Cityscape in Notations

audio-visual performance / 2018 / USA


ABSTRACT

  • A cityscape is presented in an audio-visual performance where the audience members see and hear the city simultaneously. This multimedia experience becomes a dialogue between the visual composer, music improvisers, and the audience.

  • This project asks the audience members to remove themselves from the familiar environment of scenery, time, and space, to dive into an ocean of symbols, signs, atmospheres, products, and wastes of the city, and to pay attention to what these elements suggest about our contemporary life.

  • The recorded footage of the city does not only represent the past or collective memories; rather, these elements also are extracted and rearranged into compositions. These reconstructed elements then translate various cultural and environmental contexts into a re-energized and aesthetic form of looking and listening.

COMPOSITION & CONCEPT

  • At the front of the stage, there are three motion graphic scores -- A, B, and C -- projected onto three separate standing screens, together with three improvising musicians who will interpret and play the scores with optional instruments (traditional or non-traditional).

  • The three A, B, and C scores are city images composed as music notations, whose elements will consist of, but are not limited to, symbols, signs, architectural fragments, nature scenes, and historical landmarks in contemporary contexts.

  • The A, B, and C notations that are shown on film will take on the challenge of employing experimental techniques in the darkroom using hand processing and optical printing to produce desired visual languages, such as negative and/or positive images, abstraction, rhythms, multiple colors and densities, and more.

  • Above the center of the stage, a large 3D projection (either projected on a screen or onto a physical object – for example, a prism) combines images of the A, B, and C scores in juxtaposition, plus original documented city footage below.

  • The audience will be provided 3D glasses for the show. Note that the three motion graphic scores projected at the front are in 2D, which means that individual audience members will create their own visual rhythm and visual composition by switching between 2D and 3D as part of their respective experiences. Meanwhile, the audience will listen to the music from what has just been seen by the improvisers.

  • The 3D projection is not intended to recreate the cityscape as mainly realistic, but rather to enable the audience to reconstruct and rethink our surroundings today. By means of reconstruction, the audience is asked to walk away from their familiar everyday time and space, and collaborate with the visual composer and musicians to learn a particular city/space through a set of new audio-visual vocabulary.