Plastic Fugue is an interactive sound installation that examines how material hierarchies shape artistic standards and sanctioned exclusions.
It begins from the concert flute as a social object, where training, legitimacy, and access are often determined by economic conditions prior to aesthetic judgement. The same logic appears in painting, where materials circulate with a name value of brand, price index, and where standards of quality are repeatedly tied to the cost of canvas, pigment, oil, paper, or even a pencil.
In this way, art aligns easily with economic sorting, in tension with its supposed promise of liberty. Treated as a recurring pattern, value is stabilized through symbols and their restriction rather than use. Within this structure, classical music and canvas painting are positioned as default standards through repetition and institutional reinforcement.
Plastic Fugue gathers this irony across multiple mediums. In the installation, plastic instruments and interfaces do not simply represent exclusion but rehearse the formats through which it becomes ordinary. Within a neoliberal corporate grammar, plastic paintings and plastic flutes reenacted as products, plastic trophies, and cheap rococo style arcade buttons clumsily restage the structure itself, making visible how the present normalizes what is not self-evident.
Using interactivity, the work exposes these standards as mechanisms rather than neutral flows. It treats legitimacy as something produced through material, repetition, and asks how quickly aesthetic judgement becomes a postscript to conditions that were already set in advance.
It begins from the concert flute as a social object, where training, legitimacy, and access are often determined by economic conditions prior to aesthetic judgement. The same logic appears in painting, where materials circulate with a name value of brand, price index, and where standards of quality are repeatedly tied to the cost of canvas, pigment, oil, paper, or even a pencil.
In this way, art aligns easily with economic sorting, in tension with its supposed promise of liberty. Treated as a recurring pattern, value is stabilized through symbols and their restriction rather than use. Within this structure, classical music and canvas painting are positioned as default standards through repetition and institutional reinforcement.
Plastic Fugue gathers this irony across multiple mediums. In the installation, plastic instruments and interfaces do not simply represent exclusion but rehearse the formats through which it becomes ordinary. Within a neoliberal corporate grammar, plastic paintings and plastic flutes reenacted as products, plastic trophies, and cheap rococo style arcade buttons clumsily restage the structure itself, making visible how the present normalizes what is not self-evident.
Using interactivity, the work exposes these standards as mechanisms rather than neutral flows. It treats legitimacy as something produced through material, repetition, and asks how quickly aesthetic judgement becomes a postscript to conditions that were already set in advance.