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Project Website: http://slought.org/content/11180/
Slought Foundation, a non-profit organization rethinking contemporary art, presents The Plato Songs, an audio installation for three headphones in the Slought Foundation vault by artist Chris Mann, adapted from the recent installation at Engine 27, New York. A live performance by the artist will take place on February 19, 2003, 6:30-8:30pm.
Chris Mann on The Plato Songs: "As "law" was also the word for "music," Plato's The Laws was, like the lost sixth analect of Confucius, his text on music. And as The Laws was the out-of-town tryout for The Republic, it seems timely to pry into those early models of conversation theory, the cybernetics of The Dialogues. The Plato Songs is the bookend companion piece to my earlier work "Or, Yellow" on Ludwig Wittgenstein and Cab Calloway." Chris Mann on language: "Language is the mechanism whereby you understand what I'm thinking better than I do (where "I" is defined by those changes for which I is required)."
 Read More About this Project (PDF Download)
Chris Mann is a composer and performer working in Compositional Linguistics. His work engages technology and the philosophy of speech. Mann worked with the Machine for Making Sense until moving to New York in the mid nineties. Solo performances include Paris Autumn, Ars Electronica, and the Berliner Festspiele. He has been deconstructed, interpreted and set to word and music by Herbert Brun, John Cage, David Dunn, Gary Hill, Johnny Klimek, Annea Lockwood, Larry Polansky, and Robert Rauschenberg, among others. John Cage, addressing the work of Chris Mann, wrote the following mesostic: "the surfaCe of tHis poetRy's musIc itS body's talk / a fast Mix of vulgArity aNd elegaNce." His numerous publications and releases include "Working Hypothesis" (Station Hill, 1998) and "chris mann and the use" (Lovely Music, 2001).
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