Marcus was commissioned by performance artist Carolyn Savage to compose an original piece of music, record and edit accompanying dialogue and develop an accompanying sound installation, to be used as part of her exhibition Embrace DNR.
Extract from www.embrace-dnr.com:
“Embrace DNR revolves around recent cathartic events in Carolyn’s personal life, and the strategies and processes she developed in trying to deal with those events.
The Embrace is a wide-ranging bringing together of pivotal images, sculpture, text and electronically-derived sound. Carolyn’s intention in creating these visionary artworks has been to open her experiences to wider scrutiny while also alluding to her own keen sense of lost identity, often by indications of her presence in the work.”
Embrace DNR: Sound Installation presents an illuminated radiotherapy mask. Using audio samples edited from interviews with the mask’s owner, the mask continues to breath… Viewers are encouraged to engage with the piece using a touch sensitive MIDI ribbon controller.
Recorded, edited and composed over a three year period, Embrace DNR: Composition juxtaposes voice recordings made of Carolyn’s writings describing the experience of her husband’s decline and passing, alongside recordings of her departed looking back on his life and forward to an unknown future. In the process, a heart-wrenching narrative dissonance forms.
Composed using generative and procedural techniques, the accompanying soundtrack is merely an emergent property of a complex data-flow system. By changing the random data fed into the system countless facsimiles can be created effortlessly. Perhaps it moves you, perhaps it leaves you empty or perhaps you don’t need a musical score to tell you what to feel.
Regardless, as consciousness emerges and memories are encoded in an inconceivably complex network of neurones and synapses throughout our lives, the thing which really hurts when we find ourselves confronting death is the realisation that, in spite of individual beliefs, this may very well be all we are.
For more information and news of upcoming viewings, please visit the Embrace DNR website.