persistence machine for AIYA improvisation machine, midi keyboard+sensors, and live electronics/visual projections.
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composition, system design, visuals, performance by Melody Chua.
sounds and visuals are performed in real-time, with light editing for the studio version.
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“so much of our lives are governed by the need to runthan the need to feel.”
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creating this work was a process of reflecting upon the histories of my family, specifically the conditions surrounding our immigrations across generations, of the need to escape, the need to strive, and how my aesthetic as a musician has been unconsciously and indelibly molded by this.
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after several interviews with my grandmother, 94, I noticed an uncanny congruence between her stories and my aesthetic tendencies towards quick, flying gestures, and how I revel in oceans of density and semi-controllable chaos. Even if the sound appears ‘still,’  I find a way to listen to the micro-storms bubbling from the inside, threatening to burst. Inside of me is the constant urge to run...for very long and very far.
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My grandmother speaks of defiance, navigating indeterminacy, of finding the closest thing to ‘home’—a faith, a people—and how important is to see through the illusion of permanence, that life and death are in constant movement within each other. In this work, her words are transformed into poems and presented as a perpetual dance between pixels and discernible words. Underpinning this is the desire to understand the text—but I try to create a space where interpreting the text through its pixelated textural form can be just as important as interpreting the text through readable words. Perhaps one can learn to become comfortable in these liminal, nomadic spaces...
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This work is part of a series of composed improvisation systems for the artistic research project “Developing a Visual Framework for Musical Improvisation Machines: Investigating Impacts on Human-Machine Interaction, Posthuman Identity, and Performance Narrative.”  Featured in the research project is an improvisation machine (AIYA, developed by Melody Chua), which by itself is a software of algorithmic processes and AI, and having no inherent physical or visual form. AIYA is given a visual form through each of the compositions in the series—different for every piece. Each piece is therefore an investigation into how the different visual and physical representations of the machine influence the intersubjectivity between human and machine performers.
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Thematically, performing with the improvisation machine is a practice in “getting to know an ‘othered’ being.” What hierarchies arise and how can we navigate them through new forms of communication and modes of expression? The important focus of learning a piece with the improvisation machine is not learning ‘what’ to do, but rather developing an intuition for the behaviors of the machine and navigating them in a process of co-creation.
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This work was originally premiered by Maryam Mehraban at the SONify! Festival in Graz, Austria.