Alejandro Campos

Fuga a tientas —  Imperfections

Alejandro Campos on notions of  playfulness

Blend those Colours!

Brush that Music!

Fuga a tientas

“to allow… even to desire that, after that earliest point where the pen touches the 
paper, something unfathomed emerges, something unexpected”

One of Erik Satie’s infrequent excursions into chamber music, the *Fugue à tâtons* (1913) is 
contemporary to his humorous piano compositions, and created in a similar spirit. *Fugue à 
tâtons* is a satirical reinvention of Baroque musical forms, enhanced by Satie’s characteristic witty 
titles and performance directions. A repetitive, childlike theme, a loosely woven fugue initiated by 
the piano “with silly but convenient naïveté”, and yet a complex and significant musical piece.

Curiously, Spanish architect Enric Miralles used the title *Fuga a tientas* (the Spanish translation of 
Erik Satie’s title) in 1987, for the second volume of his doctoral dissertation, a text that was 
deemed unreadable by the thesis’ panel. Miralles’ essay narrates how sketching can be seen as a 
form of writing, a creative act that happens when thinking moves forward through interruptions, 
when it stops at its beginnings, when it is produced by repetition. 

This *Fuga a Tientas* on Verse, 2023, explores how its form of writing, namely “coding”, can 
likewise be conceived as a form of sketching, or how unexpected shapes and colours emerge 
from simple geometric operations when imperfect repetition is celebrated. The artworks are fully 
composed by horizontal lines and simple shapes travelling through imperfect flow fields, offering a 
characteristically bright and cheerful aesthetic that is homage to both Erik Satie and Enric 
Miralles’s intellectual legacies. *Fuga a Tientas* is the coming-of-age of the Enfantines (fxhash, 
2022) algorithm, still childlike but now a more sophisticated and yet imperfect exploration of form 
and counterform, sound and colour.

“…form emerges at the air of its flight, it is not pursued, nor composed, nor 
constructed…”

With two modes that won’t produce the same outputs, *Fuga a tientas* is best experienced twice. 
In music mode, the code uses Satie’s fugue as a way of taming randomness, the sounds affecting 
the colours and intensities of the triangles. This is the last stop of the journey, gazing into 
unexplored lands.

“Large de Vue”

*Fuga a tientas* is part of the group exhibition *Imperfections*.