creating intermedia works
the making of “the boat of queen mutemwyia”
i first began working with intermedia in 1998, using premade images from a swedish program. i was writing downtown (watch the closing doors) for the talujon percussion quartet, which was to be performed at one of princeton’s composer concerts, and was influenced by the experiments of (then) fellow composition grad student reuben de lautour (now head of new music at u of canterbury, nz). in the fall of 2001, as a newly minted professor at northwestern, i sat at the unicorn cafe’ with gary kendall, then chair of the music tech department and my professional mentor at the time, and brainstormed on the topic du jour, “how to get tenure”. ah, things were to take a turn toward the unexpected for both us, but that’s another story. anyway, gary is a deeply creative, open mind, and our conversations went way high into the deep blue sky. with his focus on innovative tech and my insistence on radical composing, we came up with a blueprint for directly linking sound and vision through techno-artistic research. composing with tech, with a vengeance.
borrowing from the sixties fluxus artist dick higgins, i decided to align myself with the concept of intermedia, in the sense of interdisciplinary art activities of the sixties, and specifically as distinguished from multimedia. the project was nothing less than to work on the relation between image and sound, with the highly ambitious aim of creating image from sound and vice versa, in real time. a daunting prospect, to be sure. it was also supposed to be immersive, i.e. multiple screens and spatial sound. an initial attempt, which was not yet composed for real time performance, was 2004’s chicago union station, which i co-wrote with then grad student jeff weeter (now a lecturer at university of cork), and then undergrad mark cartwright (now a professor at nj institute of technology). in 2008, with contributions from then-undergrads robert alexander and devin kerr, i wrote five ideas about the relation of sight and sound, which has been performed in nyc, berlin, zurich, santiago de chile, and elsewhere. (more to follow)