Project Summary

Mouth Stitching

Audiovisual Live Performance

Yutong Wang and Yulin Fu

Mouth Stitching is the final project for the Designing Interfaces for Live Performance class in Interactive Media Arts at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

It is an audiovisual live performance collaborated by Yutong Wang and Yulin Fu. Using MAX/MSP and Ableton, the two artists created dynamic visuals responsive to the rhythmic audio part.

The audio of Mouth Stitching is influenced by Acid House music from the 80s and Techno music. The  recreate the sound of the bass synthesizer Roland TB-303 that was released in 1981, adding a retro quality to the rhythmic Techno beats. Following a well-designed composition, the audio progresses with modulations of frequencies and shifts in multiple layers of melodies that trigger synchronized changes in the visual part of the performance.

The visual style of this performance is a combination of figuration and abstraction. Using Jitter in MAX/MSP, we process pre-recorded videos of Yulin’s face into black and white silhouettes and generate white cross-hatching lines to map out these silhouettes. The alienated faces are deformed, rotated, or reversed in black and white along with the changes in the tempo and melodies of the audio counterpart. The aesthetic subtly mixes minimalistic colors with minimalist line art, and it is partially inspired by ad/ab Atom, an audiovisual installation by Japanese artist Ryoichi Kurokawa.

Selected to exhibit for ITP/IMA Spring Show 2022