Semispecific - Cove Park Residency & CCA Performance
Last week the good people at Cryptic invited us up to Cove Park to spend a week developing our forthcoming audiovisual project Semispecific, set to debut in the CCA in Glasgow on June 1st.
Cove Park is a fantastic place to work and we had a productive week. Here is a brief glimpse into what we've been working on and what the project is all about.
Maybe listen to this while you read:
What is Semispecific?
Semispecific is a piece about the relationship between consciousness, identity and memory. It is the first time we have tried to develop a show with a definite narrative theme and it has been an interesting process trying to figure out how to express the ideas we are researching through the tools of our practice: multichannel sound diffusion, projection mapping, sculptural-rhythmic lighting installations and a varitible boat load of audio-visual DSP techniques.
On top of that we wanted to explore how to combine such conceptual material with something that will work on a dancefloor. We wanted it to feel like a club and for the experience to gradually build like a DJ set.
We were both taken with the idea that the brain invents a lot of the details in what we perceive as reality. We take in a certain amount of data through our senses and then our brain fills in rest with what it sees as the most logical details. How can we be sure that it gets this right? And who is to say that any two minds will come to the same conclusions. In what way can we talk about a shared experience? Our perception of reality is only semispecific in nature.
Following from this are fascinating questions about who we are and how we understand ourselves. Somewhere within everyone's messy mixture of thoughts and memory seems to reside a sense of conscious identity – a sense of who we are. But if these very memories are drawn from our minds best guess at reality then where does that leave us in terms of our understanding of self?
Why make a piece about these themes? What do you know about it anyway?
We think the ideas are interesting and wanted to learn about them. We don't claim any particular insight going into the project or expect any major revelations to come out of it, but through the process of making work about a topic we can immerse ourselves in the research and learn as we create.
Charlie has bad eyesight and a very poor memory and has always been interested in how the two might be related and through discussions with Euan they developed some ideas for how to express this general theme, and Semispecifc has lurched into life.
How are these themes actually expressed in the work?
Variously and obliquely. We wanted to get a general sense of meaning whilst still leaving room for it to mean different things to different people.
General ideas of the obfuscation and then refocusing of detail and a certain shimmering, liquid nature of memory are guiding principles of both the sonic and visual design, along with inspiration drawn from the inner workings of cognitive and neural systems.
Through the use of heavily processed field recordings and family photographs we aim to create an experience both highly personal and somehow universal, trying to harness the mesmeric qualities of techno as a vehicle for the conceptual content.
And what were you actually doing up at Cove?
Our work over the last week fell into the following catogories:
1. Building the performance system
Realtime performance has always been central to what we do and it was really important to us that Semispecific was performed live with room for improvisation and interaction. This gets really complicated with audiovisual stuff so we spend a lot of time designing a system combining tactile hardware equipment with Max MSP patches resulting in an audio-visual instrument that feels intuitive and expressive. This process is, as ever, ongoing.
2. Developing thematical sections + content
Creating the core content of semispecific. Creating a number of dynamic audio-visual “scenes” that can be morphed and experiemented with in real time. Sort of like a DJs records but more maliable and audiovisual. Pairing sounds with images, designing atmospheres and experimenting with differant ways of expressing certain the themes.
3. Experimenting with Ambisonics
We often work with multispeaker set ups but we dedicated some time at Cove to exploring a more sophisticated approach using ambisonics. Charlie will post about this seperately.
4.Experimenting with visual processing techniques
Euan has concocted some interesting ways of processing and generating visual content. Expect a post covering that soon.
5. Performance Documentation