Concept

A live musician and visual performer collaborated in real time, with illustrated characters and generative graphics responding to audio input and audience interaction.

The performance — entitled Resident Ecologies — is a work of speculative fiction, imagining a world in which the physical and sonic infrastructure of Bangkok are manipulated by a computer virus. Acting as a sort of computational “earworm”, the virus affects humans through visual and auditory stimulus and manipulation, with the ultimate side effect of reprogramming society into a mass trance-like and meditative state. The virus, the host, and the environment become one.

The piece is an attempt to sculpt a mind-bending ecology of place, with a particular emphasis on the mundane and non-anthropocentric aspects of life in Bangkok. A gecko, a cricket, a call to morning prayer, a sidewalk crossing — a handful elements of everyday life in Thailand are sampled, stretched, warped, bent, and shifted into a new audio+visual landscape. While the connotations of virology are often harmful and foreign, the resulting audio visual experience is rather a revelation of something inherent: the sequences, algorithms, and patterns that underlie the fabric of everyday life in this place.