Oust and Spiro - works in progress

Oust is a work for flute and live electronics, inspired by a lot of research I have been reading/watching about bio-electrical signaling. While scouting things of interest pertaining to the concept of "diverse intelligence", I came across this video, and scoured different papers that might have interesting visuals to either use or inspire. I happened on this one, which described an intriguing processes in epithelial cells and had some interesting shots of signaling. However, in the end, most of the literature includes media from real-human or animal studies, neither of which I was comfortable including in an artwork of mine.

In order to make a "collective" of cells, I imagined a collection of musical corpora. This suggested the use of the Max package Data Knot. My role would be to attempt to engage in a signaling process with these corpora, but in the end, fail and be ejected from the collective. This worked on several musical levels, at times rhythmic, at times timbral, at times melodically. I built in this failure by having some of the corpora not responding to me, but to scrambled delay lines (either my delayed sound or those of other corpora). These served as a memory - or tradition that the communication relied on but did not reflect what was actually happening, only on a jumbled version of the past.

Spiro was based on the idea I had for Alive for trumpet and live video. For both I use the Tölvera package, but this time, I learned enough shader language (glsl, jxs) in order to run the visuals first through voronoi lines. (Some of these already exist in Jitter, but are very computationally expensive). The idea (which didn't 100% work in the first taping of the video) is to show a few cells growing, and then form into a Tölvera "Vera" or "Creature". This still needs quite some work. But I am happy so far with the basics. Sonically, I try to keep feedback from overwhelming the soundscape so that my breath noise can be heard, as that is one thing that stimulated the growth of the entity. I think that works fairly well but I still have issues of timing, that is, to sustain the interest in this simple set-up over a 10-11 minute piece. In general, I think more silence is needed and I hope to reflect that in the visuals in the future.

More details to come, when I have to opportunity to develop these works!