Performance: Finger Reunited from richard windeyer on Vimeo.
Cameron McKittrick (theremin, laptop) & Richard Windeyer (drums, laptop) at ‘Wired’ (Laurier Music Festival, Wilfrid Laurier University, January 31, 2016)
Last January (2016), Cameron McKittrick and I revived our digital performance project ‘Finger’ for an alumni reunion concert at the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty of Music. Once upon a time, Cam and I were both composition students there. More recently, we both worked there as sessional instructors in composition and music technology — which is essentially how the Finger project came to be.
In this performance, Cam’s instrument consists of theremin-controlled piano samples which are activated and organized through MaxMSP software. My drum kit uses acoustic MIDI trigger data to manipulate a granular synthesis engine containing a vocal improvisation recorded by longtime friend, collaborator, and spoken word artist, Angela Rawlings.
Although our improvisation was brief, it seemed to succeed as a performance — or so it seemed based on post-concert conversations with audience members. This was (I suspect), partially due the fact that we intentionally chose NOT to focus our attention on the screens of our laptops, something which has become a persistent condition of so many laptop-based performances. Instead, we focused on anticipating, interpreting and reacting (sonically) to each other through our respective physical (especially facial) gestures.
It seems to me that one primary consequence of any performance that employs computers is that it renders far too much of the actual ‘work’ of performance invisible to the viewer. Our solution here, simply put, was to transfer the perception of that work to the interplay of two human bodies struggling to formulate — and then exchange — informational cues in realtime.
Much more to be explored here (I think, I hope).
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Richard C. Windeyer 