The Wild Beast

Audio Visual Live Performance

 

This work emerges from the spatial and material conditions of the Wild Beast Concert Hall at CalArts. Rather than treating the venue as a neutral container, the architecture and its constituent objects actively informed the structure of the piece. Sound and image evolved through a reciprocal process: musical decisions shaped the visual forms, while emerging visual structures fed back into the sonic composition. Over time, neither medium functioned as an origin or endpoint; each continuously transformed the other.

Moments of extreme intensity—followed by sudden disappearance—play a central role in the work. These absences are not treated as silence or emptiness, but as perceptual thresholds where hearing begins to operate like sight, and seeing begins to register as a form of listening. Through this oscillation, sound acquires a tactile presence, while images behave less as representations than as energetic events. Visual elements are translated into sound, and those sounds, in turn, generate new visual configurations. Texture, color, and rhythmic structures remain tightly coupled, forming a single, interdependent system.

The work deliberately moves away from the conventional screen-based image that dominates everyday experience. Instead, images are situated within physical space, embedded in objects that mediate between sound and vision. These material elements allow the audience to encounter audiovisual relationships as spatial and embodied phenomena rather than as parallel media streams.

At the core of the performance is a custom-built modulated wavetable synthesizer. Each wavetable is generated either through mathematical functions or derived from external sound files, and all wavetables continuously modulate one another. This system mirrors the conceptual framework of the piece: a network of interdependent processes in which no element remains fixed, and meaning emerges through ongoing transformation.

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