Today I went to the n-Topia performance at the Conference on World Affairs here on campus! n-Topia took place at the Fiske planetarium and consisted of a woman (named Janet) making an interesting soundscape on an acoustic guitar and generative images being projected.

As a traditionally taught guitar player I was very intrigued to see how Janet was making each sound. But, I was pretty confused at first because I couldn’t figure out if the guitar noises were actually controlling the visuals that were showing up on the screen. Turns out, that is the nature of the project, but for the sake of presenting at CWA they had the visuals pre-rendered and Janet was simply playing along.

During the experience I was enjoying being mindful of where my thought process was going. It was not a very emotionally evocative experience, but I did find myself really engaging with the sense of motion and traveling through space as the images moved. As if I was almost invested in where we were going.

In a Q&A session after the performance, Janet invited her co-worker Monica up to the stage to converse with the audience. Monica was in charge of sound design, and used Max MSP to manipulate the input from the guitar. She also did a bit of explaining about how the visuals were generated, layering images in a program called TouchDesigner. The two of them also talked about how they wanted to create an experience of traveling from beginning to end in a way, rather than “pretty entertainment.” They said that they wanted to incorporate a sense of “utopia vs dystopia,” and maybe even show that dystopia is more beautiful and enjoyable. While I respect their artistic vision, I wouldn’t have thought about dystopia based on the experience itself, and I personally don’t see anything wrong with pretty entertainment! Especially when it’s something that a team of incredibly talented artists and engineers worked on for years.

Overall I wished that since it was meant to be enjoyed with live input from the guitar generating the visuals, we would’ve seen that happen. I was a little distracted with trying to figure out if it was live or not, and I think fully live or fully recorded would have been better than half and half. Also, since there was no premise to the narrative of their project, the “utopia vs dystopia” concept didn’t really stand on its own. Which is interesting for me to realize now that we’ve been talking a lot about concept in our class! And since we want our projects to be able to stand on their own, with little to no artist input before somebody engages with it.