AERGIA
#2022 #PERFORMANCE #INSTALLATION #Chinese Social Issue
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Aergia is an experimental sound performance with an interactive musical installation. It is a non-explicit form of performance expressing the possibility of creation when lying in bed doing nothing by flipping around in the bed, triggering sound and images through the pressure sensor placed on the bed. The piece states the positive attitude towards lying flat-躺平.
Aergia是一个带有互动音乐装置的实验性声音表演。它是一种非显性的表演形式，表达了躺在床上什么也不做时创造的可能性，通过在床上翻转，来使放在床上的压力传感器触发声音和图像。该作品表达了对躺平的积极态度。
/Concept and Background Research
The project starts out with my personal interest in mysticism and religious culture. The human sacrifice which is a cruel ritual appeared in almost every culture. The low productivity of the old primitive societies made the survival of human tribes very fragile. If there were more people, there would not be enough food; if there were fewer people, they would not be able to cope with wars and disasters, and the population had to be precisely controlled. I personally believe that the condition for a primitive tribe to develop into an ancient civilisation is to be able to break out of this productivity limit and not worry about basic survival all day long, in order to be able to pursue a higher level of life (even if only for the ruling class). The longest, largest and bloodiest human sacrifices in human history took place in South America, which was also the least developed civilisation in terms of ancient agriculture, with no iron and dense rainforests making land reclamation difficult, no large livestock and no invention of the wheel making farming and transport inefficient, and a lack of high-calorie crops. Religious brainwashing followed by human sacrifice was the least costly option to solve the population problem. In contrast, the Egyptian civilisation, with similar levels of religious fervour, soon stopped pleasing the gods with their precious souls, thanks to the rich Nile Delta.
Similarly, even developed civilisations that had eliminated the tradition of living sacrifice continued to legitimise methods of population control in other forms in isolated and impoverished areas on the periphery. In remote mountain villages in some parts of Asia, there has been a tradition of throwing old people who are too old to work into the mountains and leaving them to fend for themselves. Therefore, these inhumane actions, in fact, are the choice of humans themselves. The nature of profit-seeking makes them choose a way to get rid of trouble which they think is the guide from the gods. However, on the contrary, it's the way to hell.
/Technical Implementationion
The idea is simply that we can create even when we are in bed, so I make a performance in the bed. I install Pressure-Sensitive Conductive Sheet under the bed sheet sensing the pressure of different parts of the body when I toss and turn in the bed. Those signals are sent to the Arduino components connected to the MAX and trigger different sound and visual effects. Following the concept that all the meanings come from nothingness, the major sound I apply is noise. By generating varying noise, the performative installation composes an imaginary rhapsody. Furthermore, the dynamic visual effects will be projected in the circumstance according to my movement and the sound by the projector.
The performance is divided into 4 parts. The first section is Hypnagogia which describes the moment between awakeness and sleep. The movement is flipping around in the bed as it's hard to fall into sleep, expressing anxiety and irritability. The sound includes syphony of cycle and tri waves, random rushing sound, and clock ticking. Combing the colour-less image, overall vibe I create is anxious and stressful. The second part is Sound Sleep. In this part, I performance as sleeping deeply, and the sound are light and soft with white noise. It's the most comfortable part of sleep, so the image is also filled with pleasing colour. The next is the Nightmare. The sound suddenly becomes intense and aggressive following my quick movement and scared mood. Rhythmic drumming, cycle waves triggered like the whistling of wind and sound clip of thunder component a horrible atmos-phere. Following that, the image turns into fractal with spike which is extremely strong After that I am awaken by the nightmare and last, when I go back to sleep, falling into a fantastic dream with sea, forest, Chinese restaurant, and man speaking. The image is turning dynamic with the sound turning spiritual. Then, all ends up with the heart-pounding alarm.
The technique I apply is what I learned from Physical Computing 1. I use conductive fabric and pressure-sensing fabric to make a large scale and soft pressure sensor and connect it to the Arduino chip and use the Bluetooth module to send signals. I mainly install 6 parts of the sensor beneath the human body. The signal of each part will be packaged and sent to MAX. The MAX will unpackage it and make noise and visuals based on the value. The images are all generated by jitter.
/Reference
1. ‘躺平’, 维基百科，自由的百科全书, 2022
2. Gaius Julius Hyginus, Fabulae from The Myths of Hyginus translated and edited by Mary Grant. University of Kansas Publications in Humanistic Studies. Online version at the Topos Text Project.