This essay is a thorough documentation of the live music performance "Pulsations [Bitumen]" realized under the author's artist moniker 'Marcel Zaes' in 2018. The author presents the inspirational field around instabilities at the boundaries of "digital" and "analog" when crossing from digital to analog or vice versa, and illustrates the "meta instrument" that has been designed for this performance: four human violists interfacing with generative, graphic notation provide the organic timbre, while the temporal contour of their sounds is digitally constructed. This discussion reflects performative roles during live performance, references to African American popular music, the use of mechanical pulse and quantization, conceptualized stutters and swarms, and graphic notation. In different readings of the work, the author outlines "digital analogies;" that is, metaphors that add meaning to the audio-visual piece of art. The main focus of this essay is how this system for performance was consciously designed for instability, that is, for precarious moments during performance that are characterized by not knowing.
Sagesser, Marcel,
"Seeking the Unstable: A Practice Amidst Digital Analogies"
(2018).
Computer Music and Multimedia Composition Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/gr5z-8k05
