Wasteland

For solo performer, live electronics, and 29.4-channel diffusion.

Background

This place is a message, and part of system messages. Pay attention to it! – Scandia National Laboratories (1993)

Wasteland is a psycho-monodrama created for the 29.4-channel speaker dome at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. A person finds themself cast into an unfamiliar, abject, and alienating landscape and variously tries to make sense of it, cowers in fear from it, seeks employment from it.

Analogizing the imposing and quite alienating speaker dome to something like the post-apocalyptic earthworks originally proposed for the US-based nuclear Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), is asks the question: if each thing humanity creates is an expression of its/our values, what do we do when we find this creation to be truly terrible?

Premiered 6 March 2023
Kungliga Musikhögskolan, Stockholm, Sweden

Credits

Wilson Tanner Smith (voice, movement-theatre, creation)
Aaron Gochberg (electronics, co-creation)