Sequence Series: Turn Move Change | Joe Cantrell

About

This piece is a reactive system that allows the presence of bodies within a performance space to affect and alter the states of obsolete digital sound equipment and thus generate a reactive, co-constructed sound environment in which technological cast-offs are entangled with human corporeality. The system will consist of two basic elements. The first component is a sound generating system composed of obsolete digital multi-effects units. The outputs of these units are routed directly back into their inputs, creating infinite feedback loops which have a split stereo line out to make them audible. Left to their own devices, such feedback loops quickly devolve into a steady static state. Because these devices are MIDI enabled however, the internal systems of the audio processing technology can be perturbed and driven into different conditions, resulting in a sort of controlled chaotic state. Changes in this quasi-chaos will be activated by the interference between radio waves and the presence of human bodies in the vicinity of the reactive sound system. This will be accomplished by distributing a grid of AM transmission antennas on the floor of the performance space that have a control signal broadcast through them. When persons in the performance space move over the transmission wires, their bodies will act as antennas and affect the combination of amplitudes broadcasted on the AM band. The fluctuations in these broadcast signals will then be used to determine the state changes in the feedback system. In this way, an environment will be enacted in which humans and their technological waste will co-create a reciprocal generative aural space.