27b/6 Teaser Trailer
27b/6 Full Performance
27b/6 (2017)
27b/6 is an inefficient and disobedient instrument. It is an impossibly bureaucratic, 18-foot long machine. 27b/6 utilizes its theatrical and sculptural qualities to create a narrative of hopeless, repetitive action that emulates some of the more impenetrable bureaucratic systems of everyday life.
27b/6 consists of a Bela embedded computing platform/sensor board loaded with a Pure Data patch. The interface is nothing but switches, two relays, and two lightbulbs, connected to the PD patch via the Bela. The 18-foot enclosure is wood carved with CNC router.
The PD patch is similar to many of my interactive systems: it allows some human control over sound (synthesis- and sample-based), but the system regularly interferes, intervenes, and disables the human input. As a result, compositional form is composed in realtime through the fragmentation and interruption of musical phrases.
27b/6 is at once an instrument, a composition, and an interactive system. All of these identities function simultaneously and influence the others. They interact with the human performer, expanding and contracting the performer’s ability to interface with 27b/6. I figure this performance scene as the diagram shown here.
27b/6 is my perhaps my most extreme reconfiguration of the performer-instrument relationship. The performer rarely has any say in how sound is produced and their moments of control are dictated by the instrument. In fact, 27b/6 goes as far as to actually perform the human by requiring them to walk back and forth between the different and unreliable control interfaces.
27b/6 is intentionally absurd in order to convey some of its themes, specifically its emulation of crushing bureaucracy and the reconfiguration of the performer-instrument relationship. It is heavily inspired by Stanislaw Lem’s series of sci-fi stories The Cyberiad and Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil.