Black Page 16

Description of work

'Using paper and sound because the three marks punctuating the Black Page are the waveforms of the sounds of the words 'Alas, poor Yorick', as spoken by the composer. These words were chosen as it has been known for publishers to entirely ignore the existence of the Black Page, with nothing apart from these words - taken from the end of page 72.
Here the BLACKNESS surrounding these marks represents the silence surrounding the utterance of these words. However, on closer inspection, one can see small anomalies on the marks and the Black Page reminding us that noise (visual and acoustic) is ubiquitous : there is no such thing as silence.
Interestingly this visual-acoustic language reveals, with some clarity, more than the construction of these words through time : the intense white section at the end of the first mark is the super-sibilant white noise of the 's' from the end of 'alas'; the roundness of the second mark ('poor') gives us a hint as to the composer's origins (North Riding of Yorkshire); and the final, disjointed blip - short, sharp, percussive - is the 'ck' from 'Yorick'.