utterances, wanderings was commissioned to accompany the works of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, whose compositional process often embraced improvisation, collaboration, and new technologies. He would often record his improvisations on the ondiola and then transcribe (or have trusted friends and collaborators transcribe) those recordings, arranging them for different combinations of acoustic instruments. Drawing inspiration from this process, utterances, wanderings uses a custom AI model to place a detailed analysis of Scelsi’s music in conversation with an analysis of my newly-composed piece in real-time during the performance. The software I’ve written “listens” to the performers and adapts, dynamically presenting them with new modules of my score to use as starting points for improvisations in a way that is (theoretically) characteristic of some of the musical decisions at play in Scelsi’s music. The audience is later invited to join in the improvisation as well, creating an immersive soundscape together using a custom app built on the same model, as well as recordings made during the performance. In a time when AI is increasingly playing an exploitive role in music-making, this piece aims to demonstrate that when used thoughtfully, it can be a tool for collaboration and co-creation. It aims to prove that as the world becomes more fractured (in part, due to these new technologies), artists and musicians can act as agents of repair and unity.

A collaboration between creative technologist Tina Tallon and particle physicist and filmmaker James Beacham, Subsumption, No. 1 is a site-specific interactive sound, light, and video installation which examines different registers in which we engage with hidden physical, psychological, and social structures and the emergent behaviors that result from these interactions. The viewer is complicit in the construction of their experience, unique to each participant, subject to rules not fully legible—and perhaps unknowable—but inescapable. The viewer’s movements through the cryptoporticus mold field recordings, images, and data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN into new visual and sonic patterns, questioning the biases that lead us to classify stimuli as noise or signal in an effort to elucidate the underlying structures that give rise to our experiences of space and time. Subsumption, No. 1 asks what we owe ourselves – and more importantly, what we owe each other – in protecting spaces of potentiality for all of the stories that have yet to be told, both on human and cosmic timescales. Ultimately, it asks us to consider our roles in constructing and maintaining unjust hegemonies, and to imagine what alternatives may exist if only we refuse to accept the status quo and insist upon continuing to search.

Installed in the cryptoporticus of the American Academy in Rome during January and February 2022, the installation is comprised of a network of 3500 individually-addressable LEDs woven into over 3500 m2 of transparent nylon webbing encompassing the space, a film projected onto a raised, horizontal screen film, 8 channels of live audio spread along the corridor, and a network of ultrasonic proximity sensors that control the spatialization and behavior of the audio and lights.

The webbing into which the lights are interwoven is designed to be as transparent as possible when the overhead lights in the space are on, with the nuances of the structure only becoming apparent in the dark as visitors activate the lights that articulate the space. The piece first opened to the public during the AAR’s Winter Open Studios exhibition, but was left running for the next month after for data collection.

The drone is created via a feedback loop in the ancient Roman aqueduct segment that runs underneath of the American Academy’s cryptoporticus, which is activated by the vibrations from the steps of the people above. The air column in the aqueduct in turn vibrates the screen of the projection box above the access shaft through which the film is being projected, which gives a haptic experience of the physical and electronic processes at play in producing the sound.

A network of ultrasonic motion sensors along the length of the cryptoporticus controls both the spatialization of the lights and the audio, allowing the interaction to both follow the users around the space and attempt to entice them to move to other locations. Data related to timing and location is collected and used to train a simple machine learning algorithm, resulting in the constant evolution of the ways in which it follows and attempts to guide them through the space. (Thankfully, because of COVID restrictions, very few people could enter the space at a time, which led to a high degree of granularity and personalization of the experience.) Each light is mapped to a pixel in the film, and through the interaction design, the visitor is able to “play” the video into the LED network.

(click on any of the photos below to see components in more detail.)