Nate Boyce

, 2024
HD digital animation, sound
Duration: 8 min, 46 sec

 by New York based artist and musician Nate Boyce.

Projected on a scrim in the center of the gallery on a never ending loop, 

 cycles every eight and a half minutes. The output of a generative animation system produced by Boyce, the film intercuts rotoscoped 1930s era cartoons, sketched outlines of a performance by Glenn Gould of Anton Webern’s 

, and hand-drawn lines of poetry by Webern’s muse, Georg Trakl.

Taking the work of avant-garde composer Anton Webern a leading point, 

 considers themes of connoisseurship, mass culture, decadence, and questions of cultural decline. Arnold Schoenberg’s protégé, Anton Webern was one of the foremost pioneers in the use of atonal techniques in music. Dissonanceis one of 

 central motifs. The film’s principal “actor”, Glenn Gould, can be heard in moments humming over his own performance of Webern’s pointillist twelve tone score. The film’s animated segments, produced for advertisements or as entertainment for children, improvise arbitrary connections, and imagine an alternate history where they might have ironically constituted some kind of anachronistic music video for Webern’s composition.

Gould’s performance stops and starts abruptly throughout the course of the film, and in moments lines by Georg Trakl scratch across the screen like concrete poetry or graffiti. A Romantic elegist for the violence of the early twentieth century, Trakl himself appears as a secondary tragic actor in the film, whose words appear in abrupt moments of silence that interrupt the flow of the film as a whole.

Many of the same idiosyncratic animation techniques used by Boyce in the production of

were used in his work for a myriad of different pop cultural figures. His work was used extensively by Travis Scott for a series of performances culminating in a monumental concert in front of 70,000 people at the Circus Maximus in Rome.

Nate Boyce (b. 1982, Kansas City, MO) lives and works in New York, NY. Boyce has also held solo exhibitions at Galerie Pepe, Mexico City, Mexico; TG, Nottingham, United Kingdom; Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA; and Kunstverein München, Munich, Germany among others.The artist’s work has been included in exhibitions at numerous venues, including Sadie Coles, London, United Kingdom; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China; Deitch Projects, New York, NY; and CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco, CA among others. Boyce is one half of Pedagogy alongside Eli Keszler. He has also been a longstanding audiovisual collaborator with Oneohtrix Point Never, with whom he has performed at venues such as the Sydney Opera House, Sydney, Australia; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. Boyce has also performed alongside electronic music duo Matmos. The artist’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Boyce received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006.