CMT: LIVENESS IN A VIRTUAL WORLD
Wednesday 28 May, 19:00 – Ian Hanger Recital Hall
Through the Frame
Jorja Scott
Through the Frame is a short performance video built around an original song, Means to an End. The piece combines live music with layered visuals to explore ideas of self-expression, repetition, and how we experience performance through a screen.
The video was filmed on a set designed to feel like a personal, in-between space, not quite a stage, not quite a bedroom. Hanging above the performer are picture frames, which fill with video overlays of earlier performances. These fragmented versions of the self-appear and disappear throughout the song, creating a sense of memory, echo, and presence.
Rather than telling a story, the piece focuses on atmosphere. It uses colour, lighting, and minimal movement to highlight quiet moments, plugging in a microphone, playing a chord, sitting still. As the live performance unfolds, the overlays build up around it, creating a layered portrait of the performer from different points in time.
The project plays with the feeling of being both present and distant, performing in the moment, but also watching yourself from the outside. It’s about how live performance changes when it’s recorded, reflected back, and viewed as fragments of something that once happened.
The idea behind Through the Frame grew from experimenting with the relationship between live presence and digital memory. What started as a simple musical performance gradually became a way to explore how identity can shift when viewed through layers of video, of time, of selfperception. The process of building the set, writing the music, and editing the footage was just as much about discovering the tone of the piece as it was about planning it. The final result is something quiet and reflective and honest.
We Rise You Fall
Luke Barbour and Nicholas Rossetti-Cleary
We Rise You Fall is a four-minute audiovisual piece created by Luke Barbour and Nicholas Rossetti-Cleary. It imagines a near future where artificial intelligence, originally meant to free and inspire us, instead takes control and becomes a kind of ruler. Through this story, the creators give us a stark warning about what happens when we lose control over the technology we built. Visually, the work is mostly black and white with touches of blue that feel cold and mechanical—like the heartbeat of a machine world. This limited colour scheme makes small moments stand out, like a flicker of light or a twitch from a robotic movement. The blue doesn’t comfort; it feels isolating and distant. On the music side, the piece uses a technique called cut video music production. It weaves together broken-up sounds and images with a sharp, rhythmic energy. This style gives the work a sense of urgency, reflecting the way reality starts to fall apart through the eyes of an algorithm. Every sound and image are carefully connected, creating a looping, almost hypnotic rhythm that pushes the story forward but also traps the listener in its pattern. This isn’t just background music to passively enjoy. It’s meant to be felt deeply—a warning you experience, not just hear. Let yourself get lost in the atmosphere. Watch the tension between humans and machines unfold. In this world, control has shifted. The music doesn’t just tell the story—it lives it.
Mona Lisa
Gabriel Beier & Hugh Barton
Our project began with a simple visual challenge: to centre a mirror within nature and film a performance around it in a way that felt aesthetically strong and emotionally resonant. The visual constraint of filming with a mirror with all its complications around framing, sunlight, colour grading and spatial layout quickly became a driver for creative decision-making, both technically and musically. With no clear musical or technical themes, however, we explored a number of different meanings or stories the mirror could allude to. What we started to notice in our ideas was that the mirror started to feel like a lens or gateway into a new world, and soon the idea of Mona Lisa arose. The camera became her perspective, and we, as performers, became a symbol for her reflection.
At first glance, the mirror and the wandering figures within it might appear directionless or simply aesthetic. But when seen in context with the music, especially the lyrics, which speak directly to Mona Lisa, a deeper narrative begins to emerge. In the intro, aimlessness is clearly portrayed both in the reverb-soaked synths heard in the music and simultaneously reflected in the lack of direction of the performers within the mirror.
As we develop into the verses, performers continue to appear within the mirror and outside it, directing their words and energy toward the camera which we imagined as Mona Lisa’s point of view. Yet the versions of us inside the mirror often remain disconnected, lost in movement, aimlessly walking without clear purpose. This contrast became a key visual metaphor for the song’s emotional arc: Mona Lisa is being told she is beautiful and loved, but she doesn’t yet believe it — her internal self remains uncertain, and unreachable.
In the choruses, however, we see a shift. The performers outside the mirror, existing in her world, begin to perform more openly and joyfully to the camera, drawing her in. Meanwhile, the mirror selves still lag behind, as if she can’t yet see the beauty in herself. By the second chorus, the emotional divide begins to resolve and both mirror and external versions perform together, musically and visually unified. This progression reflects Mona Lisa’s own journey toward self-recognition — toward allowing love in.
What began as a technical constraint, shooting with a centred mirror, became a symbolic device for exploring doubt, duality, and the slow, quiet work of learning to love oneself.
There Was A Sighting In The Woods.
Harry Maynard
Did you hear there was a sighting in the woods? I heard it. Some say it was a cryptid, an alien, or a ghost. I know it to be a piece made from a collection of sounds recorded in the forest where it took place. This is the musique concrète genre paired with bewitching footage of the process. The French genre emerged in the 40s, and was popularised in the 60s, and this effort utilised traditional techniques while incorporating modern music production techniques to create something haunting, mysterious, and evocative. The composition was formed with both raw and altered sounds. From footsteps on dirt and gravel, crunching leaves and twigs beneath them, to the calls of various birds, mixed with the rustling trees or creaking metal structures. Other sounds were manipulated: spliced, looped, reversed, sped up, and slowed down. The caw of a crow becomes the yawn of an otherworldly being; creaking metal playground equipment are metallic thuds and eerie howls; the warped birdsong throughout the forest makes tranquility sound like a distant memory. Sounds were run through audio effect processes, including ambient reverb and tape delay, as well as downsampling, bitcrushing and saturation type distortion. These effects, but especially the distortion helps harmonise the visual and audio elements together, further cementing the vintage, digitised aesthetic. Shot on a vintage camcorder and edited to enhance the low fidelity look through gaussian and channel blur, noise, and pixelation effects, as well as colour grading reminiscent of CRT television screens. It is inspired by folk horror stories, unexplainable apparitions, and videos of bigfoot or ghost sightings. You’ll hear the sounds of the forest, journey through it, and be engulfed by the ominous, eerie world as the audio and visuals coalesce into the final product. I’ve heard there was a sighting in the woods. Soon, you’ll hear it too.
Fugue (The Shape of Leaving)
Daniel Celegato, Kayden Clarke, Alicia Dark
This video work explores the shifting nature of love over time, tracing its arc from the euphoric beginnings of desire to a proud, assured decision to step away. Rather than focusing on the idea of being rejected, the piece reflects on what it means to reject love — to recognize a misalignment and choose separation as an act of emotional self-preservation and liberation.
Structured through a fragmented, dream-like lens, this audiovisual piece evokes the instability and impermanence of romantic connection. The narrative resists linear storytelling, opting instead for a sensory and symbolic journey through states of emotional intensity. This approach allows the work to remain open — not a story to decode, but a space to feel through.
The first half of the piece is guided by warmth and calm: long takes, fluid movement, and a luminous colour palette mirror the serenity and enchantment of early intimacy. There is a softness here — a gentle surrender to connection. The accompanying music, slow and expansive, amplifies this mood of quiet devotion and emotional presence.
As the work progresses, the tone shifts. Editing becomes more abrupt, pacing quickens, and the colour palette cools. These changes reflect the unravelling of connection and the increasing awareness of emotional discord. Rather than depicting a dramatic rupture, the video offers a subtler transformation — the slow realization that love, as it is, no longer serves. The second track intensifies this turn inward, its energy erratic and raw, mirroring the liberating, convoluted agony of letting go.
Performance, camera, and sound operate in tandem throughout, forming a textured emotional landscape that speaks to the complexity of both longing and detachment. The work is not a condemnation of love, but an exploration of its fragility — and of the clarity that sometimes emerges in its fading.
By blending mood, memory, and abstraction, the video invites viewers to project their own emotional histories onto the work. It is less a narrative than a mirror — reflecting the ways time alters feeling, and how love, when no longer aligned, must sometimes be released.