Woody Sullender: “Four Movements: Live at the Kitchen”
This Video Viewing Room features a new video by Woody Sullender, Four Movements: Live at the Kitchen (2021), which expands on the artist’s music album constructed in video game space, Four Movements (2020). A text by the artist accompanies the video.
This presentation is organized by Lumi Tan, Senior Curator.
Four Movements is a music album constructed in video game space. It consists of several navigable environments (an empty club, a loft residence, an “open world” intersected with a modernist grid, etc.) in which the virtual participant can enact various ways of listening.
After The Kitchen invited me to contribute to the Video Viewing Room, I decided to expand on the virtual spaces available in Four Movements by adding a replica of The Kitchen’s main performance space as a game environment.
In this video Four Movements: Live at the Kitchen, I perform navigating these sonic environments, adopting the contemporary video aesthetic of game streaming. This video is structured as a live event in physical space, complete with a video screening, featuring C. Spencer Yeh, in an homage to Kitchen founder Steina Vasulka’s video Violin Power (1969–1978) and an instrumental music duo featuring myself with my avatar.
As music practitioners, we have a longstanding history of intuitively and inherently navigating this liminal space between physical events (the “live” performance) and the mediated (the “album”). Where initially the “record” was a document of an event, it largely exists now as a construction of a performance in an idealized space. We fabricate artificial sonic space with plate reverbs, convolution reverbs, stereo “imaging,” etc.
This interweaving of the real and the media construction largely defines our contemporary condition (further highlighted by mediated life during the pandemic). Live at the Kitchen nods to the “live album”—a document of a performance of a document.
Four Movements is available as a free download (for Windows/MacOS) at https://fourmovements.woodysullender.com/.
— Woody Sullender
Video: Courtesy of the artist.