Pendulum

Pendulum is an improvised live electronics and visuals performance, created in collaboration with Steph Horak. It was presented at Sonorities festival 2018 at the Sonic Lab of the Sonic Arts Research Centre, Queen's University Belfast.

The main idea for the piece is, on the one hand, to explore, based on our own texts and sound-based practice, the apparently ‘instinctive’ human tendency towards constructing dichotomies in dealing with complex issues. We had conjectured that the existence of such a seemingly ‘natural’ inclination is a basis for the emergence of many forms of technology including the digital. To that aim, we surveyed various uses of binary oppositions within our own poetic and reflexive writings and picked a number of texts, which reflected those in relation to the notion of ‘difference’ with regards to issues of identity, gender, race, culture, and politics. On the other hand, we were keen to reflect on digital music media’s capacity to ‘reopen creative agency’ (Born 2005, 26) through ‘decomposing’ the ‘aural and visual objects into basic binary representations’ (ibid, 28); an underlying driving force responsible for the emergence and burgeoning of a digital arts and experimental electronic music scene in Iran that has been subject to scrutiny in this text. In this context, pendulum’s aim from my perspective was also to respond to a relatively recent, and still very niche, interest within EEMSI in relation to live improvised electronic music performances; a form which has been almost completely absent from the scene’s live repertoire.