Wasteland2023
For solo performer, live electronics, and 29.4 channel diffusion.
Premiered March 9, 2023
Stockholm - Kungliga Musikhögskolan
Credits
Wilson Tanner Smith
Concept, Direction, Performer
Aaron Gochberg
Electronics, Sound Design
“This place is a message, and part of a system of messages. Pay attention to it!” – Scandia National Laboratories (1993)
DESCRIPTION “Wasteland is a psycho-monodrama created for the 29.4-channel speaker dome at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. A person finds themself cast into an unfamiliar, abject, and alienating landscape and variously tries to make sense of it, cowers in fear from it, seeks employment from it. Analogizing the imposing and quite alienating speaker dome to something like the postapocalyptic earthworks originally proposed for the US-based nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), it asks the question: if each thing humanity creates is an expression of its/our values, what do we do when we find this creation to be truly terrible?” – Wilson Tanner Smith
TECHNICAL NOTESThe ambiguous relationship between the performer’s character and the “acousmatic space” became the focus of the digital systems I developed for this work. Mediated by Max/MSP, the performer’s vocal fragments became the substance of a constructed soundscape through realtime manipulation. In anthropomorphic terms, the soundscape was given its own code of behavior, and allowed to make its own decisions. IRCAM’s SPAT was employed to create an immersive three-dimensional sonic environment.
In it’s second iteration, the sound spatialization was reconfigured for the custom-built CLEAT speaker system at Elastic Arts, which consists of 16 suspended hemispherical speaker clusters (each containing 6 loudspeakers).
Additional documentation and video of prototype-performance available on Smith’s website here.