Tempo Rubato (Stolen Time)
Nikita Gale has proposed that “bodies are never entirely absent from what we refer to as technology.” The player piano seems particularly haunted by the body, inviting us to imagine pianists working the instrument.
In TEMPO RUBATO (STOLEN TIME), Gale underscores this uncanny absence by silencing the instrument’s musical functions and leaving only the sound and image of its mechanisms, which have been amplified through a custom-built sound and lighting system. The work’s title is a musical term that describes the expressive freedom taken by a performer when interpreting a score, and a form of acknowledgment of the space between a score and its performance.
Gale worked with an attorney, the licensing organization ASCAP, and a team of technologists to create an instance where the performance of a musical work without the original sound retains traces of the instrument being played. This circumstance considers whether or not the performance still constitutes the work and is therefore considered legal property, ultimately asking if it is possible to locate authorship through the mechanical gesture alone.
About Nikita Gale
Nikita Gale (b. 1983 Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA. Gale’s work explores the relationship between materials, power, and attention. A key tenet of the artist’s practice is that the structures that shape attention determine who or what is seen, heard, recorded, remembered, and believed.
