8 Years
2020 · Gallery / Live Performance
Eight ice lanterns melt over eight minutes. The water that falls triggers sound. The sound fills the room. The brighter the lights grow, the more heat they throw, the faster the ice melts. The piece programs its own end.
Each lantern sits above a vesel on the floor. As the ice melts, drops fall into the pooled water below, and each contact triggers that lantern's voice in the score. The composition is released slowly, note by note, drip by drip, building from silence as the ice gives it up.
The piece takes its name from the IPCC's 2019 report. Eight years to act. It doesn't make the argument. It enacts it: a system in which presence accelerates consequence, and the clock is already running.
The audience is inside the feedback loop. The noise they make feeds into the system. The more sound in the room, the brighter the lights respond. The brighter the lights, the more heat they generate. The more heat, the faster the melt. The faster the melt, the more the score builds. The room is the instrument and the problem at the same time.
The score is built from drones and field recordings from the Millennium Seed Bank in England, the world's largest seed collection, sounds from the vault where we keep what we are afraid of losing. No two performances are the same. Eight minutes, every time different.
Credits
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