original text: Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters (1927); artwork/video composition: Ben Gerstein (2003/2010); initial digital rendering: Greg Haworth (2010); music: Gyorgy Ligeti, Lux Aeterna (1966)

Back in 2003, alone at my job in an office with a big xerox machine and some serious time to 'kill', I began exploring repeated 200% enlargements on various images, zooming further and further in to the abstractions I was finding. And to no end. Each picture held certain abstracting shapes implicit to it, setting the stage for a unique visual journey guided by the placement of the paper on the glass in position to these various forms as they came into view.
Hard to say if at some point it's just the xerox machine generating these abstractions, because every picture I tried this with produced something different. The clusters of images which come into view as the work progresses are all seemingly gathered together due to forces found within the initial xeroxed composite image. But also to be considered is how the ink is released from a toner cartridge through air, intercepted in motion by the paper, mid-flight, each time producing infinite little subtleties, inconsistencies...
So in this particular case, I chose a page from Andre Gide's novel "The Counterfeiters", and created a 162-oage booklet of this journey enlarging image into image... At the start one can even see how the ink hit the page at the edge of the letter 'b'. After a couple hours of doing this, I realized it could have gone on forever, and so, tired, almost dizzy, I ended the series by enlarging into the black. For a while afterwards I kept imagining things in front of me fractalizing in this way, as would most people I'm sure after such a process. It was quite surreal...
A couple of years later a guy by the name of Greg Haworth, who'd been working as a photocopiest for quite some time, came across my work on the web and asked if I'd sell him a copy of one of these booklets going into the 'b' of 'trombone'. I happily obliged, was grateful for his curiosity, and then we proceeded on our separate ways.
Then almost four years after that, out of the blue, I receive a letter from him, when coincidentally just the day before I had been reading this exact Gide novel again and contemplating the xerox experiments.
Greg has since uploaded a version of this video to Youtube with the following description: "The letter 'b' of trombone was created by Ben Gerstein, using a xerox copier as his Medium. His subject matter is a page from the book "The Counterfeiters" by Andre Gide. Of special significance is the word "trombones" in the text, as Ben Gerstein is himself a trombonist. With each copy, on each page, the letter evolved. The result was a stunning fractal pattern, generated by the copier itself, lasting for around 165 pages. Clever positioning of each page allows us to delve ever deeper into the pages on our journey through the letter B.
When I originally discovered Ben's work, I was just searching "xerox" on myspace. He had uploaded a video of the pages being flipped. I've worked in a copy shop for four years and I knew it would be a great book to keep on the coffee table at work, so he sent it to me.
Skip ahead I think... 2 years. I dig this thing out of the boxes from my old house. It is still a timeless piece. I wanted to breathe new life into it, so I set out on a quest to do so, scanning all the pages on a high-capacity scanner. I took all the images and went 3d. Each page became a plane, scaled to fit squarely on top of the page before. When all was set, I animated a camera to pan through each plane, and finally rendered it. Before I saw the rendered video, I had only known it as single frames. I wanted to finally visualize it as it begs to be seen.
I confess I never showed Ben or let him know what I was doing until it was all but done. And it was just serendipitous that he had been thinking about exactly this book during the same days that I was working on it. He is very excited, as am I, with how this all has ended. With his express permission I now show it to the world.
We hope you enjoy 'b' of trombone and we hope you find yourself captured by its mystery."








One of the truly random voicemails you can get as a trombonist in New York City.
Pretty hilarious I think. No idea who this was, how he got my number...

:34








A few videos going simultaneously of pianos being destroyed

"Feldman loved to challenge students' assumptions about what ideas were au courant, about which composers were radical and which were conservative. He proclaimed, for example, a love for Sibelius, who had long been derided in progressive circles as a retrograde Romantic. When I visited the small archive of Feldman papers at SUNY Buffalo, I came across an exam paper in which the composer asked his students to analyze Sibelius's Fifth Symphony alongside Webern's Concerto Opus 24" — Alex Ross, New Yorker Magazine

It dawned on me how on a lot of the old jazz records, alternate takes were often about the same length. Revisiting some of these albums after many years and listening to them with these tracks superimposed offered an exciting new insight into the sound of this music, perspectives on autonomy and indeterminacy very relevant in improvisation, and a joyous expansion on these musicians' sounds and song, multiplying aspects of this aural history into an abstracted afterlife of collage. So simple and so affecting! I am grateful to be able to share this...