Decomposition

Decomposition transforms minute changes occurring inside fruit into light and sound, presenting a form of life that continues its generative transformation even after being severed from the tree, branch, and root system. Fruit has long been one of the principal motifs of the Western still-life tradition, where it has, in a sense, been granted eternal life within the image. By contrast, in the East Asian Buddhist pictorial tradition of kusōzu [Nine Stages of Decay], a once-living beautiful woman dies by the roadside, decays, is consumed by small animals, and ultimately becomes bone, symbolizing both the fragility of life and its materiality. Through Decomposition, Mohri sought to bring these Eastern and Western conceptions of life and death into simultaneous view.
While based on the format of live electronics, practiced since the 1960s by predecessors such as John Cage and David Tudor that Mohri deeply respects and admires, Decomposition also uses dying organic matter as a medium of expression, and as such could perhaps be described as a “living dead electronic installation.”