C.D. — A Script for Synthesis
What the archive object documents
The archive preserves a nine-page program-booklet for Florian Hecker's C.D. (A Script for Synthesis), a performance commissioned by Performa and presented at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on 9–10 November 2013. The booklet contains Reza Negarestani's libretto Black Boxing Pink (A Script for Synthesis), Robin Mackay's essay Skin Games: A Primer, a schematic diagram, and the production credits (program-booklet, pp. 2–9).
The displayed program credits Hecker with writing and producing the performance, Negarestani with the libretto, Charlotte Rampling with the recorded voice, Carlos Benaïm and Frédéric Malle/Editions de Parfums with the perfume, Anea Miskovic with costume design, and Joan La Barbara with chorus composition and vocal design. It also names the chorus, producer, curator, technical roles, and institutional support (program-booklet, p. 9). Those are program credits, not evidence for unlisted roles or a general account of the participants' careers.
A performance assembled across media
The libretto's opening stage is already an analytic machine: three white obelisks, a pink ice cube inaccessible to the crowd, an odor materialized in a portable rubber object, sound figured as group, individual, and synthetic being, and “lysergic” light. Human actors exit except for the cube; bracketed passages are read against a pulsating sound that contracts and dilates with the text (program-booklet, p. 2). The work is therefore not adequately described as a concert with supplementary visuals. Sound, scent, text, voice, costume, architecture, and a perishable object are coordinated as distinct explanatory agents.
The pink ice cube imposes a temporal limit because it will melt. Direct touch and taste are prohibited, so brute-force inspection would destroy the very box under study. Negarestani treats this sensory deprivation as an opportunity for abstraction: sonic and olfactory agents must communicate with the “chromatic demon” of pink without pretending that immediate perception has already explained the cube (program-booklet, p. 2).
Black-boxing pink
The work takes up Wilfrid Sellars's pink ice cube: phenomenologically homogeneous, pink at every point, and apparently transparent, but still a black box because its immediate appearance gives no access to the structures that produce it. The script introduces a hypothetical cavity into that homogeneous pink. This local discontinuity is an “operative lie”: a controlled conjecture that destabilizes the obvious description and forces previously hidden behaviors and pathways to appear (program-booklet, pp. 2–3).
Once the cube is no longer assumed to be pink all the way down, it separates into scales. Ordinary language can describe a macroscopically pink object; an intermediate scale supports different properties and manipulations; an atomic scale contains no pink at all. Neither top-down experience nor bottom-up physical reduction is sufficient by itself. The task is to build translations and mixed-level explanations across descriptions that cannot simply be collapsed into one another (program-booklet, pp. 3–5).
The scent and sound follow opposite routes through this problem. The scent begins with an intended verbal effect, passes through accords and chemical formulation, and reaches molecular structure. Hecker's particle synthesis starts from subperceptual grains and produces an auditory object that invites—and then disrupts—analogical description (program-booklet, p. 7). Their function is not to illustrate the cube but to make cross-scale construction perceptible.
Mackay's “phenomenological gap”
Mackay situates C.D. within Hecker's use of psychoacoustics. The auditor's nervous system reconstructs or hallucinates objects from controlled cues, and a shift of position or attention can make an apparently stable sonic object fracture, move, or become spatially delocalized. The listener “completes” the work through perceptual constraint, not through unconstrained personal interpretation (program-booklet, p. 6).
The resulting phenomenological gap separates homogeneous perceptual objects from the technical structures used to synthesize them. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard's Les Immatériaux, Mackay treats technological instruments as systems that decompose familiar objects into imperceptible structures and recompose them through machine languages. The nervous system becomes one transformer among others, registering flows according to its own rhythms and limits (program-booklet, pp. 6–7).
The audience's disciplined synthesis
The audience is asked to reconstruct the work as a precarious accord: cube, libretto, scent, loudspeakers, costumes, chorus, voice, booklet, and conceptual labor. That participation is neither passive reception nor a “choose your own adventure.” It is a disciplined synthesis of concurrent perceptual and conceptual registers whose incompatibilities remain active (program-booklet, p. 8).
Mackay's political conclusion is that polished cultural objects already depend on immense collective abstraction while presenting themselves as frictionless experience. C.D. proposes an apprenticeship in opening such black boxes: tracing recipes, changing scale, and learning to navigate between perception and technical preparation instead of opposing sensation to abstraction (program-booklet, p. 8; speculative aesthetics). This connection to algorithmic objects is interpretive but useful: both pages concern objects whose apparent unity depends on operations distributed across scales.
CONTRADICTION: The cube is transparent yet functions as a black box; abstraction begins by inserting a false cavity yet aims to disclose real structural possibilities; and the listener's completion of the work depends on stricter constraints rather than greater interpretive freedom. These reversals are the documented method of the piece, not defects to be resolved (program-booklet, pp. 2–8).