Moondial. 2024.
Performance time, 12′. Installation loop time, sets of 48′.
For cello & video.
Cellist, Robbie Bui.
Concept, Music & Direction by John Aylward
Assistant Director & Costumes and Wardrobe, Alexandra Posen
Throne by James Maurelle
Director of Photography, Gyani Pradhan Wong Ah Sui
Moondial is the first work in a set of three for string instruments and multimedia. In Moondial, the cellist performs alongside their “twin” digital avatar. The work itself is staged as a ritual and the piece is composed in ‘gears’, each section working in various mechanized times, sometimes purposefully phased, sometimes intricately held together. The music, a kind of sonic representation of the magic of temporal perception, is performed by the cellist(s) in a ritual fashion, enhanced by the featured sculpture of James Maurelle and the cellists costume, by Alexandra Posen.
The work can be represented as an installation where both cellists are represented as video, as a live performance where one part can be performed live alongside the digital twin, or there can even be an ‘analog’ version of the work with two live cellists. My central artistic concern focuses on the first two realizations. In either version, as the cellists move in and out of phase, our perception of who is leading the music shifts.
The work confronts the uncomfortable reality of the digital avatar. With the mass of information of ourselves we put online, how we understand that information and how it is reflected back at us seems to be the most important question of our time. It changes who we think we are and informs who we think we might become, with consequences for how we relate to others and to our deepest understanding of ourselves.
With the high level of technical detail around the analog / digital synchronizing, I am also interested in the work as a mechanical display. The music elicits musical gestures to be synchronized that can then be played with in either mechanical or elastic ways. The work evokes aspects of the first Renaissance watches and clocks that had both the ambition of exactitude but the intrinsic sense of grappling with relationships not fully understood. Along with watch making, the work evokes other kinds of older meticulous sculpture, and James Maurelle’s throne suggests another allusion to Renaissance art and the stage of Shakespeare. And Alexandra Posen’s costume evokes the lush textures of Michaelangelo and Leonardo but with a color palette that also suggests astronomical connection.
Here you can see stills from our production. Clockwise from top left: Robbie Bui performing alongside video, camera capture, Robbie and Costumer / Assistant Director Alexandra Posen, John reviewing footage, Gyani and John on shoot.
