Transcendence

In my story, transcendence doesn’t happen at the end. With our systems of expression, abstraction, self-understanding, formalisation and mechanisation in place, there is still a long way to go. Transcendence here, is more about escaping biological constraints in a post-human manner than it is about the final physical escape of the last chapter.

Both the musical and visual analogy of this process came from an installation project for AND& festival in Leuven, where, in collaboration with Salvador Breed and Martin Krzywinski, we built custom “transcendental beds” for each audience member to lie on. The music was delivered in surround sound and via tactile bass drivers in every bed to yield the experience of something like weightlessness, as visualizations of a journey from 1 to 5 dimensions of space were projected up into the architecture of St Michielskerk.

Needless to say, the music required something beyond words, so it was a natural fit for the album. I think it may be the most intense piece of music I’ve ever made, and that came from the concept and the space, and imagining what I was trying to communicate, with both the scientific and ethereal aspects to the project. It is supposed to grab you and pull you up out of your body, and is particularly effective with a large sound system for getting the intended feeling of the lows. I used bass beating patterns where simultaneous waves interact to produce a third super low frequency physical shaking experience for the peak, where the tactile aspect to the music is most important.

The interpretation of the idea came from both an ascent into higher dimensions of spatial form, and a simultaneous mapping of the digits of a transcendental number (pi) inside those higher dimensional spaces. This process was undertaken by the bioinformatician and data visualisation scientist, Martin Krzywinski, who built the visual system from code in order to generate a fully surround continuous visual experience for the live renditions of the chapter.