Vis-à-vis (2002)
an interactive monodrama for voice, electronics, and real-time video

What is the cause, and the cost, of insight? What does it mean to see the world face to face? These were questions raised by the young Rilke in a well-known passage from his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a personal journal he kept in 1904 while serving as secretary to Rodin. They are also questions lying at the heart of Vis-à-vis, a multimedia work for voice, live electronics and real-time video, which takes Rilke’s words as a dramatic point of departure.

Recalling an encounter with a nameless woman in the streets of Paris, Rilke’s text is a meditation on the nature of faces. It reads like a drama, a story in five virtual scenes told from multiple points of view and in several voices, alternately droll, philosophical, ironic, pathetic. It was this multi-vocal aspect that initially attracted us to the text, and the idea of preserving those voices and their innate sense of drama quickly became the largest challenge of this interactive work.

The piece is centered around a solo singer (Katherine Bergeron), who performs within an electronic landscape based entirely on her voice. The interactive score, written in MAX/MSP, makes the computer a virtual performer, listening and responding to the changing musical events in its own terms. Together with the electronic score, the five scenes are illuminated by a corresponding visual score, assembled in real time by means of another custom program, written in the video-programming environment Onadime. Much of the visual material is, as in the audio score, based on different aspects of the singer’s visage. The exception is a single visual “quotation,” a haunting image of a woman caught unawares by the turn-of-the-century Parisian photographer Eugène Atget. The aim was to deploy the two layers of interactive media to suggest the dramatic structure itself—the shifting psychological relationship between the woman who sings (the “I” narrating the story) and the nameless woman who is ultimately the subject of Rilke’s narration.

---Joseph Rovan and Katherine Bergeron