Missax 20 10 09 Mona Wales The Cure Pt 1 -
When the composition moves into its central segment, a looped 2‑second vocal sample from a 1972 soul track (“I’m feeling better now”) is granularly stretched and re‑sequenced, producing a “stuttered” effect reminiscent of time‑compression therapy in psychoacoustic research. The glitch rhythm—irregular, syncopated bursts of 8‑bit noise—functions as a metaphor for intervention, disrupting the monotony of the preceding drone.
The spoken‑word fragments are taken from a transcribed interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, filtered through a formant shifter to render them simultaneously intimate and alien. The line “the skin remembers, the code rewrites” is repeated, underscoring a central motif: the body as both a biological repository and a digital script capable of being edited.
On the evening of 20 October 2009, the London‑based experimental collective Missax premiered a striking multimedia piece titled “The Cure (Pt 1)”, a work by the enigmatic composer‑visual artist Mona Wales. Though the event was modest—held in a repurposed warehouse in Shoreditch and documented only by a handful of grainy YouTube uploads—it has since acquired a cult status among aficionados of post‑digital sound art. The piece functions simultaneously as a sonic narrative, a visual collage, and a philosophical meditation on healing, memory, and the uncanny.
This essay will examine “The Cure (Pt 1)” from three complementary angles: missax 20 10 09 mona wales the cure pt 1
By the end, the reader should grasp why “The Cure (Pt 1)” remains a seminal artifact of its moment, and how it anticipates later developments in immersive, interdisciplinary art.
| Theoretical Lens | Connection to the Piece | |------------------|--------------------------| | Phenomenology (Merleau‑Ponty) | The immersive soundscape foregrounds the corporeal perception of the body; listeners become aware of the lived body as a site of both pain and repair. | | Post‑humanism (Hayles, Braidotti) | The hybrid of organic and digital signals challenges the human‑machine binary, aligning with post‑humanist claims that identity is constituted through technological assemblages. | | Medical Humanities | By invoking medical imagery (EKG, x‑ray) while simultaneously critiquing the reductionist view of disease, the work participates in a humanistic critique of biomedicine. | | Aesthetic of the Uncanny (Freud) | The familiar (heartbeat, children’s choir) is rendered strange through glitch and distortion, eliciting an uncanny sensation that mirrors the discomfort of confronting one’s own mortality. |
The final section sees all the previous elements dissolve into a single, sustained synth pad filtered through a slow‑attack low‑pass. The pad’s harmonic content is based on a just‑intonation chord (C‑E‑G♭‑B♭), a tuning system historically associated with healing music in various cultures. The children's choir—recorded in a London primary school—provides a tonal anchor of innocence, but it is looped so slowly that the words become indecipherable, suggesting that the notion of “cure” is itself obscured. When the composition moves into its central segment,
Missax’s original staging positioned the audience in the center of the four‑speaker array, with the projection walls surrounding them on three sides. This 360° arrangement forced participants to rotate their heads, creating a sense of bodily disorientation that mirrored the thematic unease of being “operated on.”
Mona Wales herself was present onstage, silently manipulating a series of rotary knobs (a modular synth front panel) throughout the performance. The tactile act of turning knobs—visible to the audience—served as a ritualistic gesture, suggesting that healing requires manual, deliberate intervention rather than passive consumption.
The title “The Cure” invites a literal reading—an antidote to disease—but the piece resists a straightforward medical narrative. Instead, it frames cure as a processual, layered negotiation between body, technology, and memory. By the end, the reader should grasp why
Thus, “The Cure (Pt 1)” operates as a critical meditation on the limits of both medicine and technology: it celebrates their capacity to intervene, yet constantly reminds us of the irreducible mystery that persists after each attempt at repair.
Between 2008 and 2010, the art world experienced a rapid shift from web‑based practices (net.art, Flash animations) toward what critics later termed “post‑Internet”. Rather than celebrating the novelty of the medium itself, artists began to interrogate how ubiquitous connectivity reshaped perception, identity, and affect. Mona Wales, a graduate of Goldsmiths’ Fine Art program (class of 2007), entered this field with a background in both electro‑acoustic composition and digital collage.
Missax—originally a DJ collective that evolved into a curatorial platform—served as a crucible for such hybrid work. Their programming mixed club nights, sound‑installation evenings, and “micro‑festivals” that encouraged artists to blur the line between performance and exhibition. The date 20 October 2009 marked the launch of Missax’s “Cure” series, a five‑part investigation into the aesthetics of remediation, each part contributed by a different artist.