Woods (2017)
Woods is developed in collaboration with movement, and everything else, artist Andrew Braddock. We use three projectors each with a live camera feed, a cello, a microphone, and a TV that reacts to sound. It is an investigation into the amplification of posture and sound using light. It is an investigation into understanding relationships between people and their environments as feedback and noise.
We instigate noise fields with our bodies and with instruments and with light. Within the field, the relational dynamics of light, sound, and body form an ecology that exceeds our input. It is unclear where a concrete relationship begins and a projected one ends. Is the light responding to the sound? Is the sound responding to the light? Are the performers responding to each other or to light or to the ambient noise floor? How do minute changes in posture and gesture affect the greater field and how does this modulate our understanding of them? I see a noise field as the raw material for the formation of meaning. The field encompasses both intentional dynamics as well as aleatory interactions between the elements and the environment. As performers, the main directive is to propagate the field, allowing the formation of meaning to occur in flux. The first modality, Flam, the physical directive is to focus on an alternating pattern of left-right, right-left, with sound and with movement. My score is for a hierarchy of attention. My first focus is tapping alternating flams with my hands in my lap. An utterly simple task with infinite complexity of articulation within the space between the primary and secondary transient. My second point of attention is on Andrew’s movement. Are our actions in relationship? If so, how? We notice one another, and notice how our attention to one another affects our individual attention to self. Thirdly we come into attention to the larger field of light and ambient sound and how we are affecting it and how it is affecting us. In attempting to hold these tiers of focus, I am functioning at the limits of my own ability. My posture inevitably shifts downwards as my lumbar support weakens over time, allowing more light from the projectors to reach the reactive surfaces of the wall and Andy’s body, and triggering a visually dynamic change. The same thing happens as my breath becomes heavier, my inhales and echoes are amplified into light. A change in posture like this, or an effortful exhalation occurring in daily life usually registers subconscious as information about a persons state, i.e. this person is tired, or this person is weak, or this person is beaten down. My favorite part of this piece is how it upends these subconscious assumptions and turns what would ordinarily be read as a sign of weakness into a thing of beauty, a kind of Jodorowsky-esqe psycho-magical inversion of body shame. More broadly, it creates an environment where nearly imperceptible changes in conditions have dynamic ramifications in light. The second modality in the video documentation is a piece of threshold music with site specific interaction. The cello score is the creation of tones whose envelopes open within the ambient noise floor of the space, (the hum of the projectors, rustling plastic in a window, and the elevated train which runs overhead) and close with wide amplitudes that excite the acoustic of the room. Each an invitation to listen more deeply to its surrounding silence. In order to generate the sound reactive light, a high gain audio signal is sent from a cardio microphone to the composite video input on an analog television. The frequency of the audio signal interferes with the grounded televisions frequency of 60hz and creates banding patterns derived from the resulting ratio. |
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