lusted fleeting

lusted fleeting is a 68-minute fixed-media immersive-audio piece in five parts (plus coda) with optional live on-stage speaker and lighting effects. Aesthetic promiscuity interrupted by digital discontinuities, degradations, spectral and acoustic shifts, pauses, nostalgic machine noises, and jump-cuts create a meta-narrative that breaks the suspension of disbelief and the basking in immersive sound. Many of lusted fleeting’s rhythmically-focused sections were generated by algorithms extrapolated from one-dimensional cellular automata, in particular the so-called Wolfram Codes. Text is used on several levels, both in the foreground with clearly-audible spoken words and in the background as barely-audible, highly-processed hints of human presence. A bespoke generative (non-AI) algorithm was developed to process selected parts of a text that was (actually) generated by AI, and which reformed a speech from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to focus on femicide. This algorithm generates dozens of short statements which are read quite soberly, one after the other, at various junctures throughout the complete form. The title is taken from one of these: what light lusted fleeting breath. In addition, AI-generated voices are passed through an auto-tune processor that is driven by a fifteenth-century rondeau elaborated with a second voice by the composer. lusted fleeting is dedicated to the memory of Marisela Escobedo, murdered social activist and mother of a murdered teenage girl.

Lots more detail is available on this dedicated page.

For more demos see this YouTube playlist.