June 26, 2023

Monica Duncan and Senem Pirler have been collaborating since 2017, creating audiovisual performances that investigate everyday objects, concepts of agency, and queer potentiality. Their collaborative work has been shown in numerous festivals such as Revolutions Per Minute; Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music; Transient Visions; Light Matter; Athens International Film + Video; Intermediale Festival of Audiovisual Forms and forthcoming Fisura:International Festival of Experimental Film & Video. Most recently, Duncan and Pirler performed their audiovisual performance, “Surface Connection” at the 61st Ann Arbor Film Festival’s Expanded Cinema program and exhibited their work in the LEAF2023: Sync Exhibition. They have been artists-in-residence at Signal Culture (Owego, NY), PACT Zollverein (Essen, Germany), and Institute for Electronic Arts (Alfred, NY). Pirler earned her M.M. in Music Technology from NYU Steinhardt, and her Ph.D. in Electronic Arts from RPI. Pirler has been awarded a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Music/Sound in 2022. Duncan earned her BFA from the NYSCC School of Art and Design at Alfred University, MFA from the University of California, San Diego and a MA in Choreography and Performance from JLU Gießen, Germany.

For our residency, we expanded our video work, “Confessions on a Transmission Line” into a live performance utilizing the possibilities of extended reality (XR). “Confessions on a Transmission Line” is a two-channel video piece created using real-time video and audio signal processing tools.  To bring this work into a hybrid performance space, we scanned a collection of objects that we gravitate towards and collaborate with already. While scanning the textures of the objects, we discovered how the photographic texture unfolds in 2D space, is distributed into ripped fragments, and then gets re-stitched when used in a 3D application. We also experimented with MoCap data, and we became fascinated with the movement qualities when we mapped our human skeleton into these objects: the glitches and other stretches became very quirky and playful. We also captured the movement of vibrators (attaching sensors on them which usually would be worn by a part of the human skeleton – arm, leg, torso). We are planning to expand on these experiments and use the library that we created to refine our techniques for creating a hybrid audiovisual performance space in the near future.  – Monica Duncan & Senem Pirler

Megaphone Motion Capture Test

Antique Megaphone 3D Scan

Texture Map for Antique Megaphone 3D Scan

Texture Map for Rusty Funnel 3D Scan