Overview

What does nature look like and sound like if it was born from a computer? Exploring the agency within cybernetics and nature, Passage is a speculative audio-visual series that takes form as a real-time performance and interactive installation.

Passage explores the entanglement of natural and artificial systems through the narrative of a forest adapting to human vestige, long after the presence of their involvement. Underlined by a live score that blends electronic music with organic sounds, the audience is immersed in a rich ecosystem of cybernetic flora and fauna, simulated in a game engine with AI. Variables such as the gaze of the embodied camera perspective, micro-biomes, and time foster emergent behaviors that modulate and alter the audio and visual composition in real-time, creating a feedback loop between the performers and the techno-biosphere itself.

Performance - Passage_Chroniko

The performance version of Passage takes form as a POV journey through a speculative organism's one-day lifespan, as it traverses up a cybernetic forest in the mountains to witness the sunrise. It is performed by visual artist Kevin Peter He (US) and musician Torus (NL). Passage_Chroniko presented its first iteration to an audience of 1,200 people as the closing act of Diskokina, a real-time audiovisual club night at ZeroSpace in New York City featuring other headliners such as Fractal Fantasy and Team Rolfes, and has been performed at SIGGRAPH 2023 (Los Angeles) and A3 Festival 2024 (Melbourne, AU).

Installation - Passage_SoftRains

The installation version of Passage takes form as a cavernous multimedia space featuring screen based visuals, immersive 4D sound, and sculptural elements. The presence of the audience (detected by a fabricated Kinect camera sculpture) disrupt and orient an automated roaming camera, which fosters emergent behaviors from the AI governed creatures in the scene. Passage_SoftRains was presented at Onassis ONX in New York and the Museo de Artes Visuales in Bogota, Colombia.