GRIDS

Igor Santos’s mirror scenes explores and questions ideas of immersion and the desire to dissolve boundaries and lose oneself. The mirror serves as a central theme—both as a tool and symbol for immersion as well as a connective thread throughout the work. mirror scenes makes use of found footage, found sounds, and mirror-like musical and visual techniques (palindromes, symmetrical microtonal scales, refrains, visual echoes, etc.), all joined in a mimetic cycle—constantly navigating between video, sound, and live performance, as well as back and forth in historical time.

Mud by Julie Herndon creates a collaborative conversation with the botanical world, locating relationships between live performers, vegetation, soil, and microbial life. Listeners hear plants responding to ensemble-generated sounds transmitted through soil and witness cycles of decay and renewal. With video by scientist/microscopist James Weiss, Mud draws connections between microscopic organisms and the larger living world in an act of co-creation.

GRIDS for networked ensemble is a modular collection of ten situations for seven musicians, composed for a dynamic, reactive audiovisual system. Composed by Jason Thorpe Buchanan and Christopher Chandler, the work is governed by the physical gestures and sound production of the musicians. The system generates an ever-shifting web of causal loops blurring boundaries between composition, improvisation, and rule-based constraint. GRIDS centers on themes of power & control in contemporary society. It explores the agency and roles of both individuals and groups while interrogating invisible systems and power structures—social, technological, and political—which govern, constrain, and enforce control.