of the survival of images (2013)

for custom GLOBE controller, video and sound

instrument design, video and sound by Butch Rovan
movement by Ami Shulman

program note

We shall never reach the past unless we place ourselves within it. Essentially virtual, it cannot be known as something past unless we follow and adopt the movement by which it expands into a present image, thus emerging from obscurity into the light of day.

–Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

 

of the survival of images belongs to a larger ongoing work for music, video, and the moving body, called Studies in Movement. It draws inspiration from Henri Bergson, whose meditations on time, matter, and memory offer a philosophical framework for the multimedia experience. The piece features the GLOBE, my custom wireless music controller, an instrument I designed to capture performance gestures in order to control real-time synthesis and video. The video footage presents the image of my longtime collaborator, the South African dancer Ami Shulman. Together, my performance onstage and her performance onscreen form a visual counterpoint that draws out, in sensory form, the ideas contained in Bergson’s text.