TMT INSITUTE APPLICATION

about my work

I work with original composition, found media, and system manipulation to highlight the ways in which sound and media enable and disable communion across time and space as new media shifts the definitions of legacy, authorship, and meaning.

A found home VHS, a recording of the TikTok algorithm learning a user’s taste, an AI-generated voice over, and 500-year-old words out of a performer’s mouth all recall the past while embodying the present. Re-arranged, converted, and manipulated, these de-compositions present alternative meanings in re-imagined contexts; as I collage manipulated found works with original text and composition, I aim to generate new life from the magnetic tape in the dustbin. They connect the authors, performers, arrangers, and listeners, while pointing to the medium’s presence in the content of the work. This slippage of time, memory, and substance through mediation is a fixation of my practice, and in every show I’ve designed, these concepts have slipped in through the cracks.

Below you’ll find of examples of various work – sound art, music, visual material. My hope is that this gives you an idea of what I’ve been doing up until now, with the understanding that the goal is to combine these sensibilities into a holistic performance practice.

avpal

This work is an edited live work in which I operate four cassette decks, sent through effects processors, containing both found media and original compositions which I had recorded onto the text. Found media includes: various Tiktoks, an AI text-to-speech model reciting classical theater, “Take Me Home” by Phil Collins, original and traditional music, among much else.

Pictured on the left is a sculptural object and companion piece buily by myself with projection by Duncan Davies

POLEHIT.AIFF

I composed this work entirely in QLab (a software designed for audio-video playback in theater and other live performance) for an installation in 8-point surround; I have remixed it for stereo. It is an exploration of unconventional composition techniques, the degree to which one sample can be used for composition (the first three minutes use only two samples), and the boundaries between sound design, sampling, and music composition.

beeBO

This is a live recording of a performance in which I used four electric guitars with EBows (devices that vibrate guitar strings using magnets) balanced on the strings. To change notes / chords, I detuned the strings one by one. The composition was timed to a cut-up of found media – air traffic control recordings from the 2018 Horizon Air Incident, in which a ground service agent stole an unoccupied plane off of the tarmac at Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

A full transcript of the ATC recording can be found here.

Audio found here.

visual information

here are some photos i’ve taken and screenshots i’ve gathered – i think they give a good idea of my aesthetic sense outside of sound