aria for fathoms (proposal for installation)
2019
virtual reality

There’s a saying in musical improvisation, “If you hit a wrong note, hit it twice so it sounds like you did it on purpose”. A surprising inspiration for this piece.

It turns out it’s a relatively simple thing to induce a rudimentary  feeling of “livingness” from a thing, and this improvisation quote is at its heart. Randomness drives the first passage. Each member in line repeats the phrase. Random as the inspiration is, it’s the reinforcement of the passage that combs it into a sense of order. 

Surprisingly, what arrives isn’t just vague collectedness, but something living, breathing. Motion through space, propelling through a thick, invisible medium.

A sea animal, alone in a vast deep, performing an aria in a frozen moment of time, dancing in thin beams of filtered light.