Your Heart is a Stupid Thing to Trust (2013)

Instrumentation: Audio-visual/Acousmatic
Duration: 20:00
Premiered: International Computer Music Conference, 2013, Perth
Additional performances:2high Festival, Brisbane Powerhouse, 2014,"Sequences" concert, Montana State University, 2014

Program Notes

Your Heart Is A Stupid Thing To Trust is a 20-minute synchronized audio & video composition which explores the possibilities of revealing complex rhythmic structure visually, with the use of synchronised loops of moving images. The 7 movements employ a variety of methods of layering audiovisual loops which move at slightly different rates. 

In the process of elucidating the rhythmic structure, the visual content is stripped of any semantic significance. The subjects begin as cars, dancers, or trains, and through repetition they make a fascinating transition, becoming simply form, colour and movement.

The result is a strangely hypnotic experience. Though the final goal of each of these deterministic processes is clear from the outset, we witness surprising patterns and unexpected alignments rise and fall out of the chaos.

The title is a sarcastic play on the tension between the pursuit of modernist ideals in the deterministic purity of the work’s methodology, and the artist’s postmodern compulsion toward immediacy and affect. The very humanistic expressivity in the music — largely driven by intuitive choice of pitch material — clashes against a caricature of high modernist thinking that might suggest that the heart is the least reliable guide for aesthetic expression.