Drill Wide Open
2010–12
Program Length – 30 minutes
Drill Wide Open is a musical work merging 3D animation, electronic sound and visual abstraction into a unique form of live cinema performance. The composition is influenced by multiple genres and diverse disciplinary approaches including early analog video art, noise music and current scientific data visualization techniques. DWO is an audio-visual meditation on the dramatic landscape of the American southwest. The resulting visual atmospheres, geometries and color palettes are abstractions inspired by the wide, open vistas of west Texas, the vibrant sculpted landscapes of New Mexico and the neon artifice of Los Vegas. This region, shaped by many millennia of sun, water and wind, is held sacred by the indigenous cultures who make their homes in the cities, plains, deserts, canyons and mountains. At the same time, powerful industrial interests continue an aggressive agenda to extract all the available oil, natural gas, uranium and other mineral riches through invasive and often poisonous technologies. As the consumer population advances, vast tracts of land are covered with new housing developments that require precious water from the last remaining desert rivers. This unrelenting drive to take every material resource at any cost has enormous ecological, and social consequences. In essence, we can see a longstanding and archetypal conflict between the human forces of materialism and the universal integrity represented by animistic cultures worldwide that seek to preserve a balanced and healthy relationship to the earth. This conflict between opposing worldviews guides the dramatic development of the DWO performance.
Composed and performed by David Stout, DWO utilizes an interactive software instrument developed in collaboration with artist-programmer, Cory Metcalf. The system integrates audio, video and algorithmic 3D processes with a gestural sensor interface that allows the performer to directly animate a select database of mathematically generated visual forms. The mathematic data that creates the visual forms is also used to create digital sound oscillators. The effect of this simultaneous process is that the visual forms are seen to produce their own autonomous sounds. The performer then mixes these polyphonic sound-streams through a series of parallel signal processes including various types of modulated delay, pitch shifting, ring modulation, tuned distortion, feedback circuitry, amplitude and envelope following, resonant and formant filtering, bit-crushing, etc. The instrumental technique is unique in that the performer manipulates the virtual visual objects as a means of “playing” or “sculpting” the sound. This, “hands in the air” gestural approach is enabled by an infrared interface similar in both instrumental approach and dramatic function to a theremin. The resulting imagery and audio-visual structures are continually reconfigured through recombinant digital folding, 3D visual feedback, morphological extrusion and fractured data shredding.
