Background

being with You, in Unity (2021, rev. 2022) was the result of a collaborative project between myself and the Amsterdam-based MAZE ensemble. MAZE’s line-up consists of Anne La Berge (flutes and electronics), Yannis Kyriakides (electronics, sometimes violin), Wiek Heijmans (electric guitar), Gareth Davis (bass clarinet), Dario Calderone (double bass), and Reinier van Houdt (piano, keyboards, electronics). Their work is dedicated to the performance of music that employs non-linear and non-fixed structures, open scores, hybrid notations, and unusual performances.

The project with the ensemble presented itself as the perfect opportunity to create a non-conventional score, i.e. a score that didn’t rely on traditional notation methods. Having in mind the previously exposed ideas by McLuhan, I aimed to create an interactive piece, which by making use of a tablet — a modern-day symbol of a technological extension of humans — explored micro-interactions between the musicians on stage. Ultimately, the goal was to discover if using such a device would somehow change their overall performative practices and how it influenced the dynamic of six experienced and skilled improvisers. “What do we focus on when presented with an interactive digital interface?”, “How much will the players engage with the device?”, “Will their interactions with the system reflect their own personalities?” and “Who do we become when we have an LCD screen protecting our identity?” were some of the questions that steered this piece.

Questioning my compositional practice

being with You, in Unity brought about some important questions on what composing means to me. With this work, I started questioning ideas of authorship. I created the system and gathered the pictures interpreted by the performers but the performers do a lot of the heavy lifting in this piece. How much of a composer can I be in these situations? I still somehow felt like I was “composing” something, so the only explanation I could find was that, personally, composition meant defining boundaries of possibilities and interactions. As a “composer” I create a micro-universe in which performers (and audience) can embed themselves in and I don't need to have full control over the narrative and sound world.³⁹ This piece could be seen as an extreme example of such ideas and has its own drawbacks. Having used these pictures with no further guidelines led to an inability to define clear bounds of musical material, thus being dependent on the improvisational skills of the performers. Each performer of MAZE receiving their own picture created too much chaos and no sound universe was well established.

Later, in 2022, the improvisation group Aduantas (meaning “a strange feeling in an unfamiliar place” in Irish), of which I am a part of, performed this piece. Aduantas' lineup for the performance was Risteárd Ó hAodha (cello), Hugo Ariëns (tabletop electric guitar and objects), Isaac Barzso (electronics) and myself (electronics).

Excerpts of being with You, in Unity

The interactive system

I created a wireless, Max/MSP-based interactive system with which the musicians could play with by using a tablet.³⁴ The musicians of MAZE had in front of them a very simple interface with minimal graphic and interactive elements: action buttons to make requests to other players, a picture to interpret as musical material and a textbox with the commands they received.

The pictures would be sent by a person in charge of the controller interface and they would be sent individually, meaning that the performers didn’t receive the same picture at the same time. The performers are tasked to immerse themselves in the emotional world of each photo and transform their emotional content into sound through improvisation. This could be done by playing normally, reading the text, sharing a story that the picture reminds one of, etc… In the premiére of the piece, at the Online Spring Festival 2021, I was the one in charge of the controller interface and though I wasn’t performing with an instrument, my role was essential to curate the pace of this 10-minute piece. Furthermore, the person in charge of the controller interface also creates “collective moments”. In these moments, a small detail of a picture is sent to everyone with the command “Play Collectively”. These moments were designed to gather everyone in the same sound environment, which then would be broken apart by sending individual pictures again.³⁵

Besides receiving the pictures and “collective” excerpts of the pictures, the performers themselves had only two simple request options: to invite someone to play with them, when they enjoyed what someone else was doing and thought it could be interesting to band together; tell someone to stop playing, when they thought that what someone was doing was disruptive to the general texture or narrative they were trying to create. There was no limit to how many people you could silence or invite to play.³⁶ One last detail to note is that when asking someone to play, the performer sees who has invited them on the tablet (for obvious reasons), while when someone instructs a performer to be silent, the target performer could not see who sent the request. There was then a play on “anonymity”.

For this version, all the players received the same picture at the same time. With this small change we could, during rehearsals, focus our work on how we wanted to make the two simple interactions of the piece come to the foreground. A lot of time was spent discussing what “playing with one another” meant: what element do we take in from the person who invited us to play? Are we free to choose or does it depend on the overall narrative arch of the piece? Does playing with another person mean complete symbiosis or could we also engage in counterpoint which accentuates the differences between one another?

The system itself also needed more care and attention when it came to UI design and responsiveness. Because some buttons did not respond correctly during rehearsals, there was frustration and uncertainty among the players. This resulted in losing rehearsal time in order to understand how to navigate the faults of the system. This could be pin-pointed to the fact that the code wasn’t streamlined and the local internet connection was prone to failing. The concert with Aduantas mentioned before did not work out in the end. In the soundcheck and concert itself, the system kept on failing and the tablets were losing their connections too frequently, making it impossible to play the piece. The fact that I had hit my head against a glass door in a dark hallway at Korzo Theater 5 minutes before going on stage did not help the already precarious situation!

Concluding thoughts

Initially, being with You, in Unity intended to simply explore how a modern utilitarian tool like the tablet-shaped the interactions between the musicians of MAZE. By giving them a simple interface inspired by McLuhan’s (less problematic) slogans, I had hoped to have been able to reach a somewhat simple and concrete conclusion. In a way, I was naïvely trying to artistically prove that the tropes “the medium is the massage” and “media as extensions of humans” were easily applicable to everyday life. Instead, I was left with the realisation that as our lives become exponentially more entangled with our gadgets and we can hardly envision a past without them, it is imperative to question: how does this change the way we relate to one another and the way we perceive our physical selves? These questions cannot be asked only at a local scale. Humankind has become a global agent and analysing our relationship with technology cannot stay at the tip of the iceberg by merely inquiring how “button-mashy” performers are when presented with an interactive interface. This attitude would also be a disservice to the deep emotional world created by Sabina and her photographic work. This line of questioning became more and more central to me and it led to reflecting on issues of digital translation of the physical body. In later stages of both my artistic creation and artistic research, my Queer identity came into play and soon I would realise that my interest in these subjects was no coincidence, but a call from the subconscious to look back on my experiences in the digital realm when I was a teenager and how they helped shape my personhood.

The pictures

At the time of working on this piece, I was living with 6 artists. One of them was Sabina Mérida Entrocassi, a photography student at the Royal Academy of Art of The Hague. Coincidentally, she had been working on a booklet entitled La vida es una moneda (Life is a coin) that dealt with her own issues of finding herself in a complex web of relationships, which become even more complex when you add modern communications technology to the equation. Sabina has herself a migrant background, she was born in Argentina but migrated to Catalunya at a very early age, and this has been the source of inspiration for many of her works.³⁷ The booklet is a collection of pictures she took in “non-professional” and “normal” settings: with her friends in Catalunya, at parties, at home in The Hague, in her bedroom and so on. Each picture also has handwritten notes, both in Catalan and in English, and drawings. Some of the comments include “La meua planta ya no té flors. Només fulles. I bought it with Mitch.”, “Bon dia. Bona Nit. These were the first words in Catalan Sergi and I taught to Dustin.” and “Bar in Delft where my mum bought a tea light. El papa comença a tenir canes. I li queden molt be.”³⁸ What I found inspiring and beautiful in this booklet (unfortunately not available to the wider world) was how she reflected on the minutest interactions she would have with friends, strangers, family and objects around her. With each picture, you have a select moment in time, a feeling and a person attached to it. The fact that her handwritten notes are bilingual seems to showcase how different languages convey different emotional reactions. In English, she lays out facts about a situation. In Catalan, a detail pertaining to the person with which the situation is associated seems to be used as a poetic reflection on the relationship between Sabina and the person in question. As McLuhan would perhaps put it, different languages are used as media for different emotional attitudes, thus, changing the message.