The Glow Within Our Steps.

The Glow Within Our Steps is a multimedia interactive gallery installation in conjunction with a 45-minute aural, video, and choreographic performance designed to take place within an installation space. The performances documented in the dissertation took place on May 1st and 2nd, 2013 in The Gallery in the Duderstadt Center on the campus of the University of Michigan. The audio component, crafted to permeate the space, was a combination of slowly developing synthesized ambiences, sampled orchestral strings, quick tempo electronic dance music, vocal incantations, and live acoustic performance of a contrabass and violin duo. The space was outfitted with a custom-designed octophonic speaker system, creating an immersive aural environment. The doors, windows, and walls were covered in thick black fabric, and lighting was tightly controlled so as to create an ambiance independent of time of day or external disturbance. The room was also populated with ten free-standing, wheeled, battery- powered lamps of varying heights resembling glowing white rectangular columns. Gallery visitors were encouraged to move these lamps around the room, to photograph their interactions with them, and to post images online. In the center of the space, a ten by ten foot area was surrounded by semi-transparent sheer white fabric panels stretching from the ground to the ceiling. Within this square a white shag rug served as an irregular screen surface for video projection of slowly moving sea-foam visually processed to the point of abstraction. The installation and performance make use of a minimalist geometric aesthetic to highlight the evocative power of contrast between fundamental experienced parameters: light/dark, sound/silence, flux/stasis. By highlighting the site-specific nature of the installation and performance, as opposed to creating a self-contained musical work which could, with relative ease, be mounted and performed elsewhere, the conscious decision was made to emphasize performance over text. Thus, the primary dissertation document is a video of a live performance, a decision which captures the dynamic and highly experiential nature of the project, along with the numerous sensory elements which are difficult, if not impossible, to instantiate into traditional music notation or even meticulous and descriptive prose.AMUMusic: CompositionUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100008/1/samlrich_1.pd