Integrated Scape Transducer

From the exhibition Past Skins curated by Jocelyn Miller, PS1 MoMA, NYC, April - Sept 2017

MSHR's multimedia practice is arrived at through a close study of the interiors of devices and computers, using electrical circuits, extruded and mutated geometries, and 3D-modeled environments to build worlds of their own that deliberately refuse a time and place, instead unifying around a consistent visual language that always implicates the body.

With their new site-specific work Integrated Scape Transmuter, MSHR have created an installation that bridges virtual and physical space, with a one-to-one relationship between digital space and gallery space. The soundscape in the gallery comes from an interactive computer music composition consisting of three sonic 'voices,' made from a generative sound system in six channels. While these voices are audible in the room and influence the physical installation's lighting environment, it is only by wearing the VR headset and entering the virtual environment that viewers may interact with these voices, altering the sonic arrangement by walking through virtual gateways. In doing this, VR users become performers in MSHR's cybernetic musical composition, and onlookers their audience for what the artists call "modulating the shifting sonic architecture of the space." By exploring the virtual plane, visitors allow the musical architecture of the room to unfold, generating novel, non repeating patterns.

The tapestries on the wall are graphic scores, or flow charts, for these patterns, mapping the various iterations of MSHR's musical system. Each shape in the diagrams represent elements in the system, such as a visitor, a computer, a trigger, a speaker, or the connections and causal relationships between them, the signal flow, that makes the entire installation sing.

~Jocelyn Miller, April 2017