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

Overview

TAB is the third and final of the three performance projects in this portfolio. It differs from Clock and Scroll in that it is completely improvised and contains no intentional narrative elements. I have performed it several times, and of course by virtue of being improvised those performances weren’t the same, but they each can be considered instances of ‘TAB’ in that they were done with the same tool and therefore with the same functions and constraints that tool offers, and expressing the same critical ideas influencing the tool’s design.

My intention with this project was to explore the notion that rather than the tool serving an artistic concept, the tool itself, its design and functionality, is the artistic concept. It is an attempt to collapse ‘the tool’ and ‘the piece’ together, pushing at a greater synthesis of the ‘critical’ and the ‘technical’ in the formation of my critical technical practice.

Project

(Note: Press 'down' arrow to start the audio context)

Development

Similar to Clock, this was a project that I developed for a specific performance. The release party of a compilation I had contributed a track to. The track was composed with Improv Tool. As with Clock, I had a deadline and a set length (25-30 minutes) to stick to.

I wanted to do something with a similar sound world and aesthetic to the above track, but I didn’t want to just perform with Improv Tool because while I was able to put together five minutes worth of ideas with it for my contribution, I didn’t think I could do enough with it to sustain a compelling 25-minute solo performance. I decided I would like to try a completely improvised performance, just creating the tool for myself as preparation but not having any kind of a plan. This is in contrast to Clock, which was partly automated and completely planned, and Scroll which was partly planned and partly improvised.

The performance would be a demonstration of the tool, and so my rationale was that there should be something in the functionality of the tool that served as a critical technical comment. I thought about the general idea of technical use and misuse: using a technology in a way that the creator didn’t necessarily intend, playing with, or experimenting with the features of a technology as a rebellious act.

I landed on the idea of looking outside my tool and at the browser, could I incorporate some aspect of the browser functionality in the performance? Sonically, I wanted to explore a thicker/noisier palette and so I decided to multiple tabs within the performance as a way of both engaging with the browser and adding more layers to the sound.

How it Works

I used the same ‘button grid’ idea from Clock and Improv Tool to set up the main sound-making functionality. Having a range of buttons that switch white noise on and off, with filters on that white noise to differentiate different frequencies, and setting up different keyboard controls to activate different combinations of buttons. What differs in TAB is that I have the option of scrolling through different sizes of grid, from 1 button set to 1 central frequency up to 81 buttons set to 81 randomly selected central frequencies.

I set up sliders to affect the values of effects applied to the overall sound, each with buttons to automate a random jump (as in Scroll).

The key mechanism to perform with TAB, as the name suggests, is to open and close multiple tabs containing the tool and run them together. There is a particular point, usually around 10 tabs, when the browser’s ability to run all the audio contexts at once becomes strained and the sound starts to glitch in a way I like to utilise at least once in a performance.

Reflections

TAB feels like a significant advancement of the practice. Making it, I was leaning less on my visual art background, and felt more like I was directly expressing myself through website building, as has been a major goal of the research project. What I mean by this is that I didn’t go through the quite linear and separated process of ‘what is the idea?’, to ‘what does the idea look like?’ to ‘what does the idea sound like?’, as I had done with Clock and Scroll. As mentioned in the overview, I was aiming for a greater synthesis of the critical and the technical in my practice, and as such I was able to use Sandbox Tool to quickly prototype a sound world and rough idea of the functionality, before moving directly to building the tool as my method of refining the idea.

In the same vein, and as result of my new confidence with improvising (see Context: Improvisation), I was able to think in a more purely musical way when making decisions on how I would like the UI to look and work. By this point, I had concluded that the ‘visual’ part of my audiovisual practice can be entirely fulfilled by the functional design of the tools I make and the mechanics of me operating them, with the illustrative and narrative-based visual aspects included in Clock and Scroll being less necessary.

TAB also serves to illustrate that I do not need the kind of automated elements and planned compositions I worked with in Clock and Scroll; I have a tool that gives and a way of working that means I am able to fill a performance with improvised sound that I would deem sufficiently varied, dynamic, and aesthetically coherent enough to be successful.