space

What if music were not only a language, but the language? What if communication did not take place exclusively through sound, but through a woven field of collective actions, movements, and gestures? What bodily function could vision perform that would be equivalent to what the human voice is for hearing? Could we pronounce colors, or articulate forms directly into space?

Historically, the zairja can be understood as the first counting machine: a mandalic decision computer, an anti-calculator whose purpose was not to clarify thought but to disorganize it productively. Rather than resolving ambiguity, the zairja amplifies it. It operates as a combinatorial device that forces concepts to collide until latent forms emerge. In this sense, it functions less like a logical engine and more like a dream machine. In the present work, this logic is translated into a musical and performative system. Paradoxically, the system enables musicians to interact within an unmeasured rhythm, where time is no longer segmented into units but proliferates into an infinite set of temporal points. Time ceases to be metric and becomes topological. The piece derives from an earlier work titled wirklichkeit beschleuniger dispergierers. Here, the system establishes a repertoire of actions together with conditions of connection between performers. These conditions do not prescribe outcomes; instead, they enable the emergence of complex and unstable textures. Structure is not imposed from above but arises from the constraints themselves. For this specific case, the spatial parameter of the game was adapted to the installation by Sebastián Roque at Movil.cheLA. The ensemble is composed of students from the Music Degree program at UNTREF together with invited musicians. Approximate duration: 40 minutes.

concepts

At its core, the project aligns with what can be described as a calculus of metalepsis: an attempt to think relations themselves as a form of cognition. Metalepsis aims at “unlimited predication,” not in the encyclopedic sense, but as a private generative machine that allows relations between heterogeneous elements to become operative. Relating becomes thinking. The zairja belongs to this lineage. Described by Ibn Khaldun and possibly influencing or influenced by Ramon Llull, the zairja was designed to confuse rather than to explain. Its diagrams cross-pollinated ideas until their internal forms became perceptible. What emerged was not clarity, but agudeza: a distilled animus. Despite its esoteric aura, the underlying principle is entirely compatible with contemporary science. In stochastic resonance, weak signals become detectable only in the presence of noise. Noise is not an obstacle but a condition of perception. The zairja operates precisely in this regime: it produces a structured white noise that amplifies otherwise imperceptible relations. This implies a specific geometry. Two positions are separated by a barrier that prevents direct communication; perception is rerouted through delay, displacement, or indirection. This configuration can be formalized as the Pyramus–Thisbe operator: a relational pair whose separation generates meaning. Narrative couples such as Romeo and Juliet, Narcissus and Echo, or Cyrano and Roxane all instantiate this structure. The delay ∂ is not a defect but the productive insertion of negation at the level of production. A third position, remote from the pair, enables the system to function. This “elsewhere” is where stochastic resonance becomes operative. In Lacanian terms, this is the site where truth oscillates between signal and noise, where the Symbolic reveals itself as already material. This logic reappears in automated zairjas such as Jonathan Swift’s fictional machine, Daniel Libeskind’s writing machine for the 1986 Venice Biennale, and Lacan’s own schema of the four discourses. Each is a matrix governed by rotation, inversion, and a Möbius topology, where truth occupies both the first and last position. Cinema provides a particularly lucid example. In Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, the cellar key functions as a “key that is a key”: a master signifier that reorganizes the entire symbolic field by reversing its own predicate. The key falls from the keyring, literally exiting its place in the chain, creating a resonant chamber in which meaning reorganizes itself. The kiss that is not a kiss but really is a kiss, the tryst that is true but used as an alibi: these are metaleptic operations. The hearth, the flame, the cellar, the cave: all converge into a topology where the “woman who does not exist” (in Lacan’s sense of the not-all) becomes the operator of escape. The Cyclops is defeated not by force but by a name that negates itself. Identity passes through negation to become operative. Within this framework, music can be imagined as askesis: a practice of exposure and escape, of dwelling and un-homing (Unheimlich). The performer navigates a field where voice, gaze, space, and delay are equivalent operators. The diagram is not a representation but a machine for producing relations. Zairjas are still being built today—by artists, writers, architects, and accidental configurations. Their secrecy is self-maintaining. Like Poe’s purloined letter, they hide in plain sight. Their power lies in their obscurity. The Zairja it could be thought as an exo-instrument that invents its own emergency and its own cognition.

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