My Prayers Are Made of Silicon: Purify
for networked motion controller quartet, fixed and live electronics, and laptop screens
suggested listening: (1:30- 3:00), (5:50- 6:35), (7:30-8:30)
My Prayers Are Made of Silicon began as an evening-length commission but whose development was curtailed due to the onset of the pandemic. In response, Purify was written as an exploratory microcosm that could be realized by performers sheltering at home and in various parts of the country.
The vision for the work was to explore what a communal sacral process could look like when separated by screens and/or digital interfaces. The result was, perhaps ironically, a sacralization of those same mediated forces, set in a hyperbolic reality wherein religiosity is a digitized practice.
The work draws performers into a cyberpunk ritual with my laptop and their screens. Each performer’s movements are wirelessly configured to control parameters of a “master” computer (played by my own laptop), which then outputs sound into a shared Zoom call. This computer also streams a scrolling “score” to each performer. Each performer’s score is made of a video that mirrors choreography while beaming a sequence of colored lights onto the performers.
This work is divided into three major sections, each with their own ritual function. Drawing from a variety of cyberpunk and religious literature, the movements are designed to loosely embody the actions of cutting, pasting, and sharing, three of the primary tools in digital text-editing. These movements are accompanied by three distinctive sonic palettes – a granular engine comprised of heavily processed samples, downtempo synth wave commonly associated with the 1980s capitalistic vision of the future, and Palestrina’s Jesu, rex admirabilis. The three work to paint a chronologically porous view of religiosity, making past and future projections of faith part of a singular, anthropomorphized continuity.
The documentation your are viewing of the work is of a live Zoom recording conducted in 2021. I was interested in the poetry of a telecommunication format, the homogenizing of users in a group call, and the voyeurism of watching someone on camera. I was also particularly interested in the information communicated when you can tell that someone on a call is looking at a different tab or window, usually by noticing a change of lighting on their body or face.
In an exhibition, a series of Zoom “breakout rooms” have audience members confronted with a series of flashing lights and text prompts. This culminates in the audience attending a webinar featuring 50 bots and the four performers of the ritual. Each bot has a pre-recorded camera that documents, on webcam, a person watching a video of flashing lights. The technology for this was popularized in anonymous online chatrooms, most often in sex-tortion and blackmail cases. However, this tech, along with the flashing lights, reconfigures this into an image of a hive-mind being “blessed” by digital holy water, represented by the flashing lights in both the footage and score.
My Prayers are Made of Silicon: Purify was commissioned by Alarm Will Sound through support of the Ernst Von Siemens Music Foundation and the Matt Marks Impact Fund as part of their 2020-21 Video Chat Variations series.
BAKUDI SCREAM/ Rohan Chander 
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