Just Here
What failure sounded like
I arrived at Bard College for my MFA after a career that didn’t translate easily into the categories the program expected. I had trained as a composer at Juilliard, co-founded a chamber ensemble in New York, received commissions from orchestras and soloists, and spent time as a composition fellow at Aspen. But somewhere in my late twenties I had begun making sound installations — work that used recordings of ambient environments, computationally generated hybrids of analog and digital sound, and conceptual structures that had more in common with visual art than with concert music. I had exhibited these installations in galleries in Germany and New York, and they had opened doors into a world where the questions I cared about — what happens when the familiar becomes unrecognizable, what attention does at the threshold of audibility — were taken seriously in ways the concert world couldn’t accommodate.
I enrolled at Bard to formalize a transition that was already underway. But the transition was not as smooth as I had imagined. My background with the materials of Western art music — counterpoint, orchestration, notation, formal structure — my instinct to compose, marked me as a certain kind of artist, and the art world I was entering had its own assumptions about what that kind of artist could and couldn’t do.
Early in my first year, I presented a version of an installation I had been developing — a work called Memini that layered recordings of local environments with computationally hybridized sound, creating an atmosphere where the familiar and the uncanny coexisted without resolution. The piece extended beyond the gallery: small radio transmitters were placed outdoors around the campus, each positioned near existing electronic apparatus — ventilation units, utility boxes, the ambient infrastructure of the institution. The transmitters picked up environmental sound, filtered it so no words were intelligible, and fed the signal back into the installation space, where it mixed with the composed electronic material. Inside the gallery, framed photographs of the outdoor sites — carefully composed so the transmitters were present but not the focal point — hung on the walls. The electronics were not hidden. They were simply absorbed into their surroundings, and most people, not looking carefully, walked past them without noticing. The piece depended on that slippage — the uncanniness of a familiar environment that was, without announcing itself, already part of an artwork.
I had shown the piece several times before and felt confident about it.
The campus-wide critique that followed was unlike anything I had experienced. A prominent faculty member from the writing department sat up in her chair and said, “This is one of the most violent works I have ever seen.” What infuriated her was precisely the outdoor element — the transmitters that didn’t announce themselves as interventions, the way the piece had infiltrated the campus without making its boundaries visible. She described the work’s liminal quality as manipulative. She called it an act of surveillance. The fact that the electronics were in plain sight, simply not conspicuous, made it worse in her reading — as if the work’s refusal to declare itself an artwork was itself an act of aggression. “This isn’t an artwork,” she stated.
I was not permitted to respond — the critique’s protocol gave the community twenty minutes to discuss the work while the artist listened in silence. I sat and absorbed what felt like a public unmaking. My outsider status — the Juilliard degree, the compositional background, the fact that I had arrived from a world where rigor meant something different — was suddenly visible as a liability. I had brought the wrong credentials to the wrong room.
The semester continued. I could see the fault lines her remarks had opened. But the experience also pushed me somewhere I hadn’t expected: toward a harder question about what I was actually doing, what was authentic in my practice, and what I was willing to make regardless of how it might be received.
At the end of the first year, each student was asked to create a work for a group exhibition. I decided to build something new — something that came from the questions the difficult semester had forced open rather than from the methods I had arrived with.
I had been working with Bob Beilecki, who occupied an unusual position at Bard — not a faculty member in the conventional sense, not an artist (he was adamant about this distinction), but a technical advisor and maker who worked with a wide range of artists across media. He was an autodidact with an extraordinary depth of knowledge in electronics, sound, and fabrication, and artists sought him out because he could build things no one else could build and solve problems no one else could diagnose. When I first encountered him I had to adjust my expectations — he didn’t teach in the way I understood teaching, didn’t lecture, didn’t assign. I had to learn to let his knowledge appear on its own terms rather than expecting it in a form I could recognize. I volunteered as his assistant and learned more from watching him work than from any seminar. Bob’s approach was patient, attentive, and utterly without pretension. He listened to materials the way a good musician listens to other players — waiting for what they would do rather than telling them what to do.
For the exhibition piece, I designed an array of twenty small circuits, each built to produce a synthesized sound modeled on cricket behavior. I had been reading Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial and was fascinated by the uncanny edge where digital circuitry produces behavior that appears organic — the interplay between the inorganic precision of the circuit and the lifelike quality of the emergent sound. Each circuit was designed to listen for the sounds around it and respond, creating a call-and-response field where twenty electronic organisms would converse without a conductor, producing a dense, living texture from entirely artificial means. The interest was not in simulating nature but in the slippage between the mechanical and the alive — the moment when something made entirely of silicon and solder begins to behave as if it belongs to the world rather than to the workbench.
I spent the weekend in my studio on campus building and testing the array. The pieces were to be installed Monday afternoon and I had no choice but to work through. At five o’clock on Friday the air conditioning shut off — the building’s system was programmed for the work week, and no one had thought to override it for the weekend. The windows in the studio didn’t open. By Saturday the heat was serious, the kind that settles into your thinking and slows everything down. I didn’t leave. I barely ate. I slept on cushions from a sofa I had dragged into the space. The room was stifling — my body contending with temperature while the circuits contended with code, the organic and the artificial both straining against conditions neither had been designed for. When I powered up the first circuit, there was no synthesized sound — just a sharp, quiet pop where the tone should have been. I checked the wiring, re-flashed the code, tried again. The same pop. I moved to the next circuit. The same. I left two of them running and noticed something: they were responding to each other. The call-and-response pattern was working — one circuit’s pop triggered another’s — but the sound was wrong. Every circuit produced the same failure: a click where a chirp should have been.
I tried everything I knew. I re-flashed all twenty circuits. I tested them individually. I checked the components. Nothing produced the intended sound. By the second night I was exhausted and demoralized, the heat pressing in from every surface. By Monday morning, when I was woken by someone vacuuming in the hallway outside my studio, the air conditioning had come back on. The room was cool for the first time in three days. I powered up all twenty circuits for the first time together. The room filled with pops and clicks — irregular, quiet, almost rhythmic, the twenty circuits conversing in a language that had nothing to do with what I had designed. It sounded something like rain falling on a surface I couldn’t identify. The circuitry itself — the look of the array — was utterly inorganic, static, artificial. And yet the sound was alive in a way I couldn’t account for.
I walked out to clear my head. I needed to install something in a few hours. I had nothing to install except twenty circuits that didn’t work.
I went to wash my face. I wandered the empty building. I came back.
Bob was sitting on the floor of the studio, very close to the array. He was focused, intent, and hadn’t heard me enter. I stood in the doorway, watching him listen. My mind was racing — how to explain the failure, whether he could help me fix it, whether it was too late. Eventually he sensed my presence and looked up.
“What is this?” he asked.
I began to speak — to explain, to apologize, to describe what the circuits were supposed to do.
“This is wonderful,” he said.
Everything shifted.
Not gradually, not through argument or reinterpretation, but in a single instant — the way a room changes when someone opens a window you didn’t know was there.
What I had been hearing as failure — as error messages, as the gap between intention and result — was what had actually appeared. The pops and clicks were not a malfunction. They were the work. The uncanny edge I had been designing toward — the slippage between the mechanical and the alive — had arrived, but not in the form I intended. It had arrived in a form I couldn’t recognize, which is precisely why I had mistaken it for failure. The distance between what I designed and what the circuits produced was not a problem to be solved. It was the work itself.
I had spent three days trying to force the circuits to do what I wanted. The circuits had spent three days doing something else. And what they were doing — conversing in a language I hadn’t designed, producing a texture I hadn’t predicted, filling a room with a sound that was simultaneously mechanical and alive — was more interesting, more strange, and more genuine than anything my intention could have produced.
“What do you call it?” Bob asked.
I hadn’t named it. I hadn’t thought of naming it, because until thirty seconds earlier I hadn’t thought of it as a work. It was a failure that I was about to apologize for. But Bob was sitting on the floor, listening to it as if it were the most natural thing in the world, and the name arrived from the same place the work had arrived from — not from my plan but from what was actually there.
“Just Here,” I said.
I installed the piece that afternoon. The exhibition was up for twenty-four hours. It was well received.
But what I received from the experience took years to unpack. I had learned something about the difference between what you intend and what appears — and about the specific quality of attention required to notice when what appears is more than what you intended. My critical mind had been trained to hear the gap between plan and result as failure. Bob’s attention — patient, undefended, free of any model of what the work was supposed to be — heard the gap as the work itself.
I thought about recognition and appearance. Recognition asks: is this what I expected? Does it match the model? Can I place it? Appearance asks nothing. It simply arrives — and whether you notice it depends entirely on whether you have released the model long enough to see what is actually there.
I thought about my teacher Charles Jones, who had taught me counterpoint and harmony and orchestration with extraordinary rigor and extraordinary openness — who accepted that genuine craft does not guarantee recognizable results, and that the most authentic work often sounds nothing like what the training prepared you to produce.
I thought about the circuits. They had undone my authority over them. I had designed them, built them, programmed them — and they had refused to perform as directed. What emerged from that refusal was something neither I nor they had predicted. The work’s meaning was not in my intention. It was not in the circuits’ malfunction. It was in the encounter between the two — in the space that opened when my plan collapsed and something else appeared in its place.
A few days later I was in the campus café waiting for an order. Someone tapped me gently on the back. I turned around. It was the faculty member who had called my earlier work violent, manipulative, not art.
I looked at her cautiously.
“I really liked your piece,” she said.
I began to respond, but she raised her finger, cutting me off.
“I just wanted to say I really liked your piece.”
Then she walked away.
I have spent the better part of twenty-five years engaged with what that encounter disclosed. Not the compliment — the condition. The same person who had closed the space around my work with a public denunciation had returned, days later, and opened it again with seven words and a raised finger. She didn’t explain. She didn’t retract. She didn’t reconcile. She simply appeared, said what she came to say, and left before the conversation could harden into anything more than what it was.
The work had undone its own authority. And so, in that moment, had she.
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