Chaos — the grand choreography of what we call a city.

On Animated_Landscape, Ilagan situates his experience of a complex system of chaos in Manila, the city where he lives — cars, combustion, weather, politics and people. Ilagan’s sonic experience of chaos is mostly represented by transportation, by commuting, on how he navigates the urban landscape, a bodily experience assaulting the senses. Ilagan being a sound artist restructures this sonic experience into a set of graphical notations, finding his own rhythm in this seemingly impossible systems. By seeing sound as graphical notations, sound became an abstraction, a visual representation of sound. In this transformation of sound to visual, Ilagan is proposing a visual field journal, a rigorous account of what it means to live in a city like Manila. There is no romance in this, the senses overwhelmed with combobulated tones and notations of violent punches ringing back and forth are like deathless machines scrambling to finish its task. Comparable to Ilagan’s experience is the articulation of Manila in Miguel Syjuco’s Illustrado (2008) —

“You can’t bring an unwritten place to life without losing something substantial. Manila is the cradle, the graveyard, the memory. The Mecca, the Cathedral, the bordello. The shopping mall, the urinal, the discotheque. I’m hardly speaking in metaphor. It’s the most impermeable of cities. How does one convey all that?”

In Ilagan’s observations, the sonic component is what’s composed of this city. That the Manila he knew is obscured by sonic improbabilities. Sound when composed creates a rhythm. Cities when regulated with policies creates organization. Both the city and the sound can be composed, to create harmony or to attack the senses. It is Ilagan’s proposition to illustrate a world in chaos in notational abstractions. In this seemingly more disconnected world that we live in, we are confused with equating progress with chaos, convenience with advancement. There is no stopping how we operate in this capitalist world. The modern world is designed to create capital, to endlessly squander its resources and collectively change its climate. We are not in the brink of collapse, we are already in the middle of it. In Ilagan’s means to create this exhibition is a soft proposition — on how we can imagine to compose a better world for us, that we may realize that the ecological notations should be rearranged and performed accordingly in order to survive and live a life that resembles a utopia. — D. Tumala