Screenshot from "Study on the Metaphysical Status of a Table"

  050 Study on the Metaphysical Status of a Table / 2022  

  Single-channel video version on Vimeo  

  Ambient/electronic music album on Bandcamp  

Study on the Metaphysical Status of a Table
Interactive a\v installation, performance, and full-length album, 2022

“Study on the Metaphysical Status of a Table” takes inspiration from filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film “Stalker” and composer Eduard Artemyev's soundtrack to the film. The first 5 seconds of Artemyev's synth drone sound prominent in the track “Meditations” was analyzed for its dominant frequencies, then reconstructed additively. The tones proved to be corresponding to an idiosyncratic tuning system (see below).

Using AI-based text-to-image models, an image approximately 20K x 4K pixels in resolution was stitched together. Using this image as a continuous texture, a 360-degree immersive virtual environment was created that enables interactive movement within the generated scenes. Using a game controller, a user may pan and zoom through the environment to trigger various sounds – field recordings, sparse melodies, breathing bass lines – supplementing the foundational drone. These spatially-triggered sounds were created within the same tuning system derived from Artemyev's drone.

On Vimeo, a 46-minute single-channel version of the piece was captured in real-time, with camera movement accomplished interactively via a game controller and sound being mixed automatically via spatial position. On Bandcamp, the album is a recording of an hour-long playthrough of the real-time interactive piece.

Continuing the focus on "ambient narrativity" established in previous works (see An Infinite Density Over Zero), "Study" explores audiovisual composition and control within an interactive virtual environment. The piece is also an experiment in incorporating novel AI-based techniques as a part of a larger creative workflow based in artistic concerns. The "sampling" of famous works of film and music is meant deliberately to emphasize the blurred boundaries of authorship with which our AI-enabled creative age has to come to terms.

Tuning system (subset derived from the first 5 seconds of Eduard Artemyev's track “Meditations” from his original soundtrack to “Stalker”):

A4 = 451Hz
C +30 cents
C# +10 cents
D +25 cents
E +28 cents
F +33 cents
F# +23 cents