Maelstrom

How does spatial medium convey non-textual languages through the depth of repetitive musical pattern? How do we survive in the chaotic environment of nowadays sensory overload and embrace the future of uncertainty?

Maelstrom is a spatial instrument and audio-visual installation performed by the audience. It offers a means to navigate the whirlpool of overwhelming messages by providing an accessible audio-driven pattern recognition tool. Based on habits and memories of the past, the tool helps users to reorient themselves through recursive patterns of sound and visual in space, to further take decisive and mutual impacts on the ever-evolving environment. By challenging the capabilities and perceptive process of human brain, it critiques the politics of art and technology and sensory hierarchy of the prevailing ocular-centric culture.

Marshall McLuhan recognized parallels of today to Edgar Allan Poe’s novel “A Descent into the Maelström” – when a sailor gets caught in a maelstrom, by observing the pattern of objects in the vortex and grabbing onto the recurring ones, he finally escaped the chaotic situation. The instrument ‘Maelstrom’ is a journey through multi-sensory vortex, showing new perspectives upon the humanity and technologies. Guided by predictable musical patterns in turbulence, we navigate through a landscape of maps transformed by AI interaction, in which memories and habits allow us to adapt to the ever-evolving environment. Immersed in projection and spatial audio, audience tweaks a controller to move in the soundscape from chaotic center of the overwhelming vortex, to outer boundary of dim acoustic space. Audio informs movement and movement reshapes audio – with our innovative spatial music framework, the project delivers a user-performed multi-branch music structure, exploring beyond sonification, audio-spatialization and visualization. It interpretes musical progression as a spatial-temporal logic of all sensory elements, offering decision and cognition support.