New tools same concept

‘Walk Away or Jump’ – 55" × 55" oil on canvas (2010)

The painting above is rooted in a specific moment from 1978: a walk along a cliff path with one of Robert Rauschenberg’s assistants. During that walk, he told me he was in love with me. I remember the conversation as a turning point—not because of the words alone, but because it forced a decision. At that height, with that kind of uncertainty, the question felt immediate: step toward a completely different life or step away from it. I’ve often wondered what I turned down: a different creative path, a different level of visibility, a better life or simply a relationship that wasn’t possible.

Rauschenberg himself had a history of absorbing major events into his work. In 1969 — less than ten years before that encounter — he was invited by NASA to witness the Apollo 11 launch at Kennedy Space Center and incorporate the experience into his art. He produced the Stoned Moon lithograph series, named both for the lithographic stones used in the printing process and for the overwhelming impact of witnessing the Moon mission.

That series has continued to shape my own approach across painting, printmaking, and music. Rauschenberg showed me that images or sounds that seem unrelated can still create a coherent narrative when they are set in relation to one another. The surface may look fragmentary, even accidental—but the structure underneath is built through deliberate, complex decisions.

For that reason, it’s unreasonable to expect everyone to read this as “serious” art. I hear the same misunderstanding in my music. When people encounter fragmentation or apparent randomness, they often stop at what’s missing or disjointed, rather than recognising the underlying intention—the careful choices that connect the parts and give them weight.

New tools same concept

The photograph of my painting was taken with an old digital camera, and—through AI—has now been placed into a contemporary gallery environment. This shift in context mirrors Rauschenberg’s method of pulling images out of their original setting and dropping them into new, often contradictory environments, allowing unexpected relationships to form. By juxtaposing the painting with a digitally fabricated exhibition space, the process generates a fresh narrative that loops back into our own contemporary way of life, where images constantly migrate, detach, and reattach to new meanings.

The original painting was exhibited in a physical gallery in 2010 and later sold to a private buyer. Its reappearance in this AI-constructed setting becomes a kind of temporal collage: past and present, analogue and digital, authentic and synthetic. In true Rauschenberg fashion, the work is reactivated by its displacement—its story rewritten through the friction between environments, technologies, and eras.

So this is music?

Rediscovered analogue tapes enact a curatorial gesture: familiar material is extracted from its original context and repositioned within a contemporary technological framework. In a manner analogous to Rauschenberg’s practice of juxtaposing images to generate altered meaning, older recording media—cassette hiss, room ambience, and accidental textural by-products—can be brought into productive relation with the procedural regularities of modern DAW workflows.

Through the recontextualisation of analogue fragments within digital production environments, new interpretive relationships are made legible. The productive value of temporal friction lies in its capacity to unsettle fixed aesthetic categories. Tape-related warmth, for instance, may be set against the clean homogeny of plugin-generated processes; the resulting collision expands the field of possible composition. From this perspective, the search for a new narrative functions not merely as an outcome but as a method. Rediscovery through juxtaposition—analogue alongside digital, imperfection alongside control—enables sound to be reactivated and reinterpreted within contemporary listening cultures.