When did you learn how to swim and how did it feel? In the performance Swimmers audiovisual improvisation meet memories of the first swimming strokes. Enter a floating state between calm surfaces and the deep end, between chance and a sense of community.
Swimmers is an audiovisual performance/installation in collaboration with Anna Roxenholt. The first itteration performed in Lindgrensalen at The Academy of Music and Drama, Gothenburg, February 16, 2022. The visuals where projected on translucent fabric, and the performance lasted one hour as active improvisation, followed by two hours of self-generating installation. The bulk of the work was conducted remotely, via Zoom calls and mail conversations prior to the week of performace, where we met for two days of workshops/rehearsals in person. Presented here alongside the video from the actual performance is related material such as pictures from rehersals, video examples leading up to the work, journal entries, screenshots and reflections.
Entangled?
The network includes Anna Roxenholt on saxophone, voice, percussion and her pre-recorded voice recordings entangled with my realtime generative system (modular synth and TouchDesigner). The motions in the visuals are driven from signals in the modular synthesizer. The microphones on Anna's instruments are processed by me on the modular, interconnected with Ableton Live where Anna's recordings where triggered. Via a control interface on an iPad Anna could affect parameters in both the visuals and the audio - effectively we where reaching in and out of our personal sub-networks during performance.
An entry from my audiovisual journal for the project where I explored an ambient setting with randomly generated harmony and slowly animated visual noise. A foundation for the design of the Swimmers network.
A screen recording (without sound) from the installation part of Swimmers, showing the emergent and self-organizing behaviors of the visual side of the network.
How do I relate to my practice in change, in what way is my approach transformed?
I have summarized my experience of this artistic research project with the statement "I have stopped writing music and started designing networks". A more nuanced version of this line would perhaps be something like "I have started to write music and make visual art by designing and performing with interconnected generative systems that output audiovisual pieces in real time" - this is my transformation.
I had the ambition to blur the line between the process of generating sounding material and the process of generating visual material within my practice, making it entangledly audiovisual. By making the connections the core, focusing on having the visual and sounding output grow out of the shared constraints, the same control signals, I find myself becoming a mediator of a rewarding conversation. It is a collaboration between functions I do not not want to be a part of, it is an exploration I enjoy.
The Swimmers collaboration is, from my perspective, an expansion of the conversation, a continuation of the exploration. It represents a larger network of sub-networks, with Anna as fellow artist/mediator providing pre-recorded media, and instrumental improvisation to the real time unfolding. It is a social expansion of the expression and an assuring experiment. The thinking in systems and the generative approach in general, is to me precisely an approach, not a one-off solution, not a single network. It is my foundation for a sustainable and flexible audiovisual practice.
Contents
4 Swimmers
