Living Room
Performance Art, Media Art, Design, Electronics Engineering, Coding, Sound Design
wool, plywood, analog circuits, homemade contact microphones, craigslist rocking chair, free lamps, cord, laptop, supercollider, ableton
Living Room is an ode to familiar, repetitive motions and things. The musicality of everyday objects is amplified by sensing their actions. The central focus is the making of a knitted 'score'.
thanks to Greg Shakar, Andy Sigler, David Rios, and Ryan Bartley
Living Room was performed at the Knitting Factory on December 10, 2014 as a part of the New Interfaces for Musical Expression show and in the front window of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts as an installation on December 17 - 18, 2014.
Thematic Statement
Have you ever experienced a moment where the sounds from your worldly interactions meld into your mind and begin to form a score? Something triggers a tune and you find your hands moving to keep time, your breath syncing, and your mind filling in the rest.
Our every day, least glamourous moments are ripe for disruption and reimagining. Living Room aims to present mundane, repetitive moments of domesticity as theater. The inherent musicality of these actions is exaggerated to demonstrate the power of our environments. The generative composition provides the performer with endless variations and surprises which can then be responded to and affected.
As an installation (when performed for more than two hours), Living Room also serves as a message about the lifecycles of the things we make: beginning with the casting on of the fiber, to the pulling apart of everything that has been made, to the remaking of the entire piece... Living Room is an endless loop. The knit result is a score, a record, of what has passed.
Aesthetically, the composition generated by SuperCollider is gentle and relaxing. Interacting with the instrument adds energy and chaos to the sound. The action of knitting is the most powerful sonically: feedback builds and effects are triggered over time. Living Room is about the quiet conversations between our environments and our imaginations.
Living Room consists of three lamps, a rocking chair, and custom-made knitting needles - all of which affect the sound of a generative composition created in SuperCollider.
Supercollider is used in combination with Arduino serial data to play randomized musical patterns, adjust the clock rate, and modulate various external effects. Each of the instruments is plugged into a piece of CNCed furniture which hides the Arduino and PCB.
