sound

I thought I'd finally post an introduction and share a project from last year that might be of interest here.

I'm Matt (emenel online), an artist and musician from Toronto. I work mainly with computation in a material sense and explore the poetics of computational processes and ways of thinking... thinks like loops, iterations, recombination, bricolage... I'm heavily influenced by early computational and cybernetic arts, romantic conceptualism, and the computer philosophy of Seymour Papert. My work often brings in literary references, text, language mysticism (Kabbalah mainly) and results in sound, installation, publications, images ...

"Breath from Breath" is a four channel sculptural sound installation I presented last year. At its core is a reconstruction of my own voice from individual phonemes. The phonetic sounds are recombined over and over again, slowly converging on a small set of words programmed into the work. Set against the disembodied voice is a collage of field recordings of generally mundane things. Both the voice and the collage are versions of world building, thinking about the Kabbalistic idea of linguistic combinatorics as a form of creation.

The piece is written in SuperCollider and runs on an Raspberry Pi mounted on a customized extra-tall server rack. The speakers are connected to the rack via blue ethernet cable, bundled and trailing across the floor.

You can see more images of it here: https://emenel.ca/projects/breathfrombreath.html
You can hear a recording of it here: https://emenel.bandcamp.com/album/breath-from-breath
You can view the SuperCollider code here: https://github.com/emenel/Breath-from-Breath

You can even try running it at home if you're comfortable with SuperCollider, Github, and are up for a little troubleshooting potentially