bkONE Productions and bitsANDwaves present “Interchange | UltraMedia,” an enchanting live music and reactive art show featuring the Sean R Ferguson Group and the art of Anthony Henderson. For performances on Friday, March 8 and Saturday, March 9, bkONE Production’s theater at Industry City will become a world where music, visual art, and audience consciousness intertwine and react to each other. Ferguson’s music, expanding and contracting attendees’ perception of time, will propel Henderson’s art through a projected space on scrims enveloping the performers, as it responds dynamically to the tones and pulses of the music. Made audio-reactive by bitsANDwaves’ Aaron Martinez using the open-source program Pure Data and supplemented with Jason Chapman’s dazzling AI-enabled manipulations, Henderson’s kinetic compositions are freed from the limitations of the frame. This performance is not just a show, but an opening for a weeklong exhibition of Henderson’s work with the performance stage becoming an installation for the exhibition, where art and music will continue to resonate.
“Interchange” is an interrogation of the human experience of spacetime and its implications on consciousness and our subjective interpretation of the objective world we share. An expression of the interchange between the media of the artists, where the sum is greater than the parts, Ultra-media suggests that our “reality” is just yet another form of Media, whose sacred geometries necessarily arise from the bits and waves of which it is composed. And that furthermore, base reality continues to elude us just as it did Plato’s cave dwellers. Modern scientific theories confirm and expand on the intuited knowledge and religious experiences humans have cataloged through the ages. We are made of elements forged in stars, all information is conserved, AdS/CFT correspondence posits there is substantial evidence supporting a holographic explanation of the universe—as much as there is for the traditional explanation. Astrologists wrangle photons from the dawn of the universe to image the past. Fusion has taken place on the surface of the earth and the “only” remaining problem for a buildable warp drive is a near-infinite power source. The shadows on the wall of the cave may be all there is to see, but perhaps we can become the light.
