Foiled
With Matin Esmaeli, Computer Science PhD, and students from the Experimental Music PhD program
Foiled is an immersive exploration of material and intention.
The piece reduces narrative and production to fundamentals. Where most work in the studio adds layers, this one strips them away, until what remains is a material, a light, a surface, and the decisions made about them. The question underneath is what a production still is once the apparatus is taken out of it.
Reflection does the work. A reflective surface returns an image that is neither the thing itself nor an image of it, and returns it late, altered by the geometry of the material and the position of the viewer. Time and perception become the subject rather than the medium.
That concern connects Foiled to other work in the studio. Echoes uses the LED wall to make the delay in perception visible; Foiled pursues the same question through physical material rather than through a signal path. Both treat the gap between an event and its apprehension as something an audience can be placed inside.
The work was developed with Matin Esmaeli, a Computer Science PhD student, alongside students from the Experimental Music PhD program. That pairing is the studio's normal working method: a technical researcher and a group of composers building something neither discipline would arrive at alone.