Developing a critical technical audiovisual performance practice engaging with 'the web' as both medium and subject matter.

Context: Improvisation

Improvisation is something I began to think of as a key element of my practice about half way through this research, as a result of attending a workshop on non-idiomatic improvisation by Sejiro Murayama and Jean-Luc Guionnet. Prior to this, my (limited) experience with A/V performance (including the first project detailed here, Clock) had comprised only works that were pre-composed and rehearsed. This was probably a result of my background as a visual artist, I was very used to the process of making something privately and ahead of time before presenting a ‘finished’ work to an audience, it felt natural to approach music and performance making in the same way.

Workshop

The workshop was instrumental in moving my thinking about performance along. Having been involved with experimental music (as a listener) for a few years at this point, I was comfortable with the idea of non-idiomatic music, and also considered myself to be practicing it (though I was and still am more likely to describe what I do as ‘noise’ music, in the vein of Noto, Ikeda, and Mekawei, as mentioned in Project: Clock). However, just as I had started with live coding (see Context: My Background) as a route to beginning to perform solo music, I was still searching for a way to begin playing with others. Having the beginnings of music practice that was structured around very idiosyncratic and changeable ways of thinking about composition, there didn’t seem to be any obvious way to open this out to other musicians.

What I learned over the three day workshop was a framework to do just that. The most useful element of this framework I found has been thinking of listening as being the central activity and skill of taking part in a group improvisation, the choice of how and when to make sound being secondary and in response to this. This is a way of communicating with other musicians that requires no shared language or prior understanding of musical systems and conventions.

I gained an understanding of a few techniques that I find useful to employ in both my group and solo improv. These are:

• Treating both starting and stopping a sound as discrete gestures.
• Varying what you are listening to and responding to rather than just thinking about the shape of the overall sound all the time.
• Paying attention to room noise, matching it instead of covering it.
• Starting ‘behind’ another sound so you emerge from it when it stops (or consciously not doing this)
• Considering no sound at all is as a valid contribution.
• Always resisting the inclination to wait for an ‘take your turn’ in a group improv, this would be an example of getting stuck reflecting on what has happened rather than listening properly to what is happening.

Role in my practice now

Beyond giving me a framework for playing with others, participating in the the workshop has also given me the confidence to utilise solo improvisation in my audiovisual performance practice. I am not concerned anymore that doing so would be a risk: what if I run out of ideas? What if I can't fill the silence? What if I just do something really bad and can’t recover? I now treat free improvisation as a technique that can be practiced, and often find the sound work I produce by utilising it more surprising, dynamic, and compelling than that I have pre-planned.

Improvisation has allowed me to break further away from the processes I developed to serve the visual and conceptual side of my practice and operate in a more musical or performative way. I had a tendency in the early stages of this research project, and when creating sound work prior, to treat arranging sounds in time the same way I might treat arranging the parts sculpture or image in space. This is still useful at times, but I do not wish to lean on it as my sole composition process; now I find the mixture of this and improvisation are the two key processes that inform sonic development in my practice.