Tim Roth percussion & voice
Music & video | Nolan Hildebrand
One Hundred and Fourteen Words (automatica) was initially inspired by the Microsoft Word Immersive Reader application and the different forms of pure psychic automatism as practiced by the Surrealists in the early 20th century. The percussionist performs along with an electroacoustic “tape track” built around the Immersive Reader interpretation of three different texts that were created through pseudo automatic writing experiments at the computer keyboard. The performer engages in automatic drawing by scribbling and stabbing a piece of paper that is taped to an amplified snare drum and processed via a contact microphone. The performer’s vocal gestures fuse with the robotic voice to blur the line between human speech and machine speech creating a feeling of a super reality or Surreality. Pseudo masked priming is used in the performer’s introductory speech of each movement to insert fake subliminal messages that lead listeners to believe that the text being read is important when in actuality all the spoken text is gibberish. Using pseudo forms of masked priming and automatic writing embraces the inherent mysticism in Surrealist automatism and the public’s skeptical claims that the practices were fake and inauthentic.
The performance video is an audio-visual experience that features samples of Stan Brakhage’s Prelude from Dog Star Man to embrace the idea of the Surrealist collage and the juxtaposition of unrelated images. Phrases like “reality is meaningless” and “do you even exist” quickly flash on the screen throughout the video to solidify the piece’s theme of meaninglessness and its intention to make listeners question reality.