and just where are we now?
Tonight was the first rehearsal of a new network music piece that Pan Pacific Playground (aka Tadashi Usami) is developing. I'm planning to use it in performance for the SuperCollider class I'm teaching at STEIM next month. Tonight we were connecting three points on the globe: Doug Van Nort in Montreal, Michael Cox and I in Oakland, and Tadashi in Tokyo. The sounds that Tadashi has developed in this program are strikingly subtle and delicate, listening to it was a great treat.
The way the patch functions is that basically there are a set of sound architectures, each one of them can be controlled by a series of interfaces that influence tonal quality and rhythm in different ways. These sound architectures live on each machine locked into the grid, and can be fired up at will. Every machine is producing the same final sound product, we're all listening to and influencing a nearly identical sonic object in each respective geographic point, with very little delay, since no audio data is being transferred, only terse and tight control information telling every computer what sound it should be making, when, and how, shifting the architectures as we like. There are a few exceptions, but generally that is what is happening.
When playing tonight, I got a very real sense of the "ghost in the machine." Looking at my screen, I could see others changing parameters in real time, sliders moving without my control. Topographical space was of no importance in this music, was quite a stunning feeling to be part of it, an experience that I would not be able to have if I were simply watching someone else do it.
In a recent article in Frieze magazine, the topic of which is quite different than mine, Jan Verwoert writes, "Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari suggest that the proximity between two points in space is determined not necessarily by physical distance but by the mutual relationship between the people at those points, reciprocally observing each other." I think in this sense the first rehearsal was a success, we were very close, observing and reacting to one another in a meaningful way. But if that is the case, why did it feel so lonely? Maybe because, as a friend pointed out the other day, theoretical constructs, and I would add smart code, do have their limitations.