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

Overview

This is the only of the six projects that I made for a purpose more specific than serving my solo performance practice. I built it as part of a collaboration with Tom Hawkins and Freya Shaw and as part of a contribution to the CeReNeM Journal #9.

The concept of the collaboration was a performance by the three of us, in which we would take a text score, written by Tom, and translate it to audio using a text to speech tool, then play it back live during the performance, via my tool, and have Tom and Freya perform the score instructions. The playback tool I operate in the performance serves to disrupt the original intended flow of the score in various ways, and manipulating this in real time constitutes my contribution to the performance.

Project

Development

Developing the concept for our group performance, initial discussions between Tom, Freya, and, with the jumping off point of wanting to do ‘something political’, were around the environment, guilt, and responsibility. We wanted to make something about the tension inherent in knowing if you are ‘doing the right thing’ in regards to a given issue, and the way that media, and one’s own level of media literacy and bias, can serve to exacerbate that tension. We wanted our performance to portray that sense of getting tangled up in trying to do the right thing in an age of information overload.

My approach to building the tool was quick and simple, utilising my now familiarity with the Web Audio API ↗, to make a plain interface with direct controls. This allowed me to be improvisational in the performance, reacting to Tom and Freya as much as they were reacting to me. My focus in playing back the score was to introduce as much obfuscation as I could without simply rendering it unintelligible.

Reflections

This project forms a small contribution to this portfolio but it, nevertheless, has served to develop the practice, giving me the opportunity to apply my critical-technical website making to collaborative work. It solidifies that websites can be my medium, or my instrument, across many contexts and that the array of techniques and processes I have developed through this research can be effectively utilised as legitimate artistic tools.