Sound-Space | Exhibition-Space

When John Cage described "total sound-space" in 1957, he was articulating something radical: the position of a sound is determined not by a single parameter but by multiple determinants simultaneously — frequency, amplitude, timbre, duration, morphology. Sound exists in a multidimensional perceptual field where "any sound at any point in this total sound-space can move to become a sound at any other point." The implications went far beyond music. Cage was proposing that we think in terms of spaces of possibility rather than linear sequences, in terms of fields rather than paths.

Nonterritorial operates in an analogous exhibition space—not the physical spaces where exhibitions manifest, but the multidimensional possibility-space in which exhibitions circulate.

An exhibition's position in this space is determined by multiple determinants simultaneously: artistic voice, curatorial framing, duration parameters, spatial requirements, atmospheric qualities, audience relations, temporal context.

Just as Cage insisted that sound should not be reduced to pitch alone, we insist that exhibitions cannot be reduced to content alone.

The traditional art circuit operates as if exhibitions exist in a one-dimensional space — a linear sequence of prestigious venues where circulation means moving from point A to point B along a predetermined hierarchy. Nonterritorial poses a field topology: exhibitions exist in a space of relations where position is multidimensional, where simultaneous deployment in Tokyo and Lagos and Vilnius does not mean the same thing appearing in multiple locations but the same identity instantiating differently across a distributed field.

This is why the Generative Exhibitions framework is not metaphorical but structural. An exhibition maintaining consistent identity while never manifesting identically is only comprehensible if we understand it as occupying a position in this multidimensional exhibition-space—a position defined by multiple invariant parameters (the "sound" remains the same) while other parameters vary with each instantiation (the "performance" differs).

The bar in Vilnius and the university in São Paulo are not lesser versions of some ideal museum presentation. They are different points in the field, different actualizations of the same position in exhibition-space, each generating its own atmospheric weather, each relating differently to its specific bodies-present-in-space.

Cage wrote: "musical action or existence can occur at any point or along any line or curve... in total sound-space." Similarly: cultural action or existence can occur at any point in total exhibition-space.

The limits are determined not by institutional hierarchy or market position but by the conditions for encounter itself — an image, a space, bodies willing to attend. Once we accept this field topology, the question is no longer where an exhibition should circulate (which institutions are important enough) but how it circulates through the field, what relations it generates, what atmospheric transformations it enables. The field is open. The limits are audience-determined only.