Howl! – Separation and Pulse - sonically evokes urban life’s frantic pace, work pressures and alienation, juxtaposed with a poetic, intangible pastoral, attuned to internal repose.
Gabriel Prokofiev’s shift into interactive sound installation, with sensors, was first exhibited by curatorial collective Penombra, at the RCA Masters in Curating Contemporary Art, end of year exhibition, June 20-23, 2024. Entitled Howl! – Separation and Pulse – this contemporary classical-electronic composition, intermingles world musical traditions and sounds, reflecting Prokofiev’s transnational roots and travels. Howl! – Separation and Pulse - sonically evokes urban life’s frantic pace, work pressures and alienation, juxtaposed with a poetic, intangible pastoral, attuned to internal repose.
As Prokofiev notes, electronic music invisibly transcends national and linguistic divides, making boundaries permeable. This is a prescient theme in contemporary urgencies, where the 24/7 electronic communications of globalization, bombard us with clicking sounds, flashing lights and news reports of international strife. What are the subliminal ramifications on the individual and individuation?
In this new iteration, the performed composition - Howl! – Separation and Pulse - transforms into an interactive installation, a multi-speaker circular sound nexus that plays recorded music and is attached with light and sound sensors. For active audience participation, Prokofiev collaborated with Gilad Barabi on the technological development of sensors that would interact with his music. Thus, visitors’ physical movements spark sonic sensors, to subtly integrate sounds into the musical compositions, lightening and darkening veiled tonal acoustics, resonating spatial-temporal atmospheric affect.
Consequently, electronic music’s ethereal invisibility echoes embodied visitor accompaniment, in a 10-minute interactive durational shift. Moreover, the electronic music’s cool precision contrasts with embodied performance, in four live performances’ physicality. Prokofiev’s intensely deft electronic performance is accompanied by Kasia Ziminska’s violin’s sinuously delicate strains that meander in and out, threading elusively through Prokofiev’s electronic composition. Their performance dynamic enlivens the space, physically and emotionally.
Acetates banners encircle the sound nexus’s speakers, casting shadows of passersby and words onto the surrounding. This creates an ephemeral, transient atmosphere, akin to computer screens or film. Thus, Prokofiev’s non-stop transnational communications theme is concretely spatialized. The printed texts are responses from Penombra’s community questionnaire, on the visible, invisible and the liminal in-between, associated with diaspora’s local-global encounters. The acetate banners not only mirror the computer screens’ physical and public-private transparency, but also give silent yet audible voice, to Penombra’s website’s exhibition participants.
The addition of multi-speakers’ sensors that respond to a recording in situ recasts the musical recording, for it spawns a sound installation, thus a new iteration of Prokofiev’s musical composition Howl! – Separation and Pulse. Prokofiev’s live performances present another dimension that queries the nature of embodied (live performer) and disembodied music-making (a recording as installation and electronic sensors). Thus, live performance intermingles yet contrasts in juxtaposition to recorded music’s interactive sensors that respond to participant’s movements. In this way, Prokofiev underscores how music invisibly embodies physical movement.
— Curated by Penombra, an RCA CCA collective - Beverley Harrison, Charles Lyu, Daisy Magnusson, Ecem Meric, Jane Lee, Vittoria Ciaraldi, Yuchen Xie.
