The collaboration started with Mani, one of the BA Performance: Design and Practice students at Central Saint Martins, reaching out to me through Instagram, proposing their group project to me and asking if I was interested. From what they described, it seemed pretty up my street, so I suggested we meet in person to discuss further. We initially talked about meeting at a rave, which felt appropriate given the project themes that would later emerge, but that didn’t end up happening. Instead, we met for the first time on 19th April at their apartment, along with the rest of the group.
The meeting was relatively productive, Zeen shared a Miro board with me that the group had been building as a kind of conceptual proposition for the project, a collection of ideas that laid out what they were working toward. We then sat together and added to it collaboratively, building out a physical mindmap of themes we might explore and how we could create cohesion between the sonic and visual elements of the work.
I found the bits they had put on the Miro board interesting, there were some themes and textures that I liked and felt I could respond to sonically. The group had developed an idea around simulation, hyperreality and control, drawing on ideas of the female body as something simultaneously powerful and constructed, “generated within” a system rather than entering it from outside. The figure at the centre of the work was described as almost divine but ultimately a product of code, embodying a paradox in which apparent freedom is actually a more refined form of regulation. To me a lot of the language and themes were reminiscent of AI, something which I find interesting to explore thematically but I’m opposed to using personally in my own creative work to generate ideas, sounds, or visuals.
The Korean mythological figure of the ‘haetae’ was referenced on the Miro board in a way that I found interesting, as a guardian that functions as an algorithmic system of control, a creature that “fractures and dissolves not into destruction, but into data.” Contextualising mythology through the lens of digital systems is a cool theme to explore, and gave me some ideas of what I might work on in terms of sonic direction.
Collaborators: Mani, Minseo, Zeen, BA (Hons) Performance: Design and Practice, Central Saint Martins.
Initial ideas: A video work engaging with hyperreality, simulation and Korean mythology (specifically the haetae), with sound functioning as a structural and atmospheric layer in dialogue with those themes.
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