Beyond This Point joins Constellation’s annual Frequency Festival in February 2025, a week of boundary-pushing, genre-bending, sound-exploding musical exploration. BTP’s program will include world premieres of commissioned works by Julie Zhu and David Bird.
Beyond This Point presents two premieres from composers/multimedia artists David Bird and Julie Zhu. Each new work dives either feet-first or head-first into the increasingly entangled relationship between biological and computational “minds”– at once postulating, declaring, admonishing, and beseeching what the hell is going on and what the hell will happen next.
amanuensis – Julie Zhu (b. 1990) ~25′
for 2 performers, amplified plywood board, live video, and live electronics
amanuensis sees 2 performers seated across from each other at a 4′ x 4′ plywood board, amplified with 4 contact microphones. In turns, the board becomes a canvas, a confessional, a ChatGPT prompt, a battlefield– but above all, a medium through which we try desperately to guess the 3D future in a hopelessly 2D reality.
Hypochondriac – David Bird (b. 1990) ~25′
for 2 performers, live electronics, and interactive systems
Hypochondriac begins as a sort of autopsy between a mortician/scientist/end user, and a corpse/automaton/product. As the piece unfolds, the “patient” on the table evolves from an inanimate object to a subservient machine to a sentient and perhaps omnipotent being.