Overview

Passage is a speculative audio-visual performance that journeys through a simulated ecology created by artist Kevin Peter He and musician Torus (aka Joeri Woudstra), where the ecosystem becomes a live instrument alongside the performers. It takes form as a POV journey through a speculative organism's one-day lifespan, as it traverses up a cybernetic forest in the mountains to witness the sunrise.

Passage asks the question, “What does nature look like and sound like if it was born from a computer?” The performance explores the entanglement of natural and artificial systems through the narrative of a forest adapting to human vestige, long after the presence of their involvement. Underlined by a live score that blends electronic music with organic sounds, the audience is immersed in a rich ecosystem of cybernetic flora and fauna, simulated in a game engine with AI. Variables such as the gaze of the embodied camera perspective, micro-biomes, and time foster emergent behaviors that modulate and alter the audio and visual composition in real-time, creating a feedback loop between the performers and the techno-biosphere itself.

Expanded

Exploring the agency within cybernetics and nature, Passage is a speculative audio-visual performance.

The audience is fully immersed in an embodied perspective, experiencing the world through the eyes of a speculative organism, as they traverse a forest overtaken by a gentle cybernetic force. This force forms a symbiotic relationship with the flora and fauna of the forest, giving rise to a delicate techno-biosphere. Oak trees are enveloped in metallic wires, progressively uprooting them as they mature. Sika deer fawns with elongated exoskeleton limbs roam the woodland in search of a pulsing fruit high up in the branches. Heatsink-like structures split open rocks and cliffs, providing photosynthesis properties under the gaze of a giant sun. The cinematic journey begins underground and ventures deeper into its depths as night falls, eventually settling at the cliffside as the sun rises. The musical score evolves from an ethereal hum to a pulsating rhythm, ultimately culminating in Torus’ original composition Chroniko.

Passage traverses the realm of the uncanny, born from the inherent tension between digital technology and nature. Biomes are meticulously crafted as pixels, simulated and consumed, operating continuously on a computational level. What does nature look and sound like if it was born out of a computer? How can we imagine a post-anthropocene reality where nature, after the irreversible intervention of humans, can reclaim their agency? What happens when the separation between natural and artificial systems starts to blur? Passage presents a speculative scenario that invites us to consider these questions and embrace the changes they may bring.

The scenery of Passage is crafted using macro photogrammetry scanning technology of broadleaf flora & fauna paired with imaginative sculpting in Zbrush and procedural modeling in Houdini. The project is brought to life in Unreal Engine, with AI governing the emergent behaviors of the digital ecosystem. The piece is accompanied by a generative score layering specimen sounds gathered from the natural world with live experimental electronic music, which programmatically change depending on the space, time, and creatures encountered in the experience.

Passage presented its first iteration to an audience of 1,200 people as the closing act of Diskokina, a real-time audiovisual club night at ZeroSpace in New York City featuring other headliners such as Fractal Fantasy and Team Rolfes. Since Diskokina, Passage has been reworked and its second iteration features an entirely original composition by Torus and collaborators such as Matthew Gantt with a new audio infrastructure geared towards more generative sound.

Images

Credits

Project in collaboration with Joeri Woudstra (aka Torus)