Audio-Visual Performance
Video Synth Architect: The Morphogenesis of Pixel Sorted Waves, Audio-Visual Performance, 2019
15-20min, 3840 x 2160 4k
The video synth architect (VSA) uses the morphogenetic properties of pixel sorted waves to create new architectural forms. The VSA sees audio, video, and three-dimensional space as a signal. A signal to be modified and performed in real-time, with both analog and digital processes.
XYZ, Audio-Visual Performance & Interactive Installation, 2018-2019
3840 x 2160 4k
XYZ is an audio-visual performance that focuses on the exploration of sonic material for real-time sculpture. The work utilizes three analog oscillators in tandem to generate the XY & Z dimensions of the sculpture. A series of knobs and hand sensor allows gestural navigation and sonic manipulation.
Ritual to Cleanse Neoliberalism, 2016-2017, Performance, 15min, 1920 x 1080 HD
Many ritualistic practices include sensory overload, for example, drumming, dancing, or pain. The clinical analysis of these practices tends to talk about sensory overload as a method for disrupting the cerebral processing of information and decreasing the meaningfulness of your surroundings. In Haitian Vodun, sensory overload is used to break down the self to be susceptible to possession. Neoliberalism and domination culture use a similar approach to initiate a form of capitalistic possession, which alters your freedom to choose, to a freedom to choose what to consume, a system that focuses on winners and losers.
Marshall McLuhan uses Edgar Allen Poe's story A Descent Into The Maelstrom as a metaphor for evading the effects of media, which is the method of sensory overload that works upon us. The key to Poe's sailor evading destruction was to pay attention to Maelstrom and how it functions. Hence in my ritual, I use a mantra sampled from Terence McKenna "Don't abandon yourself to amazement, pay attention, pay attention to what we're doing," an almost impossible task when being presented by a spectacle of images. If we don't abandon ourselves to amazement what can be learned?
Agentive Matter, 2017
Performance, 12-15min., 1920 x 1080 HD
Agentive Matter is a video and new media performance that explores the tension between material and symbolic communication. A database of one thousand images of historical artifacts is collected and mapped into a 3D superstructure that houses and forms these objects. During the performance, I grasp and bend this structure with a sensor that tracks my hand. Gestures of grasping or grouping mid-air morphs and bends the structure folding the images into one another creating new relationships, meanings, and matter. Through the form of aleatoric composition and improvisation, I am interested in literally touching the unseen structures where the language is both developed and dissolved, provoking a criticism concerning duality separating knowledge and being.
Entangled Ecologies, Audio-Visual Performance, 6 min, 1920 x 1080 HD
Collaboration with Mnemosyne Quartet
Composer Michael Miller and video artist Eric Souther, in conjunction with Charlotte Street Foundation, present: Emergence of Post-Human Cartographies, an evening of audio-visual works, performed by improvisational electronica quartet, Mnemosyne. Kansas City Performing Media Festival (KC PMF) takes place on September 29th at Charlotte Street’s La Esquina Gallery (1000 W. 25th St, Kansas City, MO). The event took place during Open Spaces, Kansas City’s bi-annual outdoor-indoor contemporary art exhibition. Charlotte Street Foundation is excited to combine the unique and eclectic spirit of Kansas City’s performing arts scene with national contributors and ideas.
Consulting The Oracles: Analog | Digital Cleromancy, 2017-2018
20-23min, 1920 x 1080 HD
Consulting The Oracles is a collaborative performance of Leslie Rollins & Eric Souther that engages multiple agencies of the I Ching through interactions within analog/digital sound and visual systems. During the performance, Leslie manipulates and counts with traditional yarrow stalks to consult the oracle, a meditative process which in time, builds one of sixty-four possible hexagrams.
The performance uses an analog-video synthesizer to enhance and expand video feedback (created with a video camera and CRT TV), which is partially controlled by an infrared sensing array placed in front of Leslie during the consultation. His analog stream is mapped onto three-dimensional shapes of Chinese ideographs associated with the trigrams and hexagrams. These digital generated shapes are manipulated in real-time via a hand tracking sensor. The hand and digital form share the same X, Y, & Z spatial relationships combining in organic live animation coaxed from Eric's performance. This animation is composited on top of the consultation via a web camera allowing for digital and physical entanglements as the process enfolds
Multiplying Muybridge, 2014
720 x 480 SD Wide-screen
Multiplying Muybridge is a hybrid analog/digital performance that recontextualizes Eadweard Muybridge’s late nineteenth century chronophotography, to both critique and analyze the language of film through the immediacy of video. The work utilizes an analog synthesizer to create real-time pattern generation in processing. Processing sends those frames then to Max/msp for live chroma-keying. Direct changes to the audio change how you see the layers of video. Audio is controlled via interacting with the synthesizers LFO's, depth sensors connected to control voltage to synth, and variables from drift speed from processing controls pitch on two VCOs.
The video above documents Multiplying Muybridge performance @ The Everson Museum on Sept. 20th, 2014 at the opening of Performing Media: Works by Signal Culture Artists in Residence.