’75,557,864,000,000,000,000,000 Possibilities’ was created in collaboration with the choreographer and artist Elly Trent. I was initially primed for the project, having experienced it the previous year as a musician. I was aware that conflict between collaborators and unclear timelines about project delivery created issues for some groups. It seemed that the work Elly had been making was deeply resonant with my own interests. Her primary interest was making films of dance and editing them to create a hybrid physical-audio-visual object. We began the collaborative process with an immediate recognition that our interests had such a huge overlap that problems could arise from slight creative differences. It was this set of shared interests, and my experience of the previous year’s project, that led us to working in a way which prioritized collaboration in itself above all other elements—including the work itself. We agreed that the focus of our collaboration would be the specific method by which ideas could be exchanged, and developed what we felt was a sustainable model of collaborative discourse.
We agreed that the initial discussions of the work should last for as long as possible. We began to arrive at several important realizations. Firstly, that the success of the end result of the collaborative process should be a work where it would be impossible for the audiences to tell who created each element. This would mean that Elly would have creative control over the sound, and that I would also be able to influence the choreography. Since both of our practices involved making film, the projector in the theatre would be used as part of the piece. It became clear that we would both create the visual element of the work evenly, drawing on Elly’s experience with video editing and mine with generative visual programming. Since we both were concerned deeply with the nature of artworks and their aesthetic functionality, we decided to take a first-principles approach.
Although our respective influences were discussed at length during the initial phase of development, we were both intrigued by the concept that dance must exist within space. This concept led to a consideration of what could ontologically comprise the ‘work concept’. We agreed that the dancers alone were not the only way in which the content of the work could be expressed. The space itself, with its lighting, projector, PA system, and floor space, would become the explicit material which would express the content of the work. We conversed at length about our fascination with audiovisual art, where I shared my influence with the Japanese artist Ryoji Ikeda.
As well as some material inspiration for the visual component of the piece, the notion that audio and visual information could exist in symbiosis was a core consideration inspired by developments in audiovisual art. Therefore, equal priority was given to dance, sound, projection, and lights in the creation of the work.
After some discussion of our respective backgrounds, we found another similarity: the practice of improvisation within constraints which is a core feature of modern dance praxis, and also improvised music. The existence of rules within the work was part of our initial stimulus. We each found that it was interesting how rules could exist in a work, and be observable by the audience, but over time could yield surprising results. An example which I presented in our meetings was a work by Tom Johnson called Narayana’s Cows—where the rules are clear to the audience but yield results which are difficult to predict. We realized that the material components of the work (lights, sounds, dancers, projection) could be combined in different ways. Firstly, there could be none of the elements (resulting in complete darkness and silence), and there could be any combination of the four elements of material.
We began to create choreography which involved dividing the space into different sections—beginning with the simple parameter of where dancers were positioned. Then we began to isolate several elements of the body, such as the arms or feet, where we would compose ‘movement polyrhythms’, involving each dancer having a different number of movements to repeat at a regular time interval. For instance, one dancer could be given a cyclical pattern of positions while another may be given a different set. This resulted in a polyrhythmic effect, where every few cycles, a certain movement would appear in unison. Across larger groups of dancers, this technique was employed by Elly to create more complex forms which existed within other movements, or in spatial arrangements.
It became clear that the sound I would create would need some rhythmic element in order to trigger and synchronize these periodic movements. Furthermore, the ability to run a single program through the software QLab, which the theatre used to control the lighting and other synchronized elements of performances, encouraged me to create a fixed media electronic soundscape which could trigger visual and lighting phenomena. Not only did not involving musical performers make the rehearsal process easier, but it meant that I had complete control of the sonic landscape of the work throughout the process. During rehearsals, I could quickly add elements to the sound and test them on the dancers without having to compromise to suit the requirements of musicians. It also meant that a score did not need to be produced, further streamlining the process of development and testing of audiovisual elements.
The piece was divided into 19 sections, each 30 seconds long. I began to freely draft a project in Logic Pro which included sound samples I had created using the audio programming language Supercollider. This process happened very quickly, and I instinctively structured the intensity of the sections based on the available sound recordings I had collected in the previous weeks. The ability for the entire performance mechanics of the theatre to be controlled using a central clock source meant that hard cuts could be achieved by immediately switching on or off lights, or by immediate changes in the projection or sound. This meant that the only human element of the performance was the dancers themselves, meaning that any minor inaccuracies in their timing could be covered by hard cuts in the other audiovisual elements of the piece. The sound of the piece was gradually constructed using granular synthesis from Supercollider.
Supercollider is an open-source software with expansive documentation that allows for complex algorithmic sound generation. In this project, it was used to generate oscillating sounds and binaural-inspired textures. Once the sound material for the work was generated, I moved the sounds to Logic Pro in order to have finer control over EQ settings, compression, and other audio mixing tools. Additionally, this allowed me to set particular features on a timeline interface which could be quickly edited. A workflow emerged where sounds were generated in Supercollider, then exported to Logic Pro, then used to trigger visuals which would be shown on the projection using MIDI.
The visual element of the piece was largely orchestrated using the openFrameworks library of the C++ programming language, which received MIDI data from Logic to coordinate the visual elements of the projection with percussive audio. For instance, in one section of the piece, there is a visual mesh of vertices connected with lines which multiply when a percussive onset occurs. This was achieved by mapping MIDI messages to the number of connections between the points of the visual mesh.
Overall, the production of ’75,557,864,000,000,000,000,000 Possibilities’ was one which expanded my understanding of the work concept. The title eventually emerged as a description of the amount of possible works with 19 sections which used a combination of lights, sound, projection, and dance. We arrived at this title because it introduced the idea that the presented work was simply one iteration out of a huge latent space of possible works. The production of the work placed the theatre itself as another performer. My intention with the accompanying soundscape was to create a hybrid audiovisual object where the sensory experience seemed unified, and that no element could be understood individually without its relationship to every other element. Much of the projected visuals included meshes of interconnected points or other networked visual formations. It was my belief that this visual language acted as a symbolic presentation of the interconnected aesthetic functionality of the work.