Year: 2015. Medium: Live performance with 16 percussionists, handheld torches, drums, spotlights, LEDs, microphones, spatialized audio. Technique: Custom software, generative video and music composition.
“The almost-sculptural drum patterns seemed to exist on a different, non-synchronous channel… The result was performance in which neither the sonic nor the visual was subordinated to the other, but rather combined to create something which held the two together in a kind of synaesthetic flux.”
Luke Healey. a-n
Other works from this series and more information on the series in general can be found here.
Simple Harmonic Motion #12 is a live performance for 16 percussionists and light. It is part of an on-going series of works investigating the emergence of complex behaviour through the interaction of simple patterns, invoking the delicate balance between chaos and order. It is inspired by natural and mathematical phenomena, as well as works by the likes of Norman Mclaren, John Whitney, Steve Reich, John Cage, Gyorgi Ligeti and Edgar Varèse.
The version highlighted here, SHM #12 for 16 percussionists (2015), builds on this theme to explore the complex relations between human and machine; navigating the harmonies and tensions between science, technology, culture, ethics and tradition. Mirroring the tensions created when new scientific knowledge and technologies disrupt existing ways of living, traditional values, and moral frameworks, the piece drifts in and out of sync, shifting between order and chaos. Read more on the motivations here.
Sixteen human performers are individually controlled by a central computer, running custom software, an algorithmic composition. The performers each receive unique cues via in-ear monitors — when to step forward into the light, when to raise their arms, hit their drum (triggering a sound and light pulse), turn on their flashlight, and when to step back into darkness. They are not aware of the larger composition. They simply obey their individual instructions coming from the machine. They are executing the code. And they each perform very simple, repetitive, monotonous tasks. However, collectively, they are a complex superorganism, controlled by the machine, playing out an intricate composition of sound and light.
The piece generates both discomfort, and fleeting moments of synergy, synchronicity, and poetry. Fragile equilibriums emerge from the chaos, only to slip away, and then emerge again, in multi-scale fractal cycles.
