Interviews with Mariusz Szypura

I stopped thinking of the package as a container and started thinking of it as evidence. A protective sleeve tells you nothing about how the sound was made. Here the artwork carries the trace of a physical act, the cutting of vinyl, so the object and the recording share a single origin. For a listener that reframes the format. You are not holding a wrapper around a file. You are holding a record of a process, and that, I think, is one of the few arguments physical formats still have in a streaming world: they can be the thing, not the packaging of the thing.

The waste was not chosen to make a statement about sustainability, but the methodology does open that conversation honestly. The vinyl thread left over from cutting the records was used to make nine large-format paintings, two metres by two metres each. Photographs of those paintings became the visual language of the artwork. So the byproduct of one process became the raw material of another. I think the responsibility, when you make a production process visible, is not to aestheticise the waste into something false. The traces have to remain what they are. The honesty is the point, not the decoration.

Recognition from a juried international competition matters because it places process-driven work next to more conventional packaging and treats it on equal terms. I suspect what distinguished the project was that the design could not be separated from the music: the visual language was not invented for the cover, it was produced by the same physical act that produced the records. For a jury used to illustration, photography, and typography, that is a different model. It has made me more confident in articulating that the value of this kind of design is authorship, not surface, the artwork and the recording answer to the same origin.

The unpredictability of the lathe-cut process was the most formative constraint. You cannot fully control it. Each cut behaves slightly differently, and the waste material it produces is never the same twice. As a designer trained to control outcomes, you have to give some authorship to the process itself. That changed my methodology more than any technical problem. I learned where to impose decisions and where to let the material decide, and that the inability to control everything was not a flaw to overcome but a quality to work with.

Because I work both as a composer and as a visual artist, I was inside and outside the music at once. The material did not announce itself in a single dramatic moment so much as it accumulated. While the records were being cut, the discarded thread was simply there, gathering. At some point it stopped looking like waste and started looking like the most honest possible image of what we were doing: deconstructing Chopin and keeping the remains. Seeing that from the musical side and the design side simultaneously was less a discovery than a recognition of something already present.

The project was shown as an installation in New York and Osaka, and that scope is not incidental, it is where the ideas want to live. I see future work continuing to refuse the boundary between music production and visual authorship. Sound, material, and design are not three departments collaborating. They are one practice. The direction I am moving in treats the recording, the object, and the space it is shown in as parts of a single work rather than a product and its marketing.

I would want people to carry away the sense that the object told the truth about how it was made. Across the physical formats, the listener moves through sound, touch, and concept, and none of those layers is a costume placed over the others. They are the same idea in different states. If a designer, a musician, or a listener holds this and understands that the image came from the music rather than being applied to it, that is enough. There is also a reason this matters more now than it did a few years ago. We have reached a point where a finished result generated by AI can stand next to the work of a real designer and, on the surface, compete with it. When the final image alone is no longer proof of anything, the path becomes the proof. Showing the process, documenting it over time, keeping the trace of how a thing actually came to exist, that is what separates authored work from a convincing output. This project is, among other things, an argument for keeping that path visible.

Reinterpreting Chopin through artists connected to projects as different as Portishead, Sonic Youth, and Tortoise meant the music was never going to be reverent or smooth. It was deconstruction, and the visual grammar had to match it. The material I worked with, the trace of vinyl being cut and reshaped, was itself a form of deconstruction. The sessions reinforced that the design language should not resolve into something clean. The contributions pushed the work toward keeping the seams visible, both in sound and in image.

The practical lesson is that almost every production process generates its own residue, and most fields throw it away or hide it. The model here is simply to look at that byproduct as potential visual language rather than as failure. The conceptual lesson is harder: the trace only carries meaning if it stays authentic to its origin. You cannot fabricate the residue or style it into something it is not. This connects to a larger shift designers are now facing. As generated results become harder to distinguish from authored ones, the documented process is becoming part of the work itself, not a behind-the-scenes extra. I use new tools, including AI, and I am open about it, but tools do not replace the decisions or the authorship. What they cannot reproduce is the real, traceable path a project took through time. For designers in any field, the discipline is to let the process speak in its own voice, and increasingly, to record that voice as evidence that the work was genuinely made and not merely produced.