Part art show, part immersive audio experience, Photo//Synthesis takes A/V in innovative new dancefloor directions this weekend at No.90 Hideout.

It blends photogrammetry, motion capture and responsive digital visuals that turns scans of plant and flowers into an immersive, reflective live experience, while the soundtrack sweeps from gentle-ambient undulations as you enter the space into to a full-on pulsating club set.

We caught up with Neal Coghlan, aka Aszyk, for the lowdown…

How did the concept for Photo//Synthesis emerge between the two of you as audio and visual specialists?

We’ve both had our own practices, with Jack as a composer and musician under the name Kiskadee and myself as an animator and visual artist under the name Aszyk. We often worked with other studios and artists to explore themes within nature and realised we had a shared experience and desire here to create work in this realm.
We tested the waters working on a couple of projects with one another, including a past event we did in Number 90 a few years ago.
We knew we wanted to continue creating work together and had been toying with the seeds of ideas, from samples and recordings to little visual sketches I’d been making and last year it began to come to fruition when we were commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey. Their brief was for us to explore the island’s bio-diversity through our own practices and turn it into a body of work we could present back to the public.
It was a short turn-around, over about a month, but we were both very happy with what we managed to achieve in a small amount of time, and it consequently opened the doors to obtaining funding from Immersive Arts UK which allowed us to develop it further over this year; capturing more scans, more recordings and refining the custom work-flows that we designed for the processing of the raw data and to build the set-ups for performing the show.

Tell us a bit about the field recordings and scanning process, where it took place and what challenges and successes emerged?

The field recordings and scans of the flowers and environments have been across a number of locations now, ranging from the island of Jersey (where Jack grew up) to the wild flowers of the Olympic Park, to scans and recordings further afield when we’ve been travelling. The scans in Jersey took place last year, which was part of our commission by ArtHouse Jersey to take local scans and recordings of preserved areas such as the sand dunes and coast line, and even up at Durrell (Wildlife Conservation Trust), where they have an organic farm there to feed the animals that they look after.
The biggest challenge we’ve faced is the weather. I’ve been using a relatively new technique for capturing the flowers and plants that involves ‘Gaussian Splats’ - which is kind of a fancy new way of putting an array of photos or video together, and reconstructing a 3D image of them in-computer. Wind is terrible for this process and even the slightest amount can ruin one as the output can ‘smear’ and create artefacts, however on the flipside, the motion of wind facilitates beautiful sounds among trees and grasses - so there is a trade off with what works better in certain moments.
On a larger scale, the incredibly hot summer we’ve had due to the rising world temperatures has meant that the window for taking scans of wild flowers (of which is already very small on a plant-by-plant basis) became slightly smaller as plants could look good one day and be shrivelled and dry by the next.

How do the audio and the visual decisions inform each other when you're building a live set?

We’ve been able to try out the set multiple times now, with a few live shows and a range of audiences. It’s been great having these opportunities, as after each show we're able to go away, sculpt into the set a little more and then come back with something that feels a little more refined. We’ve had a mix of rehearsal sessions where we can try things out at scale, as well as our own studio time where we get to go a lot more granular with our tweaking. There’s quite a heavy dose of creativity and tech that goes into getting the set to work across the audio and visual, so there’ll often be times where we have to go away and think about how we’re going to build or tweak something, as it may not be an immediate fix.
We’ve both worked on a range of music and visual projects for clients too, ranging from the heavy to the ambient, so we’ve also built up ways of working from past experience that we’ve managed to distill into the set - when does one use a strobe, for instance? We also know each other's work well by this point too, so it felt natural to put sound to visual and vice versa when developing new sections of the show.

As you take over the Hideout, a venue many readers will be familiar with as essentially a dancefloor and a DJ (although it is the home of the lovely Plants Can Dance), what do you feel makes a live A/V performance like this feel immersive, rather than just being music paired with graphics?

There’s a few elements here that I feel leads it more into the immersive category. Many of the recordings and scans were taken at the same moment in time, even if it’s not inherently obvious with the way we’ve manipulated and woven the sound and visuals together, we know they come from a shared place and time. For the ones that we took separately, there’s a shared intention that Jack and I have formed, our unique ways of creating and sculpting the audio and visuals has become a sort of eco-system we’ve nurtured and adhered to, meaning the work should ultimately feel consistent with each iteration of the show as it grows.
On a live aspect during the performance, I’m able to manipulate the visuals in real-time to Jack’s audio - knowing the tracks well allows me to be responsive in allowing certain things to sync, whilst Jack as the conductor of sound can choose to bring elements in and out as he chooses, whereas I will be conducting the visuals.

Another aspect we decided to introduce over this year was bringing in a dancer, Lesly Avendaño, into the performance. Lesly has worked a lot with interpreting movement withing nature onto body movements and was a perfect fit for the ethos of what what we were trying to achieve. During the performance she will be wearing a motion capture suit, with some of her movements translated live into data that I can inject into the set; in effect she’s turned into a force of nature, controlling the wind and movement of the flowers. We felt her addition further bridges the music and the visuals, she responds to the sound, and the visuals in turn respond to her, and Jack can choose to respond what and when to bring in sound-wise in response to her, the audience or the visuals. Ultimately there’s a lot of human interaction at play where we’re balancing all these different elements through the interfaces of different tech.

What do you hope audiences take away from this show, and what happens next for you?

We've attempted to take something that is ever changing all around us, from literal scans and recordings, to using it as a wider source of inspiration, and turn it into an evolving artwork that can exist in spaces ranging from galleries to clubs. Many of the flowers and plants we feature in the show, whilst not in bloom at the moment, are around us at different times of the year, and I can say with certainty it’s made us stop and look closer at what’s around us when we’re out walking; realising how wonderfully bio-diverse many places are - this area is especially, even down to the flowers that poke their way through the painted walls of the Wick. We hope that it gives people a new way to see what’s readily around them, and perhaps even inspire them to look a little closer at things they may have missed.

This will be our last show and iteration for the year, however, come spring-time we aim to continue the work once again, capturing new moments and using those to cultivate new parts of the show.