Line: A 'performance/installation'

The performance-installation Line lies at the interstices of two long-term ongoing research concerns: The first is that of installation-oriented performances which together instantiate a critique of notions of immersivity based on placing the listener in an idealised (‘privileged’) central relationship within a multi-speaker sound diffusion installation (e.g. BEAST, Soundfield, Dolby Atmos). These are documented on the website (https://orpheusinstituut.be/en/projects/line ‘related research’) and include the 2007 Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts installation 'Proxemics: The world is a deaf machine' in which audience members moved wearing individual iPods which individually ‘completed/supplemented’ loudspeaker-based material and standing-wave phenomena, and a 2019 installation for the Robinson Library, Armagh based on the recorded voices of the city’s current inhabitants reflecting on the data from a 1770 city census. The second trajectory is the development of instruments which deploy feedback in a variety of ways (Virtual/Physical Feedback Flute – REF 2007 - feedback at every level from acoustic to ‘totality of world networked audio’*; ‘Line’ REF 2020 – alto flute/loudspeaker system deploying feedback at each level from acoustic to ‘historical musical activity’; Feedback Cello – enhanced acoustic feedback between all components e.g. instrument & bow – ongoing REF 2027?)*Cited in Oxford Handbook of Computer Music 2007Line also develops my ongoing concern with musical proxemics (proceeding from from the internal and intimate ‘outwards’ to the global and historical) and performance ecosystems which have featured in Waters 2007, Waters 2013 (developed by e.g. Green (2008, 2011, 2014), Haworth (2014, 2017*)). The concept of performance ecosystems (which stress the interdependences and contiguities between performer, instrument and environment) developed by Waters (and ex-research student Bowers) is widely cited in the discourse around technologised musics.The research shares characteristics with the work of my research colleague Nic Collins (Orpheus/SAIC) and Agostino di Scipio, while exhibiting both more explicitly improvisatory, and more explicitly ‘composerly’ tendencies.