Live sound performance
5.21.2025
SRST, Providence
I invited stones collected from Narragansett
to collaborate with me and try to talk/listen to them.
(better with your headphones:)
5.21.2025
SRST, Providence
I invited stones collected from Narragansett
to collaborate with me and try to talk/listen to them.
(better with your headphones:)
An improvisation, closely effected by the body’s emotion. Every vibrance from the throat and the knocking force, is a direct reaction that I am feeling at the moment. Controlling or being controlled is shifting like a pendulum, as I could not fully decide how the programming machine is triggering the rhythm, just because there are no two same breaths coming out from my throat. The subtleness of human body function is just the same as programming language, between 1 and 0, there is a whole universe. I realize I have to remove my eyesight, my attention from the stones to the laptop screen. All these are happening and interfacing with each other at one time, at the same level.
In the first part of the live audiovision performance, inspired by Pauline Oliveros’s “deep listening”, I used a handheld microphone to input a deep humming-like voice from my throat into Ableton Live, and output it as the result of a human calling for a distant stone. Facing directly to the stones on the table, touching them while holding the microphone, adjusting the settings on the music programming platform, this calling is also an unstable imagination of stone’s sound. Through using the microscope camera, the vision in this part was showing the delicate fissures, patterns and textures captured on these stones.
The second part was composed by a stone-knocking movement and a video shot from first-person perspective. Also using Ableton Live, sound in this part depended on every knocking via using several pieces of stones. Sitting in front of a screen, which showed a shaky video that displayed my finding of an abandoned site called Black Point Ruins in Narragansett, RI, I was the conduct of myself, more than that, the stone is guiding both of us. This improvised rhythm is the result of a mixed force of my hands, as well as the shape and material of the stones.
click the sketch to see more