Morris’ Virtual Music Project Featured In Online Art Festival
Jeffrey Morris, professor in music technology in the Performance Studies program, produced a virtual music project titled “Weblogmusic: Cartomancy,” which will be featured through the end of February in the online art festival The Wrong Biennale.
With funding from the Academy for the Visual and Performing Arts, Morris and multidisciplinary artist Elisabeth Blair of Quebec, Canada, curated “Cartomancy” — a blend of improvisational music performances that serves as a response to life during a pandemic.
The “Cartomancy” project lives on the Weblogmusic platform, a web-based, time-shifted ensemble of improvising performers, which Morris has been curating since 2009. It hosts quartets of individual video performances done by different improvising artists. The artists include dancers, singers, poets, visual artists and musicians who perform in response to the work done by previous performers.
“They pick a mix and join the ensemble,” Morris said. “They pull up the website like any listener would and play along. However active they decide to be is up to their musical intuition and how busy the particular tracks came up in that particular time. You are improvising with them. They just got there first.”
Morris said the idea behind creating a virtual ensemble came from a desire to use technology to showcase new forms of creating art.
“We are treating it as a new form of listening, making music together, taking music in, and giving us a chance to reflect how we feel about this sense of authenticity or lack of authenticity in technology-mediated communications,” he said.
The “Cartomancy” process begins with an oracle card reading by Blair, similar to tarot cards. An artist follows her reading with an improvisational performance based on Blair’s prompts. Then another artist follows that. Individual videos are presented together in sets of four.
Blair said she has long collected vintage and antique photos, and she combined those with her artwork and other design elements to make several oracle decks with a pandemic theme in mind.
“They were made in an improvisatory design response,” Blair said, “just feeling my way along.”
A vocalist, improviser and poet, Blair used those skills to create videos of her initial card readings. She said she tried to channel the “complex array of emotions many of us felt during the height of the pandemic.”
“My response to the set of cards acted as an initial trigger, after which the others would make their own improvisatory video performances, responding to me and each other,” she said. “My part in this was key because I was the starting point to these chains of responses. It was important to me that I create a sophisticated, contemplative, challenging and beautiful response.”
Blair said she would choose several cards from the deck and gaze at them, imagining their possible narratives or focusing on the feelings and ideas they inspired.
“Then in my video performance response, I’d try to express that, however abstractly or emotionally,” she said.
Morris said the goal of the project is driven by the “spirit of exploratory research.”
“We realized there is this tangled-family-tree aspect of it too,” he said. “We don’t know what each person was listening to when they made their contributions. As people were performing, we found that sometimes recorded performances matched pitch at times, even though they had no idea the other performer would do something similar.”
Blair said she found the improvisational aspect of the project to be “refreshing in a world where everything has to be packaged, perfect and cost something.” She noted the documentary aspect of it as well.
“Years from now, this project could serve as a creative representation of the pandemic-induced experiences we were going through at that time,” she said. “I like to think there may be archival value in these spontaneous, expressive communications passed between artists during that difficult time.”
Photo: Artist Elisabeth Blair is shown in the top left corner, joined by artists Gabriel Dharmoo, voice (Canada) in the lower right. Upper right and lower left: Krystee Wylder, voice and drawing (US).
