Flood

Sky Christoph – Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design

Collaborators: Samuel James Harden DuBose – School of Music, Theatre & Dance; Samuel Uribe Botero – School of Music, Theatre & Dance and LSA

Our project seeks to bridge live music, projection, coding, feedback technology, and installation-based performance work to create an experience that encourages viewers to recognize the importance of the interactions between sensory modalities within their own lives. By hanging strands of rope and masses of scrim around the performers, we shift the focus away from the performers and toward the oscillation between visual and auditory modalities. Centering feedback loops between these sensory perceptions creates an experience elevating the awareness of these multimodal interactions within viewers. This elevation of personal perception regarding the interconnectedness of our visual and auditory processing would not be possible without the collaboration across disciplines. Using art and music to foster an inviting communal experience unifies a group through parallel individual interactions and a sense of collective effervescence. This will help lead to the excitement of others to create similar projects in the future and continue new interdisciplinary projects. We expect this project to help push forward the possibilities of live performance in the local music/performance scene. By bringing an audiovisual production to venues, we may influence other acts to work collaboratively with artists and musicians alike. Future immersive projects de-centering individual performers can impress a more full performative experience upon audience members and encourage them to see themselves as more than passive viewers.

This project is inspired in part by a former local group, Lines, that used audio-visual feedback to amplify the performance experience, as well as Floating Points’ Problems, Amon Tobin’s ISAM, Emile Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method, and Daniel Burkholder’s A Synthesis and Summary of Theories and Practices of Artistic Collaboration.