The Folded Map is an artistic research project exploring Renaissance polyphony as a way of thinking about the world. It traces connections between musical notation, visual perspective, cartography, and early scientific models of reality, asking how systems of representation shape what can be known, imagined, and performed.
The title The Folded Map draws on a premodern understanding of representation in which knowledge is not given all at once, but unfolded through processes. Complex realities are conceived as enfolded within compact forms and made accessible only through partial, rule-governed transformations. A map, when folded for convenience, does not fail at its task; rather, it renders terrain locally accessible while distorting other relations, sometimes producing unlikely neighbours in the process. Polyphonic composition itself often operates through similar elaborations, in which limited seed material is subjected to variation, transformation, and recombination. Certain procedures—especially canonic writing, musical puzzles, and other forms of encrypted composition—extend this logic: a single written object can contain the conditions for multiple musical parts, which are unfolded by rule through performance and interpretation over time. The “fold” thus names a representational condition shared by music, mapping, and early scientific models, in which coherence emerges through structured distortions.
These objectives are guided by the following research questions:
- How do notational technologies shape the music they purport to represent, and how does this reflexivity appear in adjacent domains
- How do polyphony and visual perspective negotiate problems of mimesis and distortion?
- In what ways does encrypted music—canons, puzzles, riddles—reimagine authorship?
- What musical ontologies emerge when performance engages directly with historical scripts?
The project follows these questions through a series of historical case studies and artistic experiments, moving between musical sources and neighbouring practices of representation. Rather than treating notation as a transparent instruction for recovering a finished work, Andrew works directly with the ambiguities, distortions, and divisions of agency preserved within historical scripts. Through performance and composition, these tensions become material for experiment: alternative readings can be made audible, incompatible possibilities allowed to coexist, and the apparent unity of the musical work tested against the documents through which it survives.
