Oceans Like Us
In collaboration with the artist Marina Zurkow, I contributed sound design and score over a family of iterations for her generative animation project “Oceans Like Us.’ Zurkow’s animations weave together visual layers of background, materials, and imaginative oceanic characters, provoking important questions around environmental pollution and sustainability. It was an honor to shape the personalities of these multilayered pieces from a sonic perspective.
UPDATE: The work has evolved into a physical installation for 150 Media Stream lobby in Chicago running from October 2021 - January 2022, where the animation is broken out across a number of thin vertical LED screens and my score and sound design elements play from spatial speakers. So excited to see this gorgeous work add new visual layers and exist in such a large and public setting.
“Oceans Like Us” orginally debuted as a generative triptych installation for screens and spatial speaker array at bitforms gallery in NYC, February 2020. As part of the larger show “Wet Logic”, the OLU triptych was brought to life thru code that randomizes and orchestrates when certain layers and characters will appear on screen. My sound design and musical score elements were triggered when their corresponding visual elements were revealed, which meant that a generative approach had to be considered a la Brian Eno’s Music For Airports because all three pieces shared one acoustic environment. It added up to one spatial audio experience that continually evolved with new overlapping patterns and harmonies over time.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in NYC prevented the show from running its full month, and so we evolved the work into new directions.
Marina and I also translated the work into a looping 3 minute video which could play in perpetuity, which my corresponding score and sound design supported. This piece, entitled “Oozy” was traded amongst other digital artists in an edition of 10 as part of a collaborative NFT project called a2p.