My Heart

audiovisual piece for 10 screens and 8 speakers
July 2021
Installed / Performed
RML Cinechamber
Gray Area – San Francisco, CA
July 26, 2021
Gray Area Artist Showcase
Gray Area – San Francisco, CA
August 18, 2021
August 19, 2021
Ecos Urbanos Festival
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico
November 19, 2021
Audiovisual Frontiers
UC Riverside, CA
November 21, 2021

My Heart is a flickering, phantasmagoric exploration of memory, composed for ten screens and eight speakers in the RML CineChamber in San Francisco. Photos of New York and Los Angeles city blocks were processed into point clouds – digital models that omitted moving objects, leaving the cities eerily empty and scattered with unidentifiable digital artifacts. Streaks of sky and brick walls become similar consistencies while signs disintegrate into formless color as you move past them, echoing the dreamlike and fragmented nature of memory.

The sound, drawn from ambisonic wind and ocean recordings and granular synthesis, fractures spatial cues until the listener is in many places at once. Rising motifs, reminiscent of smoke, dissipate as they rise while voices condense as they descend. Eventually, we return to the waves, the listener’s position static for the first time as the ocean ebbs around them.

Stitched fragments of spatial audio cause our ear to scramble to keep pace with the fractured sense of space. Eventually we form a new conception from the ashes.