Elemental Agency is a piece concerned with an emergent gestural language that manifests across movement, sound and light. Rather than sound/light articulating movement, or movement driving media, the approach builds outward from gestural metaphors as a point of shared intersection for these phenomena. The work draws upon the metaphorical constructs of Japanese Godai and Indian Vaastu Shastra theories of five elements: earth, water, wind, fire and void/space. Working with conceptual metaphors drawn from these traditions, constraints are provided to the dancers of embodying a given element as a collective – a texture of movement, rather than a singular human entity, that manifests the non-human agency of a given element. Motivations related to world, body, motion, emotion and enaction are given: earth as stubbornness and resistance to change, wind as expansive, elusive and compassionate, fire as energetic and forceful, etc. Using machine learning methods, the sonic interaction designers seek to capture moments of gestural expression and fuse this with sounds that similarly embody a given elemental quality/profile. Negotiation between art forms leads to a collective choreography and sound design that emerges from the embodiment of the nonhuman elements and the mediation of the machine agents. Visual projection functions as both lighting and enhancement of embodied experience in space, rather than screen-oriented media experience. Spotlights both enhance elemental qualities as well as embodying behaviours that align with the constraints of the element metaphors: rigid tracking of movement within earth state, amorphous following within water state, tendency towards consumption in fire state, etc.

The pieces moves through short movements of distinct elements: water swells and then recedes into earth, which tectonically shifts before dispersing to the wind, dying down to invoke fire. Gestures and movement are recognized and mapped to sound and light output. The collective texture of these elements then shifts to the individual gesturality of each dancer, who singularly choose to embody a given element: moving from the collective texture of mono-element to the collision and transformation between elements, passing between dancers. The pervasive aether of machine listening recognizes gestures captured throughout the four-elements sections and re-inject loops of these into the performance: this aether ever-listening to elements, and re-performing its understanding of each dancers elemental offerings. Increased density and destabilization of dancers’ elemental transformations lead to an ascendance into the void: pure energy, beyond the everyday, a distribution/suspension/expansion of presence and expression. Void is devoid of any object-hood or gestural points of reference.

The piece rests in void state during its installation period. If audience members interact (browser via laptop or mobile device) with the elemental portal, they may bring the piece back into the world of a given elemental state. The performance space then invites interaction from audience.

Created for the Summer Solstice 2014 at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, NY and commissioned by Norte Maar. This piece involved the placement of hydrophones in the east river, and a process of improvisational auscultation of the underwater environment and transformation of the sound discovered on this longest day of the year.

This piece was described well (aside from fact these were live audio streams and not recordings!) in 2014 by Hyperallergic:

“Doug Van Nort presented an improvised performance based on audio recordings taken from the East River, on which the park is settled. The improvisation shifted between murky drones and deep earthly noise, as well as the occasional rhythmic popping. The sounds were entirely derived from signals transmitted from hydrophonic microphones placed in the river, displacing and relocating the unheard sounds of the aquatic environment above the surface.”

This quartet project involves Pauline Oliveros, Francisco López and Jonas Braasch. It brings together devoted improvisers on one hand and electroacoustic composers on the other. The project explores a new synthesis of improvised electro/acoustics, and studio-based composition. The process has been to begin with free improvisations, from which recordings are then crafted into personal compositions by each member (which have then found their way back into performance, thereby closing the loop). We released an album on Pogus in April 2011, which has received some very nice reviews. This can be purchases directly from me, from Pogus or at the iTunes music store.

Also, my piece Outer was featured in the film Leopardi (aka il Giovane Favoloso), directed by Mario Martone and starring Elio Germano. It was used to underpin an intense scene featuring only the main character, in the film’s final 3.5 minutes.

Excerpts  of my pieces from Quartet for the end of Space (Pogus, 2011):

While living closer to NYC, I had an active duo collaboration with composer Al Margolis, also known as If, Bwana (I am sure we will re-convene and pick back up when the moment presents itself.) In this project, Al uses acoustic instrumental recordings as source material and I begin from very small fragments of various recordings. A musical feedback loop is formed and sonic materials are traded, as I capture the large chunks of sound that Al has produced in order to re-sculpt and define new gestures, while Al captures my sound in order to transpose, stretch and loop the output. We have a release on Zeromoon (2011) that presents an unedited live performance in it’s entirety. “The result is a rich palette of sound informed by classic electronic composition, minimalist drone works, and modern noise music. Structure to chaos, drone to acoustic collages…”.

Here is an excerpt from that release:

I call this project FILTER: Freely Improvising, Learning and Transforming Evolutionary Recombination system. It is both a design of an “intelligent” interactive machine performer and a generative composition – a system endowed with a universe of possible musical actions that fits with my own aesthetic and approach to electroacoustic improvisation. My interest was in creating a system that could listen to the textural and gestural qualities as well as the stylistic tendencies of a performer and to take musical actions, improvising as a partner with the player and using their own audio as source material. FILTER does this by recombining, transforming and re-presenting this material in a radically new form as a new musical offering, in dialogue with its human partner. In some sense, I consider this as a project that is a reflection and genetic re-creation of what I would do as an improvising “laptop musician” with my GREIS instrument — wherein I often capture sounds on the fly while transforming them.

Below is an excerpt of a performance sesions with FILTER and Sam Sowyrda (of Cloud Becomes your Hands and the Dan Deacon live band). I like this one because Sam uses a wide timbral variety of objects, and because he is a Deep Listener who respects the system as a fellow player. This is clear in that the dynamics are well matched; also I find the interplay quite nice wherein Sam sometimes takes the lead and FILTER created textural layers or loops, while other times it switches to more varied events and Sam creates his own rhythmic “loops” in support of this. Listen for the materials selected by the machine, and realize that there is no human hand in terms of decision making (content, dynamics, timing, etc.).

A second, more recent example is a set with percussionist Paul Hession at Cafe OTO in London, as part of the Musical MetaCreation event (“MUME @ NIME”), curated by Ollie Bown. In this excerpt, sometimes FILTER is very clearly doing machinic things (e.g. long drone, phase vocoder-sounds) and at other times it is creating new patterns from the sonic material Paul had played previously. It listens to what he is doing in the moment and plays with him. I like this section because they collectively modulate their intensity and density.

Finally, I approached the trio Triple Point as an important test bed for developing FILTER. Here are some tracks from our 3-CD set “phase/transitions” which feature the system as a fourth performer:

GREIS (pronounced “grace”) is the Granular-Feedback Expanded Instrument System. my ever-evolving performance system and digital music instrument that is now 16 years in the making. GREIS is Created in Max/MSP – a collection of many custom modules from various sub-projects I’ve done over the years. The system focuses on sculpting and re-shaping recorded or live-captured sounds through spectral and textural transformations, largely performed with hand gestures on a Wacom tablet (right hand) while modulating the sound or the nature of the control/mapping in some way (left hand). The unit of a “grain” – which may be e.g. a temporal fragment, a single partial or a transient component – is dispersed to different processes and fed-back through the system. GREIS includes granular and spectral analysis/synthesis, complex mapping techniques and generative processes that surprise me with machine-based decisions, forcing me to react in the moment. The system is intended for the total flexibility of free improvisation, and I often play with acoustic musicians – sometimes using their sound as source material. In other projects and solo, I work with particular sets of recorded material, grouped according to their qualities and re-called in the moment of performance for sculpting and transformation. A more recent focus of this work is in designing ways to navigate large databases of sound files grouped by their sonic qualities, and re-call these in an improvised fashion. (A form of “timbre space” navigation). This manual approach to sculpting recorded sound is something I refer to as multidimensional turntablism. In more recent years, I have begun performing with voice, both as source material and also as another means to sculpt recorded sounds, using audio mosaicing techniques combined in a unique way with vocal-cross synthesis methods, as illustrated in the below diagram:

In performing with this system I am focused not only on improvised sonic sculpting using hands and voice, but also interacting with the immediate past in a way that is nonlinear and which presents new gestural modulations into the musical mix in order to create coherent sonic structures over time. This performance practice with GREIS thus leads to my being able to immediately shape sound objects in both dramatic and subtle ways, and to achieve a particular musical structure by building loops, textures and layers “by hand” in collaboration with the machine. Sonic gestures are thus a very essential part of my work, while theatrical gestures are not my central concern. I think of the system as a complex dynamical system that has a memory and hysteresis, like an acoustic instrument. From an interaction design point of view, I think in terms of metaphors when designing and performing with GREIS: sculpting, navigating but also “grabbing” and “throwing” sounds in performance. Below is a diagram that represents the internal memory and sonic gestural representations of the system:

Meanwhile, here is a screen shot from one possible orientation of the GREIS software:

Sound examples of me performing with the system can be found on the Triple Point project page. More detailed information on the design of GREIS can be found in the following publication:

Doug Van Nort, Pauline Oliveros and Jonas Braasch, “Electro/Acoustic Improvisation and Deeply Listening Machines”, Journal of New Music Research, 42(4), pp. 303-324, December 2013.