Wayward Music Series: David Stout – 'The Janus Switch'
$5-$15 donation
The Janus Switch v.2 (2016) is a digital performance work merging live cinema and electronic sound in a poetic exploration of generative audio-visual feedback structures. Janus, the two-headed Roman god, was notable for his ability to look in two directions at once. He was known as the god of doorways and passages. The Janus Switch is a techno-poetic realization of these ideas, where signal streams are switched rapidly back and forth to create a wide range of sonic and visual interactions.
The system software, created by Cory Metcalf in collaboration with David Stout, allows for real-time mixing of mathematic data to create an evolving array of hybrid audio-visual forms and aesthetic behaviors. While the technical methods can be interesting in and of themselves, the work is driven by the visceral experience produced by the fleeting imagery that emerges in the process of navigating the system. The work is paradoxically highly composed and thoroughly improvisational. The image vocabulary, like music, reveals its source as a kind of fluid state of transitory becoming. What emerges for the viewer is a dynamic subjectivity, as the audience must actively complete the circuit to co-create the meaning or apparent “thingness” of what the mind and body is confronting.
In this process of “Janus Switching,” many things, places, and ideas come and go, including allusions to landscape, cellular life, plant forms, mechanistic structures, gateways, glyphs, and vessels, to name a few. All of the resulting sound comes from the direct sonification of the image processes. The sonification methods allow for working in both tonal/atonal and/or timbre-oriented modes, including a wide array of subtractive noise-based soundscapes.
About Wayward Music Series
Each month, Nonsequitur and a community of like-minded organizations and artists present 10 concerts of adventurous and experimental music in the gorgeous Chapel Performance Space at the Good Shepherd Center: contemporary/post-classical composition, free improvisation and the outer limits of jazz, electronic/electroacoustic music, new instruments, phonography, sound art, and other innovative musics.
https://www.waywardmusic.org/