Premiered at the Irish Sound Science and Technology Association Conference ISSTA 2017.
Sept 7-8 2017, at Dundalk Institute of Technology, Ireland
Sabine Bürger and Rosalía Soria Luz: THE SILVER KEY
AV Installation (video, audio)
This audio-visual collaboration between Mexican composer Rosalía Soria Luz and German video artist Sabine Bürger literally originated from within ISSTA 2015 when the two authors first had the opportunity to immerse themselves in each other’s work. The music is a 16-channel audio composition inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s 1926 short story “The Silver Key”, part of his “Dreamlands” series. In the story a silver key unlocks gates of space and time, offering access to an alternative dimension of vast cities and lands. The music consists of five sections as a metaphorical allusion to these dreamlands, conceived as synthetic sound spaces. The source materials include recordings of a koto and synthetic sounds created using mathematical models. Sound transformations, timbres, behaviours and trajectories are largely based on this model’s behaviours. A stereo version of the piece provided the basis for the visuals.
The visuals were created in response to the music, generating an intuitive visual equivalent to its expressive qualities and its movement from a mathematical origin towards the emotive. The audio piece, rather than relying on an overall theme repeated throughout, offers instead a sequence of differing autonomous elements strung together, which could be best mirrored by continually introducing new visual components throughout the piece. In that respect the visuals evolved in a linear process, as fragments were created in chronological order, reacting to the piece as it progressed.