Clay Chaplin

A collection of melodies. Embedded like a small light in the corner. This piece engages themes and processes of transparency/translucence, copying/covering, and distance/absence: the traces of a thing not there. Melody fragments expand and contract. Here, melody crystallizes into harmony and harmony unfolds as melody. Like a constellation of stars; or in the direction of […]

The Naked Hours For 100 hours, I cut 2 x 2 inches black paper with scissors and covered the L-Shape Gallery walls at the California Institute of the Arts. I did not speak. I did not use a cell phone or other electronics. I ate, rested, wrote, and meditated as necessary. I left the gallery […]

COVID Pan Drum: A Robot Tongue-Drum Rendering of the SARS-2 COVID Virus Genome I’m building a custom robot to play a little lap-sized tongue (steel) drum. A program will read through the roughly 30k base pairs in the COVID 19 (SARS-2 COVID Wuhan Seafood Market) DNA sequence. Particular (known) functioning segments will be sonified when […]

TW/CW: trauma **Trigger Warning** This is a multimedia piece about the experience of being a victim of trauma in the current COVID-19 climate. The piece consists of original poetry written and performed by Nicole Paige Chaffin over an original score by Charles Van Alst Danner. The score features a custom feedback instrument, the FeedBox in […]

Future Stars class compilation album John Tejada, a frequent guest on Touched Music compilations, hatched the idea of turning the final project for his CalArts “Advanced Electronic Music Production” class into a compilation album for the established label. John Tejada Presents Future Stars features 15 of Tejada’s students at their best, as well as an […]

Memorial An immersive virtual dining experience intended to guide the viewer through intimate experiences with the food of my heritage. The recipes in this project have been handed down orally throughout my family history and now that the previous generation is dead and gone, I take it upon myself to honor their memory while spreading […]

Wind and Wave Drawings is a series of motion drawings that intrinsically shows only one piece of thread; the video describes how the shape of the thread is changed by the wave of water and wind. By gathering these diversified shapes of the original thread, this project challenges the fundamental origin of the world that […]

Originally located on the back wall of the MOD, IRIS was a 3-dimensional automated aperture that opened to about 17-ft in diameter to reveal a lit cyclorama in its opening. For the Virtual Campus, we will be modeling the iris in 3D software, then using lighting software to create various lighting looks. Christian Mejia (MFA2, […]