THE FLOODS Live Performance: SPLICE Institute 2023
This page is about the live performance of THE FLOODS at SPLICE Institute 2023 in Kalamazoo, Michigan. For the original 2021 installation and performance at the Crane Arts Icebox in Philadelphia, see THE FLOODS and THE FLOODS Live Performance.
For another recent performance of THE FLOODS, see The FLOODS Live Performance: Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente.
Performance Info
Adam Vidiksis: THE FLOODS Live Performance (2023)
Performed on Monday June 26, 2023
7:30pm EDT
Dalton Recital Hall, Western Michigan University (Kalamazoo, Michigan)
Livestream simulcast on SPLICE YouTube
Performers
SPLICE Ensemble
Sam Wells, trumpet
Keith Kirchoff, piano
Adam Vidiksis, percussion
with:
Dana Jessen, bassoon
Popebama:
Erin Rogers, saxophone
Dennis Sullivan, percussion
Artists
Adam Vidiksis: music, sound design, lead software developer
Roderick Coover: film
Nick Montfort: generative poetry
This performance is part of the It will happen here… project.
About THE FLOODS Live Performance
THE FLOODS is part of a series of works by the artists entitled IT WILL HAPPEN HERE IN... The work was filmed on waterways and shores at flood-levels predicted in sea-level rise. Part of the code’s operation is based on signals gathered using hydrophones that move with the tides and currents connecting the human experience in the museum to non-human, natural forces beyond. Coded in C++, Max, and JavaScript, the algorithms continually transform image, sound and text to show worlds that are rich with possibilities (both good and bad). The experience unfolds in ever-changing movements to suggest choices, narratives and meanings, before breaking apart and starting again; like the tides the future is always in flux.
The generative and combinatory code produces an audible and almost-legible spectacle following Coover's journeys documenting shorelines around the world. His work looks at underlying structures of industrialization and the Anthropocene that drive the current, catastrophic prospects of global warming. The work includes videos recorded above and below the water on the U.S. Atlantic Coast, the North Sea and the English Channel. The images are organized along themes concerning human and non-human land transformations, movements, infrastructures, floods and beacons. The images of these industrial, urban and natural shores are refigured through layering, collage and code-based operations. The structural arcs in the code carry viewers across experiences of observation, transformation, longing, loss and possibility.
Over the richly layered, documentary images filmed along natural and industrialized shores is an ever-changing progression text that is based on field observations and other research into pollutants in future flood zones and potential extinctions. Code generates possibilities for description and evokes the flow of water and systems. Perception, sentience, and a movement across modes of interpretation is driven by algorithmic interventions. Seemingly familiar places become transfigured through sudden waves and a layering of fragments to suggest those rising waters don’t only change places, they also impact memories, desires, dreams and language. Algorithms combine the images to suggest unfolding events before breaking apart; like the tides the future is always in flux. The generative system reframes questions of sea-level rise, migration, and extinction, in which familiar places — and the memories and dreams that attend them — are transformed by rising waters, and it provokes the public to put into words the unspeakable threats posed to existence, time and belonging.
The music and sound design by Vidiksis accentuate the collision of natural and industrial rhythms and the power of irrational forces, evoking imagined futures through dream-like sequences and by moving between surface and submerged realities and sentience. Field recordings of natural waterways are combined and transformed by data taken from hydrophone data taken in urban and industrialized waterways. Recordings of water—flowing, streaming, lapping, crashing, and gushing—combine with synthesized electronic sounds that work to expand our perception of time, revealing the epic scale and scope of climate catastrophe. These sounds and musical gestures emerge, combine, and collide in atmospheric textures, spontaneous vocal chorales, and distorted melodic lines that highlight the urgency and emotional impact of rising sea levels depicted in the images. The remarkable spectacle reveals forces of flow, floods and chemical contamination. By compressing and distorting the scales of time that normally confound human imagination and undermine human action, the work opens possibilities for recognition, utterance, connection and action.
The generative text and multilingual voices combine to face the challenge of putting words to crises, constructing meaning through machine intervention from language derived from field observation, archives and scientific data. Natural sounds from field recordings are also transformed through machine interaction, and these collide with ambient soundscapes produced through generative systems. The disruptions of language, spatial disorientation and fragmented media propel users to refigure history and give utterance to current crises. Through movements, beacons, sounds and language, the work offers hope, possibility, and transformation in the face of catastrophe.
The live experience offers a stunning mix of improvisation, code-driven sound and composition. The music unfolds in generative ambient electronic soundscapes, algorithmic vocal chorales, and combinatorial electronic orchestration to create an ever-changing underscore to Coover’s images. The music and sound design accentuate the collision of natural and industrial rhythms and the power of irrational forces, evoking imagined futures through dream-like sequences and by moving between surface and submerged realities and sentience.
In the live version the experience expands upon the installation experience, with musicians responding to the every changing, algorithmic images, sounds and text. Local musicians work with Vidiksis to create an experience that responds live to the oceanic shifts in tone and movement.
Credits
It will happen here is a collaborative project in which ideas are created through dialog and exchange. Primary roles are:
Roderick Coover: Research, Conceptual Design, Visual Design and Creation, Cinematography, Photography
Adam Vidiksis: Sound Design and Creation, Computer Programming Design and Creation
Nick Montfort: Computational Poetry Writing And Design
Additional programming by Sam Wells and Jonah Pfluger.
Funding
Works in the Altering Shores series and related research have been supported with commissions from ISEA International, The Penn Program In Environmental Humanities and The Science History Museum, awards from Temple University.
Artist Bios
Adam Vidiksis is a drummer and composer based in Philadelphia who explores social structures, science, and the intersection of humankind with the machines we build. His music and artwork examine technological systems as artifacts of human culture, acutely revealed in the slippery area where these spaces meet and overlap—a place of friction, growth, and decay. His compositions and recordings are available through HoneyRock Publishing, EMPiRE Recordings, Fuzzy Panda Recording Company, Mulatta Records, New Focus Records, PARMA Recordings, Navona Records, and Scarp Records. Vidiksis is Assistant Professor of music technology at Temple University, and president of SPLICE Music. He performs in SPLICE Ensemble, aeroidio, Miller/Vidiksis/Wells, Transonic Orchestra, Ensemble N_JP, and directs the Boyer College Electroacoustic Ensemble Project (BEEP).
SPLICE Ensemble is a trumpet, piano, and percussion trio focused on cultivating a canon of electroacoustic chamber music. Called a “sonic foodfight” by Jazz Weekly, SPLICE Ensemble works with composers and performers on performance practice techniques for collaboration and integrating electronics into a traditional performance space. The resident ensemble of both SPLICE Institute and SPLICE Festival, SPLICE Ensemble has been a featured ensemble at M Woods in Beijing, SEAMUS, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, SCI National, Electronic Music Midwest, and New Music Detroit’s Strange Beautiful Music 10. They have recorded on both the SEAMUS and Parma Labels.
Hailed as a “bassoon virtuoso” (Chicago Reader), Dana Jessen tirelessly seeks to expand the boundaries of her instrument through original compositions, improvisations, and collaborative work with innovative artists. Over the past decade, she has presented dozens of world premiere performances throughout North America and Europe while maintaining equal footing in the creative music community as an improviser. Her solo performances are almost entirely grounded in electroacoustic composition that highlight her distinct musical language. As a chamber musician, Dana is the co-founder of the contemporary reed quintet Splinter Reeds, and has performed with Alarm Will Sound, Amsterdam’s DOEK Collective, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Tri-Centric Ensemble, among many others. A dedicated educator, Dana teaches at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and has presented masterclasses and workshops to a range of students from across the globe.
Popebama is a New York-based experimental duo that focuses on exciting performances of unconventional works. Described as “Noisily Virtuosic” (clevelandclassical.com), Erin Rogers (saxophone) and Dennis Sullivan (percussion) are composer-performers who apply text, electronics, and high-energy instrumental writing to freshly-squeezed sounds.
Specializing in works conceived by Rogers and Sullivan, Popebama has championed composers such as Paul Pinto, Matthew Shlomowitz, Jenna Lyle, Rick Burkhardt, Kittie Cooper, Daniel Silliman, and Alex Christie. The duo has collaborated with yarn/wire (NYC), Tøyen Fil Og Klafferi (Oslo), Brandon Lopez (Brooklyn), Anne La Berge (Amsterdam), Merche Blasco (NYC), Jessica Pavone (Queens), Ogni Suono (Cleveland), Rage Thormbones (LA), and DECODER (Hamburg). Popebama has been featured at the Elbphilarmonie (Hamburg), NYmusikk Bergen (Norway), The Shed (NYC), Edmonton Fringe Festival (Canada), Splendor (Amsterdam), Diabolical Records (Salt Lake City), VU Symposium (Park City), Bodies-As-Technology (Brooklyn), ReSound Festival (Cleveland), The Stone (NYC), SPLICE Festival (Kalamazoo), New School of Music (Boston), Studio Loos (Den Haag), Chance & Circumstance Festival (Long Island City), and The Walden School (New Hampshire), with lauded performances at the 2017 New Music Gathering, and NASA 2018 Biennial (Cincinnati).
Educational engagements include student workshops, masterclasses, and performances at Hochschule fur Musik (Freiburg), UMass Amherst, University of Minnesota (Duluth), the Collaborative Composition Initiative, CCI (Stony Brook University), St. Cloud State, and The Walden School Young Musicians Program (New Hampshire). Popebama was the featured artist at the 2019 Ball State Festival of New Music which included five evening-length performances by the duo, including an international Call-for-Scores. Popebama returned to Hamburg in March 2020, for the premiere of Fight Songs a collaboratively-composed, evening-length work as part of the Elbphilharmonie’s ‘Unterdeck’ Series, featuring Decoder Ensemble.
Roderick Coover is a film director/media artist and the creator of experimental and emergent cinematic arts work exhibited in art venues and public spaces such as the Venice Biennale Hyper-Pavilions, The Nobel Peace Prize Forum, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Documenta Madrid. He lives in Pennsylvania, USA, and Drôme, France.
Nick Montfort is the author of numerous computer-generated books of poetry including, among others #!, Autopia, The Truelist, and Hard West Turn and of the collaborative projects The Deletionist, Sea and Spar Between, and Renderings. Other books include Twisty Little Passages: An Approach to Interactive Fiction (MIT Press) and The New Media Reader (MIT Press).
