Please note: this video contains flashing lights.
W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) reflects the inherent bias in knowledge production, where a small fraction of the global population—roughly 15 per cent, the W.E.I.R.D. demographic—speaks on behalf of the whole. This musical composition is necessarily (and deliberately) affected by that bias.
W.E.I.R.D. is a generative score for a soloist, unwittingly created by Twitter users, whose tweets are used in real-time for live performance. Privato’s program downloads and displays tweets containing a keyword—in this case: “emergency.” That keyword affects the score and its visualization, which is projected live when the work is performed.
“Emergency,” the second movement in this three-part composition, follows the publication of “Uncertainty” in TILTING (1), and will be followed by “Identity,” to be published online by the artist in the coming weeks.
Privato’s keywords derive from the influence of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, whose writings on late modernity highlight a deep-seated sense of ambivalence and unease, where ambitions for order and rationality are always haunted by upheavals to traditional notions of economy, culture, and society.11Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
Whereas the first movement in this composition used individual tweets, a collective sentiment of emergency is indexed in this second movement, which is driven by tweets gathered in twenty-second intervals. “Emergency” proceeds at a frenetic pace as Twitter users employ the word with increasing frequency, its usage peaking as a correlate to the waking hours of the W.E.I.R.D. demographic. The dissonant, flashing, and blinking result aptly documents collective anxieties.
Privato’s work builds a dynamic between score and improvisation, notation and performance. Centred on the chaotic dynamics of globalized modernity, Privato draws on his traditional jazz training to consider how musical practice and performance can respond to turbulent change.
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