Sonic Matrix: Silence, Noise, and the Typescript
Caitlin Woolsey
2025

Published in
Raffaella della Olga: Typescripts
Clark Art Institute
Williamstown, Massachusetts
2025

Using the analog medium of a manipulated typewriter to play with abstraction and the grid, Raffaella della Olga insists: “The line is my raw material.” In her typewritten books, the subtle irregularities and intentional misregistrations of line, marks, and color produce an impression of staggering movement on the page—a visual vibration. These works are not about sound, but the artist’s use of the manipulated mechanical line produces a restrained yet noisy visual field.

Rosalind Krauss famously described the grid in modern art as “the will to silence,” but della Olga’s process is anything but silent. The artist’s heightened control of her tools is belied by the cacophonous symphony of the creative process: the whine of the Dremel tool she uses to chisel off or modify the typewriter symbols, the boisterous lunge of the typewriter carriage as it slams on its return, the assertive clacking and thwacking of keys. These sounds are absent from the finished work. Yet the resulting typewritten pages appear to vibrate, making audible the noisiness of the circulating, unruly mark. Rather than a will to silence, della Olga’s grids document a different impulse—the desire to forge an alternative syntax of touch, of listening.

Crafting her typewritten books using the most basic forms of notation—the impression, the mark, the line—della Olga forces the act of inscription out of communication and into the register of feeling. In this regard, her books build on the lineage of visual or concrete poetry and typewriter art that proliferated in the decades following the Second World War, as poets, visual artists, and composers alike sought to dismantle and reconstitute the visual and linguistic grid. For these artists, “language is no longer a code to think, a code to communicate,” poet Pierre Garnier asserted, “but material that we animate.”

Indeed, typescript practitioners from Bob Cobbing to bpNichol and Carl Andre sought to extort the typewriter’s “control of verticals and horizontals,” in the words of visual poet Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), to produce “kinetic transformations.” This process both leaned into and worked against the grain of the supposed automaticity of the typewriter. Della Olga’s unique books are rife with these kinetic transformations, and her manipulations of the typewriter produce forms of spacing that conjoin and at the same time hold apart.

Della Olga’s book T32 builds on the lineage of visual and concrete poetry in its translation of the exhibition catalog for Dan Flavin’s exhibition of fluorescent light sculptures into typescript fields. Using the equal sign and a partial symbol created by abrading an existing key, della Olga “drew” a selection of installation view of these iconic light works. The intensity with which the artist typed and the repetitive hammering of the keys progressively created embossing on the backs of the sheets. Della Olga then accentuated this natural impression by rubbing the embossed marks with carbon graphite paper. Superficially, T32 appears to be sculpture by other means. But her modulation, aberration, and distortion of the typewritten line and shapes produce a visual impression of rhythm and movement on the page.

The registration of space in della Olga’s typescript works acts more like an apostrophe than a grid. In musical notation, an apostrophe denotes a pause, a breath; in linguistics, the apostrophe signals the contraction of two terms. It is this peculiar heterogeneity of spacing—cleaving together, cleaving apart—that aligns with media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s understanding of the tactility of media. McLuhan sought to dissociate media like the typewriter from physical connection, instead defining touch as a function of an interval, “an agent of distancing.” The positioning, layering, and sequencing of lines and marks in della Olga’s typewritten books generates just such an interval—an agent of touch that is temporal as well as spatial. This interval creates an effect of resonance that is not only observed with the eye but felt multisensorially within the body. In the words of McLuhan: “there is a little space between you and the object, a space which resonates. This is play, and without play there cannot be any creative activity in any field at all.”

McLuhan’s conception of the interval invokes the kind of listening that John Cage experienced during his seminal visit to an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951, where amid the absolute silence of a scientific room engineered to absorb resonance, Cage became aware of two persistent tones: his nervous system at work and his blood circulating. The quietness of della Olga’s typescripts is akin to what Cage recognized in the chamber. Beneath the spacing, graphic notation, and the surface of supposed silence, there remains a riotous, haptic field of experience.

Historically understood as a description of how music may best be written down, the word score can be traced to its origins in Old English, denoting an inscription, a mark, or a tally. This is precisely della Olga’s impulse, as made evident in her earliest typewritten works, from 2011, which dismantle the financial notation of credit ratings. In these concrete poems, she restructures the fixed meaning of lines through experimentation and iterative marks, ultimately privileging the operations of making.

From 1950 on, composers like Cage, Jani Christou, Cornelius Cardew, Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen, as well as many artists and filmmakers, including Allan Kaprow, Alison Knowles, Katalin Ladik, and Yoko Ono, experimented with how to visualize notational material for music, sound art, and performance events. Jackson Mac Low’s typewritten piece from 1961 exemplifies the multisensory, open-ended dimensions of the reimagined score. The work’s title prompts: “The text on the opposite page may be used in any way as a score for solo or group readings, musical or dramatic performances, looking, smelling, anything else &/or nothing at all”.

Della Olga’s work should also be understood in relation to networks of postwar sound and visual poets, such as Bernard Heidsieck, who assigned to the typeset page a radical new role as a form of notated score, as in his Poèmes-partitions(poem scores, 1955–65), which he insisted were not fully realized until they had been recited aloud to an audience. Or we might think of Lettrist poet François Dufrêne, whose visual poem Tombeau de Pierre Larousse (or TPL, 1954–58) is a self-described détournement—a type of critical reappropriation or hijacking—of entries from the standard French dictionary, compiled by Larousse. This poem, published in 1961 as an artist book with accompanying décollage panels by Wolf Vostell, transgresses graphic systems for organizing knowledge in favor of emphasizing the materiality of fragments—graphic, textual, tactile, and aural alike. Dufrêne and Vostell cut apart and juxtapose not only linguistic pronunciation and definition but also strips of posters torn from the streets of Paris. The resulting typewritten slivers and appropriated scraps of text and imagery undulate and skitter across the page like waves.

In della Olga’s unique book T40, typewritten on paper and tracing paper with colored carbon paper and colored ribbons, the sheets act as windows onto what comes before and after, while others are opaque. Each line is like the notation of a soprano, tenor; oboe, viola, bassoon; each of these instrumental voices may be identified and isolated but remain imbricated in the much denser web of the score. In this case, the typewritten page operates as a visual score. Rather than creating a repetitive grid, the work is based on persistent differentiation, including aberration and pause. T40, like della Olga’s creative practice overall, is not about sound. But her use of the manipulated typewritten line produces, perhaps inadvertently, a subdued but noisy visual field.

The experimental poet Henri Chopin often created typescripts, which he called dactylopoèmes. He considered these as separate from the guttural sound poems for which he was best known. In a page from his artist book Graphe-machines(2005), uppercase As appear in dizzying proliferation, typed upright and upside down, layered over one another. The decisively geometric angles of the typographic symbol, when repeated, reoriented, and layered to this extent, dissipate clear meaning in favor of an overall effect of hazy vibration. This effect is also a result of the typographic profile of the letter A, and the spacing it demands on the page. Passages of greater darkness and density emerge, as at the top and bottom, accentuated by the artist’s decision to overwrite more in those areas, whereas other sections seem to breathe, the white of the page striking through the dense lattice of letters in certain sections. A brief typewritten text appears below the As: “At the beginning / was the ‘A’ / with its reliefs / and with the musical staffs / alone / in the alphabet… / whom we / see with / a whole body!” Chopin figures a single letter as at once concrete, as an analog of the human body, and as notational, and yet ultimately the visual effect of the sheet is one of thrumming white noise, not the clarity of speech.

A similar effect vibrates in della Olga’s typewritten book T44, in which horizontal lines loosely mimic the linear progression of traditional staff notation. By using partial, impenetrable symbols, chiseled away from the standardized, legible number and letter keys, the artist articulates a set of possibilities rather than a predetermined sequence. The bolded numbers stamped across some of the pages at slightly irregular intervals only add to the impression of precision that is slightly out of phase. In this regard, her books take the graphic scores of experimental postwar artists like those of Fluxus even further toward abstraction. This aspect of her practice echoes that of her contemporaries who, like her, elude umbrella terms like visual poetry, including Ewa Partum and Katalin Ladik, who layers cut-up sewing patterns, typewritten letters and numbers, and angular and dotted lines in visual collages that also serve as enigmatic scores that she reads to perform her trilling, vocalic sound poems.

Della Olga explores vocal notation in T50, in which multicolored, rippling vertical stripes vibrate across the wide pages, each sequence replicating a bird song. This convergence of visual notation, sound, and performance underscores della Olga’s less observed connections to the performance scores of other post-1950 experimental musicians and artists like Ladik, who has often used the typewriter and the sewing machine as transposable mediators. For one performance in 2024, Ladik used a manual Singer sewing machine to produce a visual and vocal score in real time. As the needle perforated a piece of paper, threaded beneath the head of the sewing machine, Ladik simultaneously marked the paper and vocalized, creating an improvisatory sound poem, as if reading this in-situ score.

Della Olga’s activation of sound in and out of notation is nowhere more explicit than in Typewriter (for Organ) (2025), a score created by the saxophonist and composer Alexandra Grimal for the organ, an instrument that can play and sustain a multitude of notes simultaneously, as the musician works the keyboard and the foot pedals. Grimal observed that the organ may be played in a manner similar to della Olga’s manipulations of the typewriter: “there is no attempt to mask the sound, which is an integral part of the piece.” The opening bars of the score dictate only rhythm––the sound of the action, of the keys and pedals being depressed, or any combination of these gestures, but no notes. “Noise only,” Grimal dictates. Like della Olga’s use of tracing paper in T40, Grimal uses the stops on the organ as colors that may be combined in varying ways, at the performer’s discretion. Moreover, the score offers various combinations that may be freely changed, layered, and recomposed within a single measure or over longer segments. “The most interesting thing,” Grimal indicates in the score notes, “is to change the emphasis with the foot pedals by playing one note after the other on each measure repetition, in order to highlight the harmonies differently with each repetition.” A similar pattern logic of repetition and mutability resonates in a work like T50, in which the undulating ink ribbons emphasize, diminish, and extend formal lines, colors, and spacing from page to page.

In addition to warbling frequencies, T50 suggests dense streams of computer coding. But rather than the 1950s cyberneticians’ notion of feedback as a channel feeding constructive information back to the control mechanism, allowing a self-regulating system to correct itself, we might think instead of another kind of feedback: the screech of a microphone, the inadvertent delay, the disabling noise that happens when the system’s own technologies of communication are recursively trained on themselves. This is how the interval operates in della Olga’s work—as iteration, as cleaving, as vibration, as delay.

T38 is distinctive in the way that marks, lines, and full or partial geometric shapes spur across the white page like a flock of birds. Here, the artist does not merely transgress the regimented grid, but erupts it. Some of the pages recall the spiking arcs of sound-wave registration, while others suggest abstracted musical notation for a melody that has been torn asunder. In some cases, a cloud of marks fills the sheet, and it is as if we are watching static on a television screen: a visual vibration. As subtle and subdued as they may appear visually, della Olga’s works do not figure, as Krauss would have it, a will to silence. Instead, they notate an impulse to listen.