Music, Illustration, and Animation by Kevin Anthony

Recourse is a work for live electronics and interactive narratives. It is an exploration into the world of composition-instruments. How complicated is affect? How simple can we make it? How much concern can we feel for two-dimensional shapes if they "emote" with pity-inducing animations? If my sympathies are so reactive to such artificiality, can I trust any pixel; any abstraction?

For live electronics and voice.

Text:

(The following is from William Morris' poem "Meeting in Winter")

Sweet is that, as all is sweet;

For the white drift shalt thou meet,

Kind and cold-cheeked and mine own,

Wrapped about with deep-furred gown

In the broad-wheeled chariot:

Then the north shall spare us not;

The wide-reaching waste of snow

Wilder, lonelier yet shall grow

As the reddened sun falls down.

-

Bottled up in a sealed container

Time like throwing knives piercing tattered sunlight

Rays crash falling in and out of a velvet ocean

Blistering heat scorching the inner parts of the soul

Blight spreading through the skin

Contrasting creatures see red

and they begin...

An audio-visual work for music and dance, in collaboration with Jacob Machmer. Premiered at the ICIT showcase, 2019 California.

The visually represented dialogue for Gatekeeper portrays the specificity of words while removing certain interpretable elements. The particle system (implemented using Unity's Visual Effect Graph) substitutes human speech with visible affect/emotion. The motion of the dialogue is controlled by the gestures of the dancer (Jacob Machmer). When holding the plant, the dancer's movements also control phatic audio gestures (mimicking animal or human origin). This allows for strict authorial control of the dialogue and music, while still enabling improvisational performance freedoms.