Light Organs and Trippy Fish

Last Friday I had a show where I performed with a light machine. There was nothing performative about how device lit up, it was a machine being played by an algorithm (which has its own kind of poetry). But it started me thinking about how light can be performative. The ways in which I'd been exposed to this concept were mostly in the genre of EDM, where I'm always confronted by the mystery of whether or not what I am seeing was truly live or if the performer, like my light organ, was really just an algorithm in a shiny hat.

Then I thought about the antithesis of EDM: technical performance, like the kind our own Jeff Alder does. Jeff performs live with a real, physical lighting interface with the intention of never being seen.

But then I thought about musicians. I thought about how instruments respond to movement with such sensitivity to express human emotion with sound. Applied to my exploration of controlled light, could I create a light instrument with the same sensitivity and visible performative nature as an instrument?

So in the interest of curiosity, and as a way to explore how I was bending light for Here, There, Anywhere... I started building a model for an analog light piano I call Pedal Reactor. Here's how it works:

I know, pretty darn simple right? By design, there isn't supposed to be much mystery between what my fingers are doing and how it affects the light. I like the idea of the audience not having to focus on how things work, but instead how well they work.

Which, incidentally, means I'll have to learn to play my own instrument with some level of competence sooner rather than later. Wish me luck.

On a different note, I haven't abandoned my holograms. Last week I started combining my transparencies with reflective plastic surfaces and videos to create this demonstration: