ON TOUCHING

2019

Intermedio (Eric Blyth, Sam Ferris-Morris, Erin Sansalone, Ashley Walton, Justin West)

Sound is physical, emerging from and continuously shaped by dynamic interactions between musical environments, materials and bodies. Bodies listen, transfer, and perform sound as it traverses aural, tactile and spatial dimensions. In On Touching participants engage in a collective exploration of sound as it expands across multiple bodies and mediums. Participants form a cybernetically enhanced choir connected by touch sensors through which they collectively dictate change in pitch, playback audio, and tempo. As these interactions unfold they generate an environment that can both obscure and amplify the intention of its inhabitants. The multi-sensory presence that emerges challenges the relationship between component parts and the whole, where individual actions and their implications are indistinguishable from those of the group. Participants act and are acted upon by touch, as their interactions create and are driven by their experience of being enveloped within this collective sound. Every performance becomes a unique experimentation with the ability to communicate, to convey, to be misunderstood, and to be altered.