From 2000 until 2007 I worked on a series of performances and installations called Synaesthetic Objects. Originally developed for the 2000 Lincoln Center Festival, this body of work flourished through collaborations with video artists (Mark McNamara), musicians (ETHEL), and choreographers (Christina Towle, Beliz Demircioglu) through multiple iterations. The conceit of these pieces was to create an audiovisual experience where a simple intermediary algorithm was employed to translate sound into image, or vice versa, in an engaging and direct manner.

Soundscape Navigator, the first of the series, was developed as a piece with Mark McNamara. The work allowed for the participatory performance of looped sonograms in an installation context. The user was presented with a joystick and four buttons by which s/he could ‘scrub’ sonograms in two dimensions, changing their speed and pitch independently. A performance version, developed during a residency at STEIM in 2000 with choreographer Christina Towle, translated the system as an audio-visual backdrop for camera-tracked dance.

Further live performance versions of the work explored the use of generative video as an amplification scheme for media performance. In 2004, a second iteration (called Birds) was developed with New York-based string quartet ETHEL during a residency at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. This version visualized the string quartet as a flock of origami-like shapes that could fold and spiral around one another in response to the spectral input and rhythms of the players, and was used as a visual avatar- like presence for their performance repertoire during the residency.

In 2005-6, a second dance-related iteration of the work was created with Turkish choreographer Beliz Demircioglu, developed as a project for the NIME conference in Vancouver, Canada and a modern dance festival in Pisa, Italy. Polar used a vertically mounted camera to visually embellish and sonify the actions of a solo performer on a large turntable; drawing from mandala, circular schematizations of Western harmony (e.g. the cycle of 5ths), and Wheel of Fortune, the performance enabled a solo dancer to generate a wide array of audiovisual material.

As a solo performer, I’ve been using a laptop version of the software (Coltrane), which uses OpenGL computer graphics to create complex, generative shapes based on acoustic and musical analyses of John Coltrane’s 1966 masterpiece, Ascension. The work creates figurative, abstract, constantly shifting geometries that are then re-scanned to create a direct acoustic result. What you see and hear has the energy and improvisational complexity of the source material, translated into an ever-shifting virtual architecture with an accompanying musical drone.

Birds

U.S. Patent #20080314228