Retina

A fifteen-minute performance for piano, live video and electronics, putting the classical idiom into a modern setting — a study in the kinetic relationships between sound, image, motion and space.

It takes its inspiration from the early cinematic practice of Étienne-Jules Marey, whose photographic studies of movement changed how we picture time and motion, and asks what the audiovisual material actually contains that lets a cinematic experience be built at all. How does narrative material develop? Does the modern listener attend differently? How should the material be presented now?

The sober electronic soundscape carries the image and gives the visual a dimension in sound and time, while the nostalgic, familiar piano bridges the early cinematic world and the present.