Title: Composite Cells (Documentation)
Category: Performance
Year: 1999
Synopsis: On the surface, "Composite Cells" appears rather abstract visually & sonically. It contains deliberate blending and obfuscating of images and sounds from the living, organic world and the inanimate, inorganic world. It was inspired by developments in the fields of cybernetics (changing the body by augmenting it with useful technology) and genetics (changing the body by the manipulation of the genome). The combinations of imagery and sounds in this piece preset a sort of conversation or interaction of various circular-shaped loops, which are like little portraits of imaginary impossible organisms. Like "Autoharp", "Composite Cells" consists of custom software & hardware, video & audio elements in the setting of a live improvised performance. Due to improvisation and chance occurrences introduced by the software, no two performances are alike.

Production Notes: As in other previous works (such as "Bezem" in the video category of this site), I used an endoscopic video camera to gather the imagery. Everyday objects in front of its tiny lens are magnified, distorted and become often barely recognizable. The music and sounds were composed from a wide range of acoustic and electronic sources. The performance uses 5 different screens onto which the circular-shaped loops appear. In order to control the system in real-time, I built two boxes each with about 15 buttons. Via the custom software, the buttons, often pressed in combination, can independently control parameters of separate video/audio loops such as transport (play, pause, reverse), pitch (+/- 2 octaves), video size, sound volume, etc. Being able to modify these parameters at a whim provides the basis for the improvisational format of the performance.