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.

Andrea Turk

KARMA Music Video “Karma”, a song by Andrea Turk featuring Prince Husein, is a song that throws you into the situation of unreciprocated love and how one would react to it. In this song, both sides wish the other person well but also ‘karma’, for wasting their time and effort into a one-sided relationship. The […]

Eyvind Kang

A class album and some videos Nina Flagg, Medusa

Cindy Pepper

Boxing Can Be Fun A contemporary duet danced on 2 wooden cubes performed by 2 dancers from Ballet West to the music of Keenan Webster composed on the African instrument called the baliphone. cynthiapepper.com

Mia Yao Meng

Hyperreal Gesstures This project is a reflection of the gestures we perform on a routine basis in order to interact (as the trigger and the data input) with networked devices such as smartphones and laptops. These gestures are abstracted/flattened in the design process and transformed into online behaviors. This habit-formation process only takes us a […]

Jiayu Zhang

Unbuilt Door Unbuilt Door is a collaborative sound installation between Jiayu Zhang and Joana P. Cardozo during the emergency state of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spring 2020. Jiayu and Joana were studio neighbors at CalArts. This piece offers an imagination practice for the participants to visualize the border of their individual space. The participants are […]

Carson Schafer

A Drum Solo Visualized Hello, I am a Jazz Drums MFA ALUM (’19). My goal with this submission has been to find a way to make visuals that clearly represent what drummers practice –moving around the kit and using multiple limbs at once to create music. I wondered if there was a way to visualize […]

Greg Lewis

Rob Ford Explorer Original experimental music from CalArts that would be perfect for the virtual expo! Greg Lewis, Cameron Sax