Kai Luen Liang

MFA 2 - Music

Flag ASMR

“On Sept 11th, 2001 I watched the twin towers falling with my father. Glued to the TV. A silent demolition. An American reality TV show. In the weeks that followed, I started to see American flags everywhere. Especially from immigrants of all colors, flying the flag out of a sense of fear of appearing to be on the wrong side.

The sound of the twin towers falling in my memory is silent. Filmed from far away. As the second plane hit, there was no sound on TV. I heard the sound via the sound of my own heart beating and the breath of the newscaster trying to be as professional as possible as they had to report a major catastrophe in real time, live in front of the world.

Flag ASMR is the attempt to recall a memory. An attempt to close a schism caused by a fear of the lines people cross and the fears of uncertainty, harm, and danger. What is the sound of a silent memory. The sound of it being touched, taken apart, and reordered.”

Redefining Boundaries

Building new systems, setting new parameters. Boundaries are constantly defined and redefined. An experiment in generative systems, generative image/ film and sound relationships. Exploring mutual relationships/ co-habitations of sonic and visual digital spaces.

Manufacturing Landscapes

*** warning: Contains strong flashing lights….

Manufacturing Landscapes:

A short film investigating the metaphors of vision used in surveillance hardware brand videos. Uses various Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN)/ machine learning image synthesis techniques to generate material related to vision and changing landscapes. Also looks at word associations with images by using text descriptions to generate images. The images generated were then used as “found footage” for the film.

Tim Feeney

Multimeda recordings of spontaneous music: prompts for assembling sound and image, running remote-distanced seances, and/or time-based annoyance. CalArts Percussion Ensemble: Morgan Alford, Kristyna Svihalkova, Henry Delargy, and Eric Lennartson Free Improvisation Ensemble: Camille Kiku Belair, Maria Alejandra Bulla, Rebecca Drapkin, Hazel Feiner, Brian Griffith, Jeremy Rosenstock, Adam Zuckerman, Kai Cleaveland, Stefany Glik, Bjorn Gustafsson, Terry […]

Eyvind Kang

A class album and some videos Nina Flagg, Medusa

Perry Cook

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 […]

Sungjae Lee

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 […]

John Tejada

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 […]

Emily Eisenstein

plasticity My clothes my hair my face my body. The way I look and the way I feel are at war with each other. A film about gender in isolation.