Materials: paper, wire, motors, computers, rocks, leaves, sticks, flowers, shadows, fog, snow, rain, balloons, hands, feet, fender rhodes with contact mics, piano marionette, ambisonic just intonation distortion synthesizer, humor, granular synthesis, wave field synthesis, cymbals, robot voice, timpani, leafblower, hihats, projector, bubbles, lights, harmonica, and various percussion objects.
As pressure forms in the cloud, micro particles intermingle—vapor, moisture, salt, dust, atoms—latching and accumulating into crystals of ice and droplets, amorphous, ephemeral objects of infinite complexity. As the particles continue to churn and collide, tiny electrical charges are released, gradually collecting into regions of positive and negative polarization within the cloud. Over time these polarized regions become more and more charged, shadowed by a mirroring charge on the earth’s surface. The growing opposition between the polarized regions creates a stronger and stronger electrical field between both the internal charge regions in the cloud itself, and between the cloud and the earth’s surface. When the field’s intensity overflows the resistance of the air buffering the polarized charges, a channel forms to release the electrical flow, from which a hyper-focused beam of heat emerges, around 54,000°F (30,000°C), five times hotter than the surface of the sun. This explosive discharge of heat transforms the air, breaking down the molecules, reforming as a plasma channel of highly energized particles, free electrons and ions, through which the electricity rapidly flows from the cloud to the earth’s surface. At such high speeds the energy becomes visible light while the rapid expansion of air surrounding the channel of heat creates a shockwave that radiates outward as sound.
The emergence of lightning from micro interactions of particles in the clouds, is not unlike many other aspects of nature: the emergence of life, consciousness, ideas, love, war, combustion, technology, and on and on. Like fission and fusion nuclear energy, the splitting or joining of atoms causes a massive release of energy—conflict and resolution, new forms emerge as the result of deep interaction.
The piece Ontopoiesis for Yarn/Wire, is a scenographic exploration of the embodied nature of these interacting systems and processes of emergence, in nature, evolution, human experience, society, and poetic expression. Ontos (ὄντως), the ancient Greek word for “being” or “existence”—and poiesis (ποιεῖν), “becoming” or “creation,” the emergence of forms and being; and autopoiesis, the process by which a self-reproducing system sustains itself, maintaining life, and constructing its own parts.
Inspired by these interactive processes of emergence, and the idea of horizontal gene transfer—an interspecies phenomenon, where DNA has been shown to migrate between unrelated organisms during the course of evolution—the piece focuses on the experience of life as a porous, fluctuating network of interaction and transformation.
Ontopoiesis is part of an evolving series of puppet/installation/scenographic composition works, developing a kind of post-human, ecological music theater (Apophänie (2016), Scenes from the Plastisphere (2018), Corporis Fabrica (2019), Animism (2020), Rummeln (2024), Grass Geometry (2024), and others)—through these works, the performance practice aims to act as a lens through which to view and experience different modes and empathetic ways of engagement with other creatures, places, processes, and ecosystems.
During the course of Ontopoiesis, the audience is led through an ever-changing sequence of landscapes and weather patterns from which emerge creatures and poetic processes: insects made of plants, vaguely human-like creatures made of rock, loggers, gangsters, paper moths, hand monsters, digital suns, and swarms like bees or orbiting atoms, colliding and producing new forms of life and electricity.
Composition commissioned by EMPAC, with research support from the ICST