Cloud Chamber

Cloud Chamber is a ‘solo project’ based around the danceroom Spectroscopy system. Where that is intended as a large-scale installation, interacting the the public, dancers (Hidden Fields), or musicians (Molecular Music), this is an audiovisual performance which takes away the physical/human interaction, and instead focuses entirely on the interaction between sound, image and the physics simulation.

I perform using the danceroom Spectroscopy software as an instrument. It runs on two machines, one running the visual/physics engine (primarily written by Phill Tew) and another running the audio engine (written by myself and Tom Mitchell). It’s essentially a complex feedback system: sound and image don’t control each other directly, but both are controlled by the physics system, and both can in turn control and influence the physics. This makes the behaviour somewhat chaotic (it’s never the same twice!), but also quite organic and responsive to ‘play’. I like the results from an audiovisual perspective too, where the indirect relationship between sound and image provides connections that are not too obvious or predictable.