Boat of Queen Mutemwia
April 7th, 2021Between all my recent projects focussed on field recording and acoustic ecology, I also continued my collaborations with Zürich-based composer Virgil Moorefield. I have known Virgil for over 20 years now, with our relationship dating back to when he was one of my professors in graduate school. It’s been nice to work with someone for that long as we continue to grow creatively, both as individuals and through our collaborations.
Work on this latest project began just before the COVID pandemic. He was working on a new composition called The Boat of Queen Mutemwia, inspired by a statue he had seen while visiting the British Museum. My role was developing a live visual instrument that allows for video panels to be “played” in real-time during performance like a musical instrument.
Designing the instrument used my extensive experience with Cycling’74 Max, but also required me to learn some new programming techniques in TouchDesigner. It will be interesting to see if I can bring some of this knowledge back into my teaching when I work with students on intermedia projects in the future.
Although the concert was initially delayed in hopes that we could have a live audience, it instead had to move forward as a livestream event only in April 2021. I couldn’t be there in person like we originally planned, since international travel out of Scotland was severely restricted and would have required long quarantine times on both ends of the trip. Despite this challenge, I still provided technical support to the team in Zürich from Aberdeen right up to the concert date using file sharing and frequent video calls.
Virgil and I are both extremely happy with the resulting 15-minute work, which can still be viewed on YouTube here:
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