μ (“mu-“)

Marina Rosenfeld is an artist, composer and musician whose work traverses disciplinary boundaries across music, performance, improvisation, video and sculpture. Since the 1990s, her practice has continually investigated the fundamental conditions of sound and music.

μ (mu) is a two-channel video and sound installation filmed at a microscopic scale on the surface of a dubplate – a medium long central to Rosenfeld’s artistic and musical production. Named after the mathematical coefficient of friction or touch, μ is exhibited on two screens, where sound and image unfold in constantly shifting juxtapositions. The work stages a meeting between a series of stylus-like objects and an elemental landscape in which sonic inscription appears to be perpetually underway. μ imagines the work of the stylus in this borderless, pigmented terrain as a kind of avatar moving through a space of quantum conditions, where the proto-social and material potentials of music overlap and collide. The sensual topography of the recording surface generates a complex tapestry of fricative, scattered sounds, deformed through the physical act of inscription. “μ immerses us in the infrastructure of sound through a hyper-magnification of its material conditions, reimagining the base matter of sound as a rich field of individual articulation and social encounter.” (Artforum, 2024)