Palaver

Palaver is an improvisational multimedia performance in which two components – live synthesized music and projected live-rendered environments – interact and affect each other’s development. The performance follows the musical and visual narrative of a flower’s life cycle - germination, flowering, fruiting, seed dispersal and death - in a lush world that is foreign to ours, yet mirrors it in many ways. This project translates the nuance and subtleties of human performance into animated ecosystems that are responsive in real time. By using musical and tactile improvisation to converse with this system, we aim to capture the spontaneity and adaptability of our world in a constantly changing environment. We can’t ultimately control or predict change, but we can respond to it and adapt to it in the same way a saxophonist can respond to an unanticipated chord change, or in how a digital moss simulation can grow around a new object in the space.

Palaver reacts to human touch in a generative and unpredictable way, embracing mistakes and spontaneity, always generating something new. In this way, “nothing is wasted, or a failure”, something new emerges “that makes use of everything in the iterative process”*. New situations - orderly or chaotic - can be embraced and we can find peace, insight and beauty in the idea that we truly don’t know what comes next. In this strange, beautiful and transient context, everyone becomes a child trying to make sense of the world again.

‍