Pianowork 2

Directed by Ed Atkins

Pianowork 2 is an animated recording of me playing Jürg Frey’s ‘Klavierstück 2’ at Mimic Productions in Berlin on 22 June 2023. It was a very hot, early summer’s day. Mimic created a ‘digital double’ of me, scanning my head and hands. It was the first time I’d used a computer-generated figure with my own likeness. I played the piece at an upright piano, wearing a sensor-filled Lycra onesie with a head-mounted rig holding an iPhone a short distance from my face. I tried very hard to do what Frey’s score asks. I counted the beats in the vast rests, the 468 instances of the same fourth, the precisely instructed micro-shifts of tempo. I worried about and tried to depress the keys with the correct pianissimo dynamic to follow the previous decayed chord played 40 seconds prior. This agonising pace makes for a terrific mounting of anxiety.