Past Tense

Exploring Idleness and Boredom as Compositional Strategies

What if the instrument plays itself and the performer's job is to not intervene?

Past Tense is a site-specific idle game instrument. Spatially distributed stations autonomously accumulate sound from geophones, electromagnetic pickups, radio signals, and visitor contributions. Participants may briefly intervene — unlocking processing engines, releasing short sonic gestures — before the system settles back into its autonomous flow. The composition emerges through neglect: the act of not-performing as the creative gesture.

More decisive than the work's refusal of performance is its refusal of telos. The system moves toward no goal-state and withholds no resolution. Following Leino, it is precisely this absence of aim that reveals the instrument's worldness: with no purpose to serve, the work ceases to behave as a tool and appears as a world the listener must invest with meaning rather than receive it from.

Accepted for presentation at ICMC 2026.