Per/formative Cities, A Nest of Triptychal Performances in Rome (Feb. 29 - March 15, 2024), as well as for Santipreecha's ...These Things That Divide The World In Two… engaging with the works of Samuel Beckett.

He is a multi-instrumentalist who studied composition and music production at Musicians Institute, Los Angeles and has previously released several EPs and an album, In Coherence (2020). The series of sound works DÉS.ILLUSIONS (2023) was accompanied by an adjoining essay that sought to decorticate contemporary illusions. His 2022 project Polarity interwove music, language, dance and film into a striking gesture that expressed “the cognitive dissonances of the engaged modern mind.”

He lives and works between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Foad Dizadji-Bahmani is an associate professor at the Department of Philosophy, California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). “I primarily work on philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of probability. I also work on Wittgenstein and on philosophy of law. Whilst at CSULA, I have also held a research position at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences. Before coming to CSULA, I was a Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). And previous to that, I completed my PhD at the LSE.”

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