Echoes
With Irina Kruchinina, Performance Studies, UNC Chapel Hill, and Dennis Parker, LSU School of Music
Echoes is a performance about the latency of human sensory experience.
Perception is never simultaneous with the world. Light and sound take time to arrive, nerves take time to carry, and the brain takes time to assemble what it receives into a present moment. What we experience as now is already slightly past. The piece takes that gap and makes it visible.
The LED wall runs a live feed of the camera pointed at the stage, so the performers appear inside the environment they are performing in, always fractionally behind the moment being captured. The wall then shows that image to the camera again. Each pass compounds the delay, and the stage fills with successively older versions of itself.
The effect is a hall of mirrors in time rather than in space. Ripples of overlapping moments slow the audience's temporal experience until the boundary between what is happening and what has happened stops holding. Perception diffuses. The instrument producing that effect is the studio's own infrastructure, turned back on itself.
The piece was developed with cellist Dennis Parker and performance scholar Irina Kruchinina, now Teaching Assistant Professor in Performance Studies at UNC Chapel Hill.