the music already has a shape. this makes it visible.
participants stand between a bank of lights and a backlit surface, and their silhouettes become the image. the audience is not watching the piece — it is the piece.
the move: light, not pixels
nothing here is rendered — not one shadow on that surface was computed. it moves the lamp, and lets physics do the rest.
four fixtures sit behind the audience, each carrying five individually controllable bulbs. audio triggers random combinations of them in real time, which shifts where the light is coming from. as the source moves, every shadow in the room stretches, swings and splits.
color and intensity respond to frequency and amplitude on top of that. the shape of the music arrives as the shape of the light.
indoors, on a wall big enough to hold the whole thing, it looks like this.
she is standing there shifting her weight a little, and the shadow is doing all of that on its own.
a person in the light is never completely still, and a moving shadow reads as a moving person. so put something in front of it that cannot move at all.
everything happening on that wall is the light source travelling, and the wood is the control that proves it.
the two clips are the same rig on two different days. the plank blocks light and the glass carries it through, and the music is electronic in one and slow in the other — the results have nothing in common except the method, which is the point. the crossing rectangles in the first one were not designed and I did not expect them. a fixed rule and a moving source produce things you would not have thought to draw.
the physics had to be done first
letting physics do the rest is not the same as leaving it alone. how far the fixtures sit behind a person, and how far that person stands from the surface, decide how tall the shadow comes out and how far it travels when the source shifts. I read up on it and worked the distances out roughly before anything was built — enough to know what a given standing position would throw.
nobody is operating this
live audiovisual performance system, the year before, was built to be played — a tablet, patterns to switch between, sliders in someone's hands through a whole set. this takes one function out of it and removes the hands.
so the variation a person was supplying has to come from somewhere else. that is why the combinations are drawn in real time rather than cycled: random draws from twenty bulbs reach states no operator would have thought to ask for, and no two minutes are the same.
what people did with it
two children stayed in front of it for a while, working out how to move together and then showing each other what worked.
nothing in the piece asks for that. it is the part I could not have designed, and the clearest sign it was doing its job: they were not looking at the installation, they were looking at what they could make with it.
the signal path
the music plays from the computer and a Scarlett 2i2 loops it straight back in, so what
gets analysed is the track itself rather than the room — at a level the speaker volume
cannot change. Processing reads it with Minim and sends the result out over DMX to
the fixtures. that is the whole of it: from the track to the bulbs, with nothing in between
that waits for a person.
shown at
Illumination NYC 2024 — Battery Park, New York City.