Oyster is an algorithmically generated sound and video installation that poetically explores the field of ethnomusicology (study of world musics) while using it as a lens to examine broader issues of globalization and a Western, technologically mediated, understanding of other world cultures. Oyster was made with support from New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) via Harvestworks.
What might the singing style in folk music from “Arctic Asia” or “Insular Pacific” say about these regions’ respective cultural levels of…sexual repression? Such was one type of question monumental blues and folk music archivist Alan Lomax sought to answer with Cantometrics. Introduced in the mid-1960s, and harnessing some of the earliest computer technologies, Cantometrics was Lomax’s little-known, yet astronomically ambitious system of numerically coding and analyzing sung music from around the world. In oyster, the score reverses this process of turning songs into numbers by turning Lomax’s numbers back into songs. This data vocalization begs a larger, pervasive contemporary question—how much can we really know of people and culture through computer profiling? In oyster, Alan Lomax (played by John Rose) gives a lecture on his ethnomusicological findings in a sung-spoken and rhythmic style, accompanied by prepared piano and electronics. He brings the audience on a “world tour,” evoked through brightly color-coded videos, in which BOTCH Ensemble performs songs based on the data for each of the nine regions into which Lomax divided the world. Meanwhile, live onstage, Christina Campanella, Michael Chinworth, and Saori Tsukada piece together Lomax’s life, parsing and scanning an extensive, recently declassified FBI file. Theater director Phil Soltanoff infuses the work with his signature physical language of quotidian movements and geometric patterns.BOTCH Ensemble was formed in 2010 to rigorously explore spoken language as a basis for a contemporary form of opera. The group (Joe Diebes, Christina Campanella, John Rose, Michael Chinworth and Saori Tsukada) has recently performed at HERE Arts Center, The Watermill Center, STEIM (Amsterdam), and Experimental Intermedia.
