4. Media and Material Transformations

Piano Transplants

Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants provide not only a shift of perception but also a radical physical move: a transplantation of instruments out of their protected cultural sphere and its conventions. (Even Lady Gaga’s burning-piano spectacle noted earlier took place in an indoor performance space.) In her work, Lockwood strives to create radical and nonhierarchical sound experiences with a “focus on elemental and natural sound sources.”12 These experiences displace the traditional focus on human performance in favor of a posthumanist perspective that allows for interactions between the instrument and weather, water, plant life, and fire.

The following analysis traces the roles of elemental change, material process, and media transformation in the 2021 ISSUE Project Room films of Piano Burning, Piano Garden, and Piano Drowning. Though audiences can experience live mediation of music in a performance setting, it is a rarer occurrence to witness artworks that involve the destruction or decay of instruments without the double mediation of audiovisual technology. The following analysis shows that this additional transmediation of Lockwood’s performances does not necessarily prevent embodied experience of these works and the ecological entanglement they perform. Lars Elleström’s media modalities reveal how these films’ material, spatiotemporal, sensorial, and semiotic aspects involve the spectator’s body, allowing for affective responses and new forms of meaning-making.

Our analysis also includes levels of radical and elemental mediation that move beyond the contexts of conventionally qualified media types such as (art) music. Drawing on Peters, we discuss the roles of fire, air, and water as elemental media interacting with the piano, with additional reference to Richard Grusin’s radical mediation. We show in detail how the 2021 films transmediate these elemental aspects of live performance and, on the audiovisual level, a performative experience within the media-specific affordances of film. The ISSUE Project Room’s two-and-a-half-hour-long film of the three performances is an experience of slow watching and careful listening. Our fine-grained intermedial analysis takes the time needed to focus on the objects and beings we interact with, the sense data we focus on, and how all of these aspects contribute to unexpected forms of perception through decomposing pianos.

Piano Burning

This one-hour, eleven-minute video transmediates a performance of Annea Lockwood’s Piano Burning at the 2021 Brisbane Festival, featuring a performance by composer and artist Vanessa Tomlinson. When we approach the material modality of the film, the act of looking for objects and beings that offer communicative interfaces makes processes of mediation more obvious. The scene includes an upright piano placed in a circle of earth or sand in front of a wall, a performer, a person who acts as a fire starter, and fire itself. The fire’s rapid spread and crackling sounds suggest the presence of fire accelerant and microphones. The fire’s transformational qualities expose the piano’s materials: wood eventually transformed into charred embers (from 0:15:05), the piano’s internal wires, and the cast-iron harp revealed as the wood falls away (from 0:15:20).

In the sensorial modality, we notice visual, auditory, and audiovisual events. As the piano fades into the frame, it appears center stage but at the same time out of place in what looks like an industrial area. The performer slowly walks into the frame and sits in front of the keyboard as a man sets the piano alight from its back and leaves. The fire spreads quickly, the starting signal for a short improvised performance; the keyboardist adjusts her movements not primarily to produce music but to avoid flames and smoke. She moves toward the lowest end of the keyboard as the upper range becomes too hot, and there she continues to play. When the heat forces her to leave the seat, she must let go and leave the scene where the burning piano remains center stage (0:05:28).

In the following interplay of piano and fire, we notice different visual transformations. The upright piano emitting flames (instead of musical sounds) (Figure 1) turns into a simple rectangular container for fire, slowly opening to reveal the cast-iron frame with copper wires protruding like harp strings, an instrument within the instrument, or the ribs of a skeleton (notably around 0:18:00). The piano turns into a simple wooden and increasingly charred box that eventually collapses (0:38:10) (Figure 2). As the flames decrease, from violent yellow-orange to red-orange against the increasingly dark background of nightfall, we notice sparks and trailing smoke (from 50:00) and the piano’s amber glow in contrast to the neon lights of what looks like a gas station further off (1:00:06). Finally, all that remains of the piano is a smoldering pile of wood and metal with undistinguishable form. The film ends with an extreme close-up of the glowing embers and fades out.

Different sorts of sounds enter one by one as well. The rush of car traffic draws attention to the auditory mode even before the piano fades in. These traffic sounds are then drowned out by the roar of an airplane (0:02:05), which eventually merges with the clearly audible (electronically amplified) crackling of burning wood and the noticeably out-of-tune piano during the improvised performance. The pianist begins with broken, dissonant chords across the keyboard’s range and ends with a percussive bass pattern that includes fewer and fewer notes. The sounds of burning wood and music from the same object create a sense of ambiguity, especially as the burning piano destabilizes the keys’ volume from one to the next. The sense of fine-tuned control expected in live piano performance falls apart. When the music stops, the fire continues to produce sounds, from the aggressive roaring of a bonfire to a calmer crackling that allows other sounds to protrude again: easily identifiable noises such as car and occasional airplane traffic, the murmur of an invisible audience, and later birds, sounds which could possibly be crickets, and shuddering noises along with what may be the aeolian harp–like hum of the remaining copper wires (ca. 1:00:24).

Other sensory modes of the live event, notably the heat and the smell of burning wood (with accelerant and varnish) cannot be directly conveyed by audiovisual media. We do get a sense of the heat from the performer’s movements. On site, we might be more conscious of the performer’s body and its vulnerability to the fire. In this media transformation, the distinct and electronically amplified sound of burning wood transmediates the fire’s dramatic and potentially threatening force, as well as its diminishing heat. The more the fire burns down, the nearer close-up shots come to the burning wood and glowing embers, creating intimacy with the heat that becomes less dangerous as it smolders to ash. In the sensorial modality, the burning piano may start with spectacular sights but guides its audience into close listening that extends the familiar experience of a domesticated fire, as fire and piano sound together in unpredictable ways. The short improvised performance and the piano’s shape draw attention to the auditory modes that involve us in listening to rather than watching a fire.

In the spatiotemporal modality, we notice transformative negotiation between the space and time of the performance and their transmediation into one hour of film. The performance site remains obscure and anonymous but conveys the audiovisual impression of an industrial area close to a major traffic artery and an airport. Some movements occur on site, from the improvised performance to the piano’s fiery collapse. The film’s editing adds an extra dynamic level by switching among mostly fixed or slowly moving close-ups, full shots, and increasingly wide shots slowly fading into each other. When the on-site process slows down, the editing increases in tempo as it switches angles more frequently. The time it takes to burn a piano into a heap of glowing embers and ash is summed up both through elliptical cuts and indexical signs of cyclical time, from dusk to darkness and a final close-up of glowing embers. Through the continuous changes caused by the fire and the changing of perspectives (most notable at 0:22:30), there is a sense of losing time while watching and listening; one hour does not feel long at all, yet time also seems to slow and stretch, as if in the passage of a long night. The live piano burning described in our final chapter does not take as long as this filmed version appears to, though the actual time of viewing is only one hour.

In the semiotic modality, the film destabilizes art-music expectations, materially by the outdoor, industrial environment, and audiovisually by the sights and sounds of the fire competing with the pianist. The performance is short and leaves little space for a more informed understanding of what is musically expressed here, though the movement from broken chord clusters to the pounding of the bass keys (reminiscent of Fredric Rzewski’s Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues) does enact a shift from modernist sounds to more machinelike gestures. Even for viewers used to performance art, the whole process sets up and then unhinges musical meaning potential. For instance, the fact that the performer moves to the lowest section of the bass is ambiguous; it is indexical both in that it evokes an existing piece of music and in that it responds contingently, as movement forced by the flames’ heat and smoke. The space and time of the performance also appear contingent in relation to the processes of fire. Any iconic or symbolic meaning potential is partly intentional and partly accidental, more found than produced. Sounds lose their cultural affordances, expressing instead something of radical mediation in Grusin’s terms, or a relational process in the very fact of material, fuel, and body responding to each other.

The conventions of musical performance may also affect how some viewers hear the fire, not only as noise but as aesthetically framed sounds, and as a continuation of the performer’s improvisation. We find some iconic relationships in the visual transformation of the piano, from an instrument emitting flames (instead of sounds), to a bonfire in the shape of a piano, then to a container, a frame, and finally to a ruin. The most iconic relation arises from the strings’ metal frame and its resemblance to a harp or ribs. Depending on which meaning we choose, this body-like shape might signal either a surprise revelation or a violent death, or perhaps both at the same time. For some viewers, however, after the piano’s collapse into firewood and embers, symbolic and iconic resemblances may recede into the background. The focus remains on the fire and on its transformation as a symptom of passing time. Semiotically, the performance highlights the piano’s materiality, auditory experience beyond musical conventions, shifting iconic associations, and the blurry entanglement of music, sounds, and noise.

When we move to the level of elemental and radical media, Piano Burning not only changes and expands notions of music but also draws attention to fire as a medium. As we have discussed with regard to musical instruments, fire in this performance is not used to produce lights, warmth, tools, or social connections; nor is it out of control as an elemental force. Instead, the performance foregrounds ambiguous relationships of fire to organic life and human civilization. John Durham Peters presents the element of fire as the first human tool, a “medium as well as the precondition for almost all human-made media.”13 Even if fire itself is not a survivable environment for living beings, it enables human civilization. Humans depend on fire to carve out their habitat, to produce light and warmth—to the extent that Peters remarks that “human beings are pyrophytic plants: we grow together with fire.”14 Combustion is the hidden motor of our organic life, as “every cell in our body is slowly burning.”15 Domesticated fire is built into many layers of human civilization, from a home hearth to our use of oil to the electricity-driven internet. Terms like global heating and burning planet indicate the close relationship of fossil fuel–based fire to climate emergency. However, fire in itself is “fragile” in that it depends on the right combination of oxygen, fuel, and other conditions.16 Thus, the medial perspective toward fire is a contradictory one. Human civilization contains fire and is threatened by it as soon as it gets out of control.17

Piano Burning showcases fire as an ambiguous mediator of human life. In the performance, the destructive potential is not entirely neutralized or tamed (as it is in candles, torches, or electricity sockets). Instead, the performance enacts symbiotic interdependences. In the material modality, the fire pushes all cultural and musical affordances of the piano into the background, highlighting the piano’s role as firewood and fuel. In its use as fuel, Peters calls fire “a contradiction itself. It destroys what it touches but also destroys itself.”18 Humans turn fire into a tool by containing it, by offering fuel in a controlled environment. Thus, the burning piano displays fire as human medium but in a defamiliarized way. In the sensorial modality, the performance presents a controlled fire on one level as flames in shifting colors that we would recognize from a campfire, bonfire, or wildfire. At the same time, the very construction of the piano, along with electronic amplification, frame the fire aesthetically into surprising shapes and cinematic sounds as the wood and metal crack and whine and collapse.

On site, the fire would engage smell and touch as well. Apart from humans’ use of lights, smoke, and electrical technologies to communicate, Peters points toward a “baseline of evocative vagueness” that is characteristic of fire, that conveys “no special message besides its burning, pulsing self.”19 This experience is familiar from the meditative experience of a burning campfire, but here it is once again defamiliarized (without the smell of smoke) and foregrounds only visual and audiovisual experience. Following the performance emphasizes the space that fire occupies and its ephemeral relation to time, as it “exists by disappearing.”20 In this respect, fire is similar to musical sounds. The staged process of transformations, of a piano into firewood, the wood into charcoal, and the charcoal into ashes, takes a specific amount of time. The film transmediates a distinct experience of the on-site performance, although it speeds up the process. In fact, we may be better able to focus on this transformation in its edited form.

Overall, Piano Burning demonstrates the role of fire as a multisensory catalyst. It is this dynamic and constantly changing process of fire consuming organic material that humans use both as a material tool and as an aesthetic medium. In both cases, we accept the loss of organic material because we value the heat, light, or aesthetic objects that we can produce with its help. The burning piano forces us to look at the loss of organic material that we accept or sacrifice. When fireplace logs are burning, we might only enjoy the product of warmth and heat. When cities, forests, and living beings are burning, we would only focus on destruction, pain, and danger, and, as Davies points out, we might want to rush to help and save what can be saved, if possible. The burning piano, however, becomes a mechanical object that is somehow close to a human being; it sets destruction, affective response, and aesthetic experience into oscillating ambiguity.

Thus, the fire and the piano foreground a process of radical mediation in Grusin’s sense, exposing connection and interdependence as preconditions of communication. One could say that fire and piano work as technical media of display for each other. The qualified media type of music expands into a process in which noise, sounds, and musical sounds all partake, along with human and nonhuman, organic and elemental actors. The fire and the piano play together, and the fire allows the piano to sound independently from human manipulation. An instrument considered to be defunct, in the qualifying standards of music, provides the possibilities for this elemental or even radical performance—one last, grand show without a human performer. From a posthumanist perspective, this self-consumption might signal the inevitable decline of humankind already built into the human project, in Claire Colebrook’s sense,21 or simply indicate a necessary humbling of human ambition on a heating planet.

Piano Garden

Lockwood’s Piano Garden includes the simple instructions to “not protect against weather” and to “leave the piano(s) there forever.”22 The nineteen-minute film version from 2021 (1:11 to 1:30) transmediates this work in a wooded area of Katonah, north of New York City, where the Caramoor Summer Music Festival has run since 1945. Well-heeled listeners flock to the outdoor pavilions and Italianate villa rooms to hear the world’s top musicians play innovative programs that, at the same time, continue the received practices of classical performance practice. Festival curator Stephan Moore has recently included Lockwood’s work as part of an effort to open up this practice to include more multisensory and experimental sound experiences.23

The Piano Garden film focuses on the score’s documentary aspect with fairly seamless time-lapse editing of still shots; it shows the piano on a series of warm, windless days, with fast-growing bushes and creepers overtaking it. In what looks like a neglected garden corner, the material modality features a Knabe baby grand (a more workaday model than the music festival’s Steinways) surrounded by plants such as oak, maple, wild balsam, and dog rose. A keyboard performance by Madison Greenstone (normally a clarinetist), with additional sound by Stephan Moore, is not shown but heard as a nondiegetic soundtrack. The film’s edits show the deserted piano throughout summer months in a series of fixed shots lasting ten to twenty seconds and separated by black frames; the sound creates continuity across the film’s breaks.

In the sensorial modality, vision and hearing thus remain disconnected throughout the film. The piano varies among three camera positions: a medium shot showing the keyboard, a full shot from a distance showing the baby grand slightly to the right, and a shot from above foregrounding the raised lid and the piano’s weathering process. The lid’s upper layer has become delaminated, and one can imagine the hammer mechanisms inside the case have worn loose as well in changing weather. The keys’ surfaces lie scattered in increasing disarray throughout the film; a slight mossy layer on the varnish spreads as well (e.g., 1:18:20) (Figure 3). Other visual indications of growth and decay are very slow; in fact, they are hardly noticeable from frame to frame, except by the growth of the surrounding plants. Wild balsam grows in from the right until it covers half of the piano in the film frame, and one wild rose branch gradually invades the piano’s interior (1:13:29).

Along with the visual repetition of static slightly changing images, we hear an evolving sonic improvisation (offscreen, as a soundtrack) that begins with a loud thump in the keyboard’s bass range and continues as a kind of testing of pitches and intervals, as a piano tuner would assess an instrument. The sound is not simply out of tune but also heavily influenced by the piano’s mechanics breaking down, the result of changing weather and New York’s high summer humidity. The improvisation seems to occur more as listening and response than as intentional sound-making. First the (invisible) players focus on the keyboard, as pitches split between the tap of each key’s mechanism and the twang of loosening wires, until hardly any tone emerges from the hammers. Then the players move into the body of the piano, using extended technique to pluck and strum the strings, which sound (for a while) more in tune than when struck by the hammers. Gradually even this sense of scalar order collapses, and the players find new freedom in making faster, more aggressive, and more rhythmic sounds that exploit the piano’s remaining percussive integrity. Some hammers still hit the strings; some keys produce only muffled thumps and thuds. These sounds reveal the instrument’s materials that often sound individually: the soundboard, copper wires, wooden hammers, and other felt and wooden surfaces. We hear birds in the background and at some stage the faint sound of plants in the breeze. The improvisation breaks off suddenly at the end of the film, as if in midthought, while the plant growth continues its slow work to overtake the piano.

While the installation of a planted piano in the garden is stable in place and evolves over a much longer amount of time than the twenty minutes of film, the static images document consistent outdoor conditions: cloudy summer weather. The amount of documented time is left unclear. The recurring shots from similar angles create a cyclical pattern that suggests regular (weekly, monthly, annual?) visits, although this might not reflect the actual artistic process. The repetitive, static images with minimal plant movement convey a sense of timelessness in the spatiotemporal modality. The invisibility of the performer or performers and the lack of a clear sense of when the musical sequences were recorded creates an uncanny, acousmatic effect, implying indirectly that the sounds come from (or have come from in the past) the piano pictured in the still shots on-screen.

In the semiotic modality, the piano sounds offer some associations with harp glissandi, piano-tuning intervals, and occasionally syncopated rhythms. These sounds also evoke extended technique, but overall, they are more exploratory, directed by the material preconditions of this specific piano in a specific moment or moments. Visually, the film includes several iconic relationships, such as the delamination of the lid cover, which recalls the “wing” term for a grand piano in German (Flügel) and thus adds to a sense that the instrument becomes more creature-like when placed outdoors. Piano Garden also evokes a metaphorical relation to plants (in the loose key surfaces’ resemblance to the disarray of autumn leaves) and, in its static and repetitive editing, a slow, plantlike experience of time.

By extending this temporal perspective through elemental and radical media, Piano Garden shows a piano decaying as days and even months pass in the film. As John Durham Peters has noted, humans use the sky and its movements for orientation; “sky media” are means for a sense of control over time and space.24 Time-keeping tools such as calendars and clocks, or orienting tools such as towers and compasses, use the area above the ground to map a comprehensible, human here and now. The planted piano may not be a sky medium in Peters’s sense, but it could be a case of orientation and timekeeping having moved from observation of the sky outdoors to subsidiary tools, such as clocks, which today are integrated in nearly all types of digital devices.25 In this respect, and paradoxically, the planted piano destabilizes orientation in space and time. It questions the indoor/outdoor order and offers a different relation to time, not of timekeeping but as a documentation of a slow change. Instead of the short-term passing of time normally made audible by a piece of music performed on the functioning piano, this piano confronts the audience with the indefinite, slow, and often ungraspable longue durée—not of human history but of natural processes. For a while, even for years, the piano will still look like a musical instrument but is part of a long decomposition process, which will end when the decaying wood has turned into soil. In this way, the elemental mediation of a weathered piano exposes the time stretching that occurs in musical performance (think of the length of a song versus spoken text) but in a more ecologically embedded, less linear way. While music is a means to make the passing of time audible, the planted piano connects to much longer time scales, not unlike John Cage’s Organ2/ASLSP, which has been continuously performed in Halberstadt, Germany, since 2001 and will take 639 years.26

After analyzing Piano Garden through the media modalities, our overall sense is that the planted piano shows human control loosening from its own construction. The piano’s mechanisms disintegrate and sounds controlled by conventional scales collapse, remaining in this decomposed state long enough to reveal the piano’s materiality and the unexpected sounds formed by its environment. The displaced, decaying piano also calls attention to the constant changes and unpredictability of outdoor weather that we try to control and model as best we can.27 When humans stop trying to control a piano’s physical environment, we risk entropic loss in the face of heat, cold, humidity, and other forces. The process recalls Caitlin DeSilvey’s point that when humans ask “certain buildings, objects, or landscapes to function as mnemonic devices” for cultural value, we assume the need to protect them. Piano Garden, then, confronts us with the alternative: to refrain from intervening and allow for processes of “erosion, weathering, decay, and decomposition.”28 The piano is subjected to the same slow process of decay and in-betweenness of a dead forest tree trunk. While decomposing into soil from which new plants can grow, the dead wood offers a habitat for numerous living beings, showing how deconstruction or decomposition is part of biological cycles. Even if we want to protect the piano from change, this is not the natural state of things but rather the result of human control.

Piano Drowning

Piano Drowning (ISSUE Project Room 1:30:00 to 2:30:00) documents a 2021 performance that features a commissioned piece by Welsh composer Ynyr Pritchard in performance with Xenia Pestova Bennett at Plas Bodfa, Wales. Though Annea Lockwood’s score for this work does not include instructions for a live performance (aside from playing the instrument once a month), this iteration includes a sheet music score and prepared piano objects. The piece is entitled “Boddi,” meaning “to drown or swamp.” Apart from the drowned piano on which the piece is performed, the title also refers to the controversial 1965 flooding of a rural community in Wales to create a reservoir and provide water for industry in Liverpool.29 Four artist-observers were also invited to respond to the piano, the composition, and the natural environment.30 While the performers observe some concert conventions, the long lead-up to their playing becomes just as important, as an open surface (not unlike the “silence” of John Cage’s 4′33″) on which random images, sounds, and conversations occur.

Piano Drowning transmediates a variety of possible spaces, objects, humans, and nonhuman beings in the material modality. The film zooms in and out among a meadow landscape, a grove between the meadows, and a pond within the grove. Within these environments one notices plants (e.g., meadow flowers, willows, reeds, water lilies), animals (birdsong, cows, fish), artistic material (pens, pencils, colors, paper), and technical equipment (microphones, cameras, cables, computers), as well as people standing, sitting, strolling, and chatting, with two visual artists and two musical performers. An upright piano has already been placed in the pond, close to its edge in the grove of trees. Thus, the film presents the piano as only one object in a larger ecosystem. Sound engineers and camera operators also appear in the film. One could even mention the water’s surface as a participant—not only as a mirror for objects and living beings but also as a medium of display for sunshine, wind, and rain.

The film calls attention to the sensorial modality but blocks familiar forms of perception. The first succession of shots (a rural landscape from above including a small grove, then a pond in a grove, and finally a close-up of a water lily in the pond) recalls nature-film rather than performance conventions. The editing oscillates between frequent close-ups to wide shots—for example, from the close-up of a microphone in the open piano lid with hammers exposed (1:31) to the pond with the piano placed inside (1:32:16 to 1:37:25). Thus, the piano appears simultaneously embedded and deterritorialized in a natural habitat. Even the mirroring water surface destabilizes vision—for example, by showing only the mirror image of a leg upside-down (Figure 4, 1:49), or showing reeds reflected on the motionless pond so that the line between air and water disappears (2:21). Not only is the piano mirrored in the pond, but the qualified media type of film also mirrors itself in the editing process. Camera operators (1:32) and sound engineers (1:35:26) are the first human figures to appear (Figure 5), and later a sound engineer directly meets our gaze (1:50:24). A visual focus that switches between details and wholes is accompanied by the sounds of murmuring human voices, footsteps, and remote traffic sounds, as well as the noises of cows, chickens, and waterfowl. These sounds, for instance footsteps in the grass, often proceed the sight of the action, as in a person walking through the meadow (1:37:55 to 1:38:04). Sounds and images are presented as related but remain disconnected. For instance, we see a piano mirrored in the motionless surface of the pond while we hear splashes of wading feet; we hear murmured comments about recording quality close by, and shortly afterward we see from across the pond a sound engineer stepping into the water to adjust a microphone. It takes a while to realize that disconnected nearby sounds and images shot from a distance might show the same or a similar event (1:34:32 to 1:35:26). At other times, we hear sounds and see images from different events. We hear the discussion of the musical performance while we see an artist drawing, or we see people talking while we hear a different conversation (1:48). This lag creates a temporarily acousmatic, disorienting effect, in which the source of a sound is not clear, adding to the off-kilter quality of the film. This deliberate lag also exposes the artificiality of audiovisual events in film, as they are often created for seamless effect from disparate images and sounds. Here the device is bared in a Brechtian mode of defamiliarization, calling attention to what audiences usually take for granted.

In the spatiotemporal modality, close-up shots (of usually a minute) by a fixed or only slowly moving camera encourage the viewer to switch focus and discover new, unfamiliar sights within the same frame—for instance, the veins of water lily leaves that protrude in the sunshine (1:41:29) or water pooling in the middle of another leaf, the curves of its surface tension, and a refraction of light (1:51:26). Sometimes, it is the camera lens that switches focus between different objects (e.g., 1:38:05 to 1:39:24). The constant shifts between close-up and wide-angle shots create a peculiar rhythm and an implicit sense of movement between the shots. There is no stable point of view and no clear sense of time, as the sequence of images is not always in chronological order; the piano appears sometimes with a score and sometimes without (1:41:20) with people moving or with the pond deserted, in bright sunshine, or with raindrops disturbing the pond’s mirror surface (1:47). Here even nature-film conventions unravel, as the scene is temporally unpredictable and the visual focus wanders. Together with the long waiting period between the beginning of the film and the actual piano performance, this editing style creates a discomfiting experience of time, as viewers may impatiently expect the piano to make sounds and begin to wonder if it will ever happen at all.

In the semiotic modality, the first part of the film foregrounds the detailed iconicity of images, particularly in the close-ups. The way hearing precedes vision foregrounds the indexical quality of sounds and their mysterious, acousmatic potential. Less stress is on conventional signs as the film subtly destabilizes perception and orientation. Even the performance of “Boddi” is embedded in close observance of nature, as the camera zooms in on rings on the water (1:57:50), before we see, one after the other, the boots, legs, and rest of the performers’ bodies. The performers are clothed not in concert dress but in fishing pants and athletic wear. They wade to the piano and take position in front of the keyboard and at the back of the piano, with hands in the open lid: they stand there, motionless and silent for around a minute. They play, or rather manipulate, the piano not only with their hands but also with a bicycle tube, a megaphone, a comb, and a mallet.

While the camera and the sound of the recording are now synchronized, the performance artificially disconnects piano-playing conventions. When the performance starts, however, audio and video need to be synched. The performance itself keeps the film’s disjunction present in other ways. In the typical treatment of a piano, the manipulated keys and strings are mechanically connected. In this case, their sounds are split from each other. We see one pair of hands moving on the keyboard and hear the wooden mechanism; we also hear another pair of hands strumming the strings with a comb. The hand movements on the keyboard are conventional as patterns for scales and chords, with low, rhythmic repetitions not unlike the Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues style played in Piano Burning. In another sense the performance recalls extended-technique piano performance, as the musicians stroke the keys toward the body, hammer with flat hands and later with fists and arms, or play the piano’s internal wires and wooden parts. The camera documents the performers’ movements, zooms in to show hands on the keyboard (according to the conventions of filmed performance) but also zooms out into the landscape (2:03) and below the water surface via a muddy underwater shot (2:09).

The film defamiliarizes the piano’s sounds in several ways. The performance starts with the piano’s hammer mechanism sounding separately from the copper wires, each treated by a different pair of hands. These string sounds are not what one would expect from a piano, although the strumming of the highest wires (around 2:03) sounds nearly as if the keys were pressed. The reason for the muted sound, which one first might think is the result of the piano placed in water, is later revealed as a bicycle tube. When it is removed, the first, musical sounds of a rousing folksong melody create a bit of a shock (2:04:32). Even in this case, conventional piano sounds occur via isolated piano mechanisms—the sound of wooden keys clicking, or the wires strummed and hammered, the pegs struck producing bell-like overtones, or the wooden surfaces resonating with a howling sound. With this variety of unexpected sounds, the piano takes on an almost feral quality. The performers continue to play the instrument in different ways, alternating sounding and muffled keys via the keyboard and the internal wires. As an electronically amplified body made of wood, the piano gains a human voice when the second performer (the composer, Ynyr Pritchard) screams sentences in Welsh through a megaphone into the piano, which is “answered” by the instrument with the feedback loop when the megaphone is held behind the soundboard.

The performers play for 18 minutes; their motionless standing at the beginning and the end (and to mark a second part in the piece) recalls conventions of marking a performance space and time. However, there is no applause or sound of the audience leaving; the performance simply merges into the surrounding soundscape. Distant traffic and machines, birdsong, humming insects, cries of waterfowl (2:26), and cows are part of the soundscape again, together with images of the piano from different perspectives mirroring the pond. The last shot, of nearly three minutes, shows the piano in receding light (it might be evening). Its motionless quiet draws attention to the sounds of traffic, birdsong, occasional footsteps, and an airplane until the fade-out (2:30), but the soundscape of traffic and birds continues to sound during the end credits.

In the semiotic modality of the performance itself, Piano Drowning foregrounds the indexical relation of sounding objects and materials, with occasional iconic or associative aspects, such as the cotton-mill pattern, the sudden melody, and rhythmically struck octaves recalling the sound of bells. At the same time, despite including elements that the audience might recognize, the work defamiliarizes established conventions. Though the performative space and time are carefully set by the motionless standing of the performers at the beginning and the end, what is seen and heard in between is disconnected and complex. The aggressive performativity of the piece may relate to the “Boddi” drowning of the village, which Welsh listeners would associate with the music’s title, especially as Tryweryn was one of the last Welsh-speaking communities in the country at the time.31 This history also complicates the pastoral scene of this Piano Drowning iteration, as the act of flooding a town may create a beautiful, watery landscape, but in its cost to human and nonhuman communities for the sake of industrial production far away, the act takes on a sinister quality.

If this performance were to take place in a concert hall, its prepared (as in the bicycle tube), “inside,” and extended-technique aspects might be expected in a twentieth-century or contemporary program. But outdoors in a pond, in a performance with no set starting time, even the performers’ use of sheet music becomes defamiliarized. The film’s oscillating near–far dynamic, combined with the contrast of familiar and strange sounds, creates a constantly shifting perception. Objects appear upside down or inside out, but in an interconnected way. Viewers can appreciate and connect with the unfamiliar not as a disruption but as an extension of what sounding materials can mean. The piano itself becomes an unstable element in a larger ecosystem, with implicit references to historical and environmental loss. Thus, the drowned piano in the pond, the performance of “Boddi,” and the film’s documentation enact a complex interplay of different parts, senses, and actors that we usually perceive as a whole, such as “a piano,” “a musical performance” and even “nature” and “culture,” by disconnecting, zooming in and out, creating audiovisual lag, and baring a relational network that we usually ignore.

On the elemental-media level, when John Durham Peters explores water as a medium, he approaches oceans as environments for cetaceans—mammals adapted to a life underwater that inverts all the conditions of land-living creatures. Water creates a sonar environment with altered sense ratios, where sound travels faster than sight and where sound, not sight, is the sense that connects and orients across distance.32 Liquid environments invert inside and outside, sight and sound, organs and the senses, above and below, ground and fluidity, and thus also highlight how human bodies, perception, thinking, craft, and media all are shaped by adaptation to earthly environments.

Piano Drowning conveys some of the destabilizing potential of water as an element and its capacity to transgress boundaries. The pond is not a natural habitat for the piano, just as a piano placed in the garden and submitted to weather becomes endangered and fragile. In the context of “Boddi,” this displacement also signals the loss of human culture—not in a positive, posthumanist way but in a traumatic historical sense. This semiotic addition also highlights the potential for life-threatening floods in a time of global heating. Like the piano pushed into the street during a California landslide or the pianos flooded or crushed in Appalachian homes during Hurricane Helene, more and more human cultural materials will likely be drowned (and not by choice) in the near future.

At the same time, Piano Drowning offers a new, upside down perspective through the medium of water that mirrors, inverts, and opens up the environment. Reflective tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar makes itself noticeable when we engage with the drowned piano, be it by performance or filmic documentation. The water’s surface makes wind and rain visually perceptible, but it is a surface that, contrary to human-made surfaces, mirrors while also being penetrable. Water physically connects piano, plants, and beings; its surface is not only self-reflective but opens up; it can be entered, passed through (similar to the meadow) as an interface between habitats above and below. In Gaston Bachelard’s terms, water has a different reflective quality than that of a human-made mirror: “Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter.”33 In a poetic sense, water also transforms at the elemental level: it is “an invitation to die . . . a special death that allows us to return to one of the elementary material refuges.”34

The drowned and decomposing piano is no longer primarily a sounding object but first of all becomes an image (both literal and poetic). This image is mirrored and deepened by the water as an element in which various meanings can be imagined and elemental transformation can eventually occur. When the piano in the ISSUE Project Room film sounds, it needs human intervention, amplification, and even distortion. The film documentation picks up the audiovisual-disjunction characteristic of life underwater; this “microscopically small lag time” in fact only extends the slight delay between speech and hearing that occurs on the ground too, “but our senses are too dull to notice.”35 This delay becomes more obvious as the film editing estranges our normal ability to create cohesion out of different visual and auditory events. The water’s surface thus also mirrors the self-reflexive character of film and the physical conditions humans usually depend on to connect with their environments. The piano in the pond creates a new perspective, defamiliarizing and fluid, as frames leak into each other and as meanings waver.

As in the other Lockwood films discussed here, Piano Drowning destabilizes musical conventions in favor of a more ecologically embedded approach to the piano. Our three-part analysis has traced the ways in which transplanted instruments invite an embodied response not only to music but also to the larger environment, as is doubly mediated in film. Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants treat each instrument as a defamiliarizing presence, revealing elemental and radical elements of mediation that are not about communicating a message but about connectivity and response to the environment. Fire, air, and water expose materials and structures in the background. In return, the instruments make visible our related materiality formed by the elements that we usually encounter either as domesticated tools or as unleashed, violent forces. The peculiar combination of instruments and elements invites an ambiguous form of perception. We might identify with the threatened piano, but really we engage with the environment more as fire does: in constant need of fuel and oxygen, in each of our cells as well as in the larger world.

In addition, Annea Lockwood’s Piano Transplants radically destabilize the expected human position of being in control. While classical music is especially dependent on intricate instruments and skilled musicians, these performances ask what happens when we get out of control, discover new interplay between human-made material and nonhuman actants, and take a step to the side and listen. This helps audiences inhabit the posthumanist perspective, permitting them to move toward a more entangled way of looking at the world—and to a deeper awareness of the elemental climate changes that will inevitably affect cultural materials. The kind of embodied experience offered by Piano Transplants is not an easily decoded message but a shift that occurs slowly, by engaging with these artworks over time.