Ben Nobuto

bad infinity

The 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.

This quote from writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher caught Nobuto’s attention a while ago and it forms the inspiration for this short piece. The composer was interested in subverting the image of the cyborg, presenting the performer (Zubin) not as some super slick, high-tech entity, but as a bumbling and stalling thing, prone to self-doubt and distraction. Like an AI that's too self-conscious to carry out the task of generating its own music, the piece starts and stops, goes off on tangents, arrives at dead ends and never really gets going. Like the GIF that Fisher references, there's a sense of whimsy and play, but also an undertone of melancholy and boredom. 

The piece incorporates TouchKeys, a touch-sensitive keyboard technology, to double the microtonal inflections of the performer as they speak and sing throughout the piece. Capacitive sensors, which are overlaid on an existing digital keyboard, track the position of the player's fingers on the surface of the keys, allowing them control over musical parameters such as pitch, glissando, and vibrato. This allows for a fluid and 'elastic' keyboard sound that, when synchronised with the performer's voice and backing track, creates the eerie effect of a cyborg.