Cat Pose

Cat Pose is an exploratory, collaborative, audio-imaging work by Sonnenzimmer (Nick Butcher & Nadine Nakanishi) and Coupler (Ryan Norris) sparked by a collective interest in the nature of audio loops.
 
The origin of the project was inauspicious. A question was posited: “what is a loop?”. From that seed a forest of conversations, ideations, and iterations sprang. The process began in earnest with a photograph of Ryan’s cat, Jericho, with the intent of creating a sonic impression of him using a series of audio loops. Based on this photo, a graphic score was developed, 33 equidistant “slices” demarcated from top to bottom. Any section of Jericho’s body within a slice was visualized by an ellipse—a loop—as a graphic representation of the distance around a particular part of his body.
 
As imaginative as this all may sound, it is only the beginning of the story—a step into the unknown. What Cat Pose actually is can be difficult to parse. There is sound, yes, and text, too. A collaborative essay unpacking the parallels between image and sound wraps around the exterior of the LP cover. Perhaps it is most accurate to call Cat Pose a tone poem, or “tone parallel” as Duke Ellington might say. Cat Pose asks questions but only alludes to answers. It is a meditation on the nature of temporal versus non-temporal art (which, when you think about it…). It interrogates Schrödinger’s famous cat experiment through the lens of a very real, very blind cat, and imagines a conversation the legendary physicist might have had with Jean Piaget about object permanence. Cat Pose is playful, but takes itself seriously. Cat Pose is motion and stasis in balance, an un-concluded interrogation of the twinned nature of time and space, of image and sound. The answers to this interrogation a black hole whose presence is nowhere and effects are everywhere. Cat Pose denies conclusion, but accepts finality. It is a holistic, transparent, creative act; stating the question, performing the answer, and providing a format to revisit both.